LinkedIn wants to be the center of business networking and data, but can it do everything, or will competing startups carve out their own niches? Latest example: LinkedIn is introducing new pages (LinkedIn’s own, left) that detail information about companies, partially by aggregating information about its users. Meanwhile, for the fund-raising focused, there’s a new sort of investment social network created by San Francisco-based Venture Hacks.
Venture Hacks, formerly a blog comprised of veteran entrepreneurs and investors, that offers advice to startups, takes a proactive stance in connecting its audience. It offers a social network where people can “subscribe” to each other, somewhat like friending somebody on a social network or following them on messaging service Twitter, or subscribing to them on a social news aggregator like Friendfeed. Then, you can see who the people you subscribe to are subscribing to. People can also recommend each other. It’s all reminiscent of LinkedIn, but with more streamlined features. Each person can provide a profile with employee history and other information, as well as their email addresses so they can contact each other directly. The idea is that potential investors can watch which one of the people they subscribe to is recommending an entrepreneur — an entrepreneur working at a company that the investor might want to put money into.
Since LinkedIn is already a way for business people to stay in contact, the two companies are in some sense competitors. But LinkedIn is moving in many directions, coming out with a new service — or the promise of a service — every two weeks or so. These company pages, its latest release, is based on using data from LinkedIn as well as information provided by partner companies. It lists the executives of a company, based on what it knows from its own data, along with new hires, total number of employees, worldwide locations of employees, and other information. Read the rest of this entry »
