LinkedIn Introduces Intelligent Applications Platform
Mountain View, CA — December 10, 2007 — LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network, today introduced the Intelligent Applications Platform enabling partners to build powerful new professional applications across the Web. LinkedIn also announced BusinessWeek as an inaugural partner with additional partners to be announced in coming months.
LinkedIn’s Intelligent Applications platform is composed of two pieces: the ability to get LinkedIn into your application and the ability to get your application into LinkedIn. LinkedIn partners will be able to build LinkedIn features into their applications, enabling LinkedIn users to access to their professional networks wherever and whenever they need it to accomplish professional tasks. Using a set of LinkedIn APIs and widgets, partner sites using the Intelligent Application Platform will be augmented with business networking features allowing the 17 million LinkedIn users to be more productive on those sites.
“The goal of the Intelligent Applications Platform is to help make our users more effective by providing them with access to the intelligence of their professional network both on LinkedIn and on other sites they visit to get work done,” said Dan Nye, CEO of LinkedIn. “Our focus is 100% professional, so we will be working with select business partners to build high value, high productivity applications.”
LinkedIn’s first publishing partner, BusinessWeek, is developing an Intelligent Application that will reside on the BusinessWeek website. The application will enable readers of BusinessWeek.com to access their professional network to look up profiles of people and find connections at companies featured in articles. “We believe our LinkedIn application will strengthen our connection to professionals by enabling them to easily tap into their professional networks while reading BusinessWeek content,” said Roger Neal, Senior Vice President of BusinessWeek Digital. “The ability to have this information will make BusinessWeek's high quality content more useful and actionable for our users.”
With the Intelligent Applications Platform, LinkedIn is also including the ability to develop applications that will run within LinkedIn using the OpenSocial development model. As a demonstration of what will be possible, a sample application was featured as part of Google’s OpenSocial announcement in early November 2007. The conference calendar application has a view of upcoming events and people in one’s LinkedIn network who are attending upcoming conferences. Dates are color-coded to indicate how popular the conferences are amongst a user’s professional network, and users can see suggestions of people they may want to meet at the conference based on common network connections.
“As the web continues to distribute, there is a growing demand for applications that work across multiple platforms” said Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research. “Extending useful business applications on top of existing business communities will bring a new opportunity for efficiency — business communities will be more productive.”
For more information about the LinkedIn’s InApps developer program, email: developers@linkedin.com.
About LinkedIn
LinkedIn takes your professional network online, giving you access to people, jobs and opportunities like never before. Built upon trusted connections and relationships, LinkedIn has established the world’s largest and most powerful professional network. Currently, more than 17 million professionals are on LinkedIn, including executives from all five hundred of the Fortune 500 companies, as well as a wide range of household names in technology, financial services, media, consumer packaged goods, entertainment, and numerous other industries. LinkedIn is backed by world-class investors including Sequoia Capital, Greylock, the European Founders Fund, and Bessemer Venture Partners.