Linkedin Blog

Ed. note: Rieva Lesonsky has been covering the world of entrepreneurs since 1978. Two years ago, she left Entrepreneur magazine (where she was editorial director for many years) and became a business owner. She’s also moderator of Small Biz Nation – a newly launched LinkedIn group and small business community resource.

We all know that it’s not easy to start and grow a small business. There are days you feel like you’re standing at the edge of the abyss. The key though, as my favorite author Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, is “to stand as close to the edge as [you] can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.”

Today, we’re launching a LinkedIn Group called Small Biz Nation that aims to serve as an online community resource to help meet the needs of small business owners.

I’m Chad Whitney, the Product Manager responsible for mobile products at LinkedIn. This is my first blog post for LinkedIn, so why not kick things off with a bang?  I’m excited to announce the full release of LinkedIn for BlackBerry v1.0.  You can download it directly from LinkedIn right now:

Download LinkedIn for BlackBerry 1.0

Whether you’re looking for a new job or looking to make your next rock star hire, matching talent with opportunities is a time-consuming process. With Real-Time Profile Matches, a new beta feature that is included with every job posting on LinkedIn, we now hope to make it faster and easier both for users to find the right jobs and for hiring companies to find the right talent.

Now LinkedIn members will be matched with job opportunities that they might otherwise miss, and hiring managers and recruiters will see qualified candidates immediately after posting a job. As a user, you may want to have your profile complete and up to date, to ensure that you are matched with the best possible jobs. This new feature works best when you’ve filled out the experience, summary and professional headline sections of your profile with details about your skills.

“We can make him better than he was before.  Better, stronger, faster.” — The Six Million Dollar Man

On December 28, 2009, we decided to ring in the new year a little early with the launch of the new LinkedIn for iPhone v3.0 application.  Since that time, we’ve seen tremendous excitement and enthusiasm around the new application.  In fact, in the short time since the launch, we’ve seen the number of active users of the application triple.