As I stood last night in a London venue full of some of our UK members, I overheard Lou Reed’s musical director deep in conversation with a senior executive from one of the world’s largest financial institutions.
That doesn’t happen every day, I thought.
Over fifty million users entrust their professional identities and relationships with LinkedIn, helping build LinkedIn into the largest global professional network today. However, professionals around the world use a wide variety of applications and Web sites to get their work done, and they have spoken loud and clear that they want the ability to leverage their professional networks wherever they work.
Starting today, developers worldwide can integrate LinkedIn into their business applications and Web sites. Developer.linkedin.com is now live and open for business.
Today, Microsoft announces an exciting new addition to the upcoming Microsoft Office 2010 – the Outlook Social Connector. The Outlook Social Connector is designed to seamlessly bring communications history as well as business and social networking feeds into your Outlook experience.
LinkedIn will be the first networking site to support the Outlook Social Connector. The LinkedIn functionality will be available in early 2010. Our big belief is that you can be much more effective if you have your professional network close at hand, and you can leverage your online identity in the work you do on a daily basis. The Outlook Social Connector will bring your LinkedIn Professional Network to where you work – right within your e-mail inbox.
Last week LinkedIn launched a significant integration with Twitter, enabling professionals to expand their personal brands to their professional networks and vice-versa. To show our users how that might work, today we’re asking you: What’s the best business advice you’ve ever received?
[Ed. note: This is the first in a series of posts on LinkedIn around the world. We just announced LinkedIn's country manager in India - Hari V. Krishnan - and here are his initial thoughts as he visits our Mountain View headquarters this week]
I am truly excited about my new role heading up LinkedIn India – a platform which has been an integral part of my own career. The Indian internet has grown strongly and changed dramatically over the last 5 years with social media, e-commerce and advertising all beginning to come of age. Having witnessed the change first hand working with leading companies like MySpace and Yahoo and start ups like Travelguru, I see the need to share knowledge assuming a more central role in sustaining the growth. I’m convinced that LinkedIn will play a strong role as a platform for sharing connections and knowledge.
