Well, duh.

Facebook fans are the holy grail of small business, according to a recent study. In fact, 41 percent would take the two million fans, almost double the number that would prefer a celebrity endorsement or a million-dollar Super Bowl ad.

The data comes from a study of 500 small businesses by Staples which asked, in part: If a genie granted you one wish to market your company, what would you want?

Source: Staples

Which of the following would you select?

Perhaps most interestingly, small business owners prefer Facebook fans to Twitter followers by almost a four to one ratio. Only 12 percent of the owners picked two million Twitter followers, suggesting that Twitter followers are only 25 percent as valuable as Facebook followers and fans. That makes sense, given recent data that engaged Facebook fans are worth hundreds of dollars each in lifetime value, with some — for brands like Zara and Levis — being worth $300-400.

Compare that to a Super Bowl ad that makes a momentary buzz and then is gone, or Twitter followers who are much less likely to actually see any communications from the brand, and the value is clear.

“The results showed that these savvy business owners are not only utilizing social media in advanced ways but that the understanding of the philosophies behind why social media works and how it can help business were advanced,” a Staples representative said.

Further evidence of that?

Engaging customers via social edged out boosting sales when business owners — who spend 5.5 hours per week on social media marketing — were asked why they invest time, energy, and money in social. That’s a big difference from even a year ago, when increasing sales was the most important reason for most businesses to jump on the Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest bandwagons.

Which doesn’t mean, of course, that small businesses don’t want to profit from social and don’t want to increase their sales. It does mean, however, that they realize the relationship matters more than any one specific purchase, and that nurturing the relationship first will lead to great lifetime value of the customer.

One other interesting point as Twitter ramps up its advertising products, having recently launched more small-business-friendly ad options: LinkedIn is actually the second most frequently used social channel, and Pinterest ranks higher when business owners list social sites that are helpful.

Interestingly, given that many small businesses still today do not have a website (three out of five in this survey did not), 61 percent felt their blogs were their most helpful social media channel.

Image credits: Staples

Ed-tech accelerator Imagine K12 announced that it will increase its initial funding for startups from $20,000 to $100,000.

This additional funding is available from the newly established “Start Fund,” backed by Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, Yahoo co-founder David Filo, Angela Filo, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, NewSchools Venture Fund, and GSV Asset Management.

Imagine K12 is focused on helping entrepreneurs develop technology for students from kindergarten to high school.

In just two years, Imagine K12 has established itself as one of the most well-respected programs in part because of its efforts to reach teachers. Thirty-nine startups have graduated from it, and these have gone on to raise approximately $30 million in funding.

Each startup accepted into the program will receive a $20,000 check from Imagine K12 and $80,000 from the Start Fund.

“The funds will give entrepreneurs enough time to get the right market fit so [they] can take root in the educational system,” said Imagine K12 founder Tim Brady by phone. ”And our startups have built products that are used in hundreds of thousands of classrooms.”

Brady claims that the accelerator’s alumni have launched products deployed by 10 percent of teachers. Some of the most well-known graduates from previous batches include behavior management software ClassDojo and open-data startup LearnSprout.

Interested in applying? Applications are now open for the official program, which begins in September in Palo Alto, Calif.

photo credit: @Photo. via photopin cc

The find-jobs-anywhere site has now reached 100 million unique monthly visitors, including half of all U.S. job search traffic, and delivers more hires, it says, than CareerBuilder, Monster, and career-networking darling LinkedIn combined.

Take that, Facebook and Twitter.

“There’s a lot of focus on social … you can’t read a story about job seeking without reading about it,” said Indeed VP of product Chris Hyams when I chatted with him this afternoon. “We don’t discount that, but you have to start with the simplest thing: You have to have more jobs.”

Source: Indeed

Last month on Indeed

Indeed has stayed laser-focused throughout its eight years, Hyams said, on three things: More jobs on the site, keeping the site as fast as possible, and focusing pretty much exclusively on providing the best possible job-seeking experience for job hunters.

That’s translated to about 16 million jobs being present on the site at any given time, three billion job searches just in the last month, and according to a recent study by SilkRoad of more than 150,000 hires, more people finding jobs through Indeed than any other career site or service. Not to mention the number one mobile app for Android, iPhone, and iPad for job seekers, and that one new account is created on Indeed every single second.

“We’ve been working incredibly hard to get jobs the minute they are posted in every country,” Hyams said. “Our key metric is people getting jobs.”

I see a ton on new startups who are focusing on hiring and recruiting. KarmaHire, Zao, Path.io, GetHired, Quixey, Wowzer, enRecruit, VisualCV, Spark Hire, and InnovateCV are just a few of them. And each of them wants to reap the rich rewards of helping companies and people connect in careers.

But it seems like they’ve got a long, long way to go to beat the big kahuna of hiring in the U.S. and beyond.

The result, according to Hyams?

“If you’re an employer and you want to reach job seekers, Indeed.com is where to go.”

photo credit: NASA Goddard Photo and Video via photopin cc

Why now?

Jeep’s Twitter account recently told the world that the iconic brand had been “sold to Cadillac.” And Burger King’s account started mysteriously promoting McDonalds. Two high-profile hacks in less than a week means, apparently, that Twitter had to take some action.

The hacks were due to phishing attacks, or sending out emails that look legitimate but, sadly, are not.

“There’s no shortage of bad actors sending emails that appear to come from a Twitter.com address in order to trick you into giving away key details about your Twitter account, or other personal information,” Twitter’s “postmaster” Josh Aberant posted this morning on the company’s blog.

Twitter sends out a lot of emails. If you opt into email notifications for new follows, mentions, and direct messages (little hint: don’t), you potentially get hundreds of emails a week. The problem is: how do you know the email in your inbox is from Twitter?

To make that determination easier, Twitter has adopted DMARC technology, an email authentication protocol initially developed by PayPal in 2007. Essentially, it helps receiving mailservers know, with a reasonable level of assurance, that an email’s reported sender is accurate, not spoofed, and not forged. Which then allows the mailserver to delete forged email before it ever reaches your inbox.

Facebook already uses DMARC and is listed as one of the founding contributors to the open specification, as is LinkedIn. Other organizations that use DMARC include Google (Gmail), Microsoft (Hotmail/Outlook), Yahoo (Yahoo Mail), AOL, and Comcast.

A note for emailers:

If you don’t use Gmail or one of the other email providers listed above, you may not be protected. It might be a good time to ask your mail service provider if they support DMARC.

photo credit: Stian Eikeland via photopin cc

And ePACT co-founder Christine Summers says such a network has a fairly impressive viral component.

Summers calls the company, which graduated from the GrowLab accelerator in Vancouver tonight, the “LinkedIn of emergencies,” because it’s a cloud connector of individuals’ emergency notification information that also functions as an alert system for organizations like schools, clubs, daycares, and youth sports teams.

“The vast majority of organizations put their emergency [contact] information on paper,” Summers says. “This is an opportunity to leverage networking technology for safety.”

The second co-founder, Kirsten Telford, saw that need firsthand. She was living in Japan when the massive tsunami of 2011 wreaked havoc on the coast, killing 15,000, and devastating the country’s infrastructure. And based on what she saw there, Telford recognized that we’re completely unprepared for a similar-size emergency in the US.

ePACT works by operating as a single source of emergency contact information. Everyone puts their data in, including allergies and medications, and organizations and people that need to access it request your permission. You grant permission to authorized organizations, like schools your children attend, or companies you work for, and they now know what to do and who to contact in case of emergency.

“If there’s an emergency, they can blast messages to the whole network,” Summers says. “Schools, for instance, can communicate out to families through text messages, a mobile app, email, and the web, and families can communicate with their network.”

That sounds like a prototypical good thing, but hard to monetize. But in fact, according to Summers, many types of organizations are federally mandated to maintain emergency contact lists. Schools head the list, but community organizations, sports teams, some clubs, fitness centers, and other organizations also need emergency contact information. According to ePACT, organizations in North America alone ask for emergency contact information 900 million times a year.

And it’s all on paper right now. Which means the emergency contact “industry” is ripe for disruption.

“The Toronto School Board, which we’re talking to right now, would save $1.75 million using our system,” Summers says. “Right now it costs them $10 per student to manage via a paper process.”

The co-founders had already raised $800,000 from angel investors before entering GrowLab. The company has five full-time employees, and Summers says it’s on track for 2,500,000 users within its very first year. And each user who joins, spreads the message.

“For every family that joins, we get another three families joining,” Summers told me.

So why join an accelerator?

“GrowLab held our feet to the fire,” she says. “It upped the ante for us … they made us think big and pushed the message: go hard or go home.”

photo credit: selva via photopin cc

LinkedIn has surpassed Wall Street’s expectations yet again with its stellar fourth quarter.

The company just reported revenue at $303.6 million, an increase of 81 percent from the fourth quarter of the previous year.

Analysts estimate that LinkedIn would report revenue growth of 67 percent, to $280 million, with profits more than tripling to 19 cents per share. The social network for professionals has met or beat on every earnings since going public in May 2011.

As Wired Business reports, the company is on a “financial rampage,” but the big question is whether the market can support two social networks. Facebook’s annual revenue stands at about $5 billion.

Q4 Revenues

CEO Jeff Weiner revealed on today’s investors’ call that LinkedIn is the 25th most visited web property in the world.

Most of the company’s Q4 revenue came from its suite of Talent Solutions products. Revenue from that business totaled $161 million, an increase of 90 percent compared to the fourth quarter of 2011.

On today’s earnings call, the company revealed that it expects revenues to increase in Q1 2013, as it will modestly raise prices for LinkedIn job slots for its U.S. customers.

The company reported healthy growth in all three of its major product categories: its ad sales group saw a 68 percent year-on-year jump to $83.2 million, while its subscriptions service increased 79 percent year over year to $59.4 million.

Next quarter, the company expects to pull in revenues of approximately $310 million, up about $6 million from the previous quarter. ”Our investment plan involves recruiting…and new strategic initiatives like mobile education and non U.S. markets,” said Steve Sordello, LinkedIn’s CFO on an earnings call. The company will also invest in expanding its data centers.

Membership at home and abroad

Annual revenues aren’t the only success story: the company is adding approximately two members to its network per second. LinkedIn recently hit the 200 million member mark, and according to today’s report, it ended the year with approximately 202 million members. LinkedIn has grown its membership 39 percent year over year.

In 64 percent of members are outside of the U.S., up four percent from the fourth quarter of 2011. The company said the gap is closing between international customers and international revenues — as it opens new offices around the world (most recently in Dubai), it is pulling in companies willing to pay for enterprise subscriptions. 

International revenues account for approximately 38 percent of overall revenues.

The company will focus its expansion on Southern Europe, where Sordello has been “surprised” by the takeoff of the service, and Brazil.

Innovative products

“2012 was a transformative year for LinkedIn,” said Weiner in a statement. “We exited 2011 having successfully revamped our underlying development infrastructure. Based on that investment, we said that 2012 would be a year of accelerated product innovation, and it was.”

On the call, Weiner stressed how “LinkedIn Today,” the “people you may know” feature, and the new professional profiles has been an engagement driver. Last quarter, the website received record page views for the year, and the number of members updating their profile doubled.

Status updates and social gestures are at an “all time high,” said Weiner.

The company also rolled out its LinkedIn influencer program last quarter as it moves into the realm of personalized content. Richard Branson is most popular influencer with 1.3 million followers, and already, an influencer post has received over one million page views.

LinkedIn Jobs on mobile is also gaining traction, said Weiner. Mobile products remain the “fastest growing consumer service,” he said. “Given the more limited real estate [on the smartphone] we want to be thoughtful about integrating ads on that experience,” said Sordello.

Last month, Sordello said the company began a test with customers like GE and Xerox. They are taking repository of existing content like white papers, and serving it as a status update to specific followers on LinkedIn. In the coming month, the company will perform these same tests on smartphones.

LinkedIn’s stock jumped ten percent in after-hours trading this afternoon. The company is currently trading at LinkedIn is trading at $135.87 per share, an increase of 9.5 percent over its closing price today.

Sheryl Sandberg’s new book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead has a lot of advice for working women, which we’ve previously covered. But according to an excerpt given to the Wall Street Journal, it also reveals some juicy tidbits about her life and career, including that LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman asked her to become LinkedIn’s CEO in 2006.

She passed on the offer:

“In the summer of 2006, a tiny startup called LinkedIn was looking for a new CEO, and Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s founder, reached out to me. I thought it was a great opportunity, and after five years in the same position at Google, I was ready for a new challenge. But the timing was tricky. I was 37 years old and wanted to have a second child. I told Reid the truth: Regrettably, I had to pass. …”

I think we can all agree, however, that given Sandberg’s career at Google and now Facebook, she made the right call. And while LinkedIn is clearly super-successful, very few companies on the planet — IPO or no IPO — are more important, more relevant, and more central to the emerging digital economy than Facebook.

Sandberg is only one of many super-successful women who have started or grown careers at Google only to jump to other Silicon Valley companies. An obvious example is Yahoo CEO and president Marissa Mayer, but a more recent example is Jennifer Dulski, who recently left Google to become president of Change.org.

Sandberg’s book is about women leaning into their careers to be successful, and features advice similar to what she talked about in a TED talk, including:

1. Sit at the table (Be present and don’t accept subordinate roles.)
2. Make your partner a real partner (Have or get a husband who helps out a home equally)
3. Don’t leave until you leave (Don’t emotionally prepare for maternity or other job interruptions by mentally leaving before leaving.)

Image credit: Hubert Burda Media/Flickr

Leading VOIP and cheap call provider Rebtel asked 1,632 American adults what effects social networks had on them. In a classic can’t-live-with-it, can’t-live-without-it scenario, almost 20 percent of American adults said Facebook was the social network that has the “most negative effect” on their mood, and another 20 percent said it caused them the most stress.

However, Facebook is also the site that almost half of Americans said was the most positive.

In other words, Facebook is such a big part of our lives that our experience of the site pretty much mirrors our experience of life: sometimes our friends piss us off, sometimes they make us sad, but more often, they make us happy.

One thing that’s almost guaranteed to drive your friends nuts? Including them in status updates and location check-ins. 45 percent of us don’t like it when we appear in social media updates that others create, and 70 percent say that’s because they don’t like to broadcast their location.

LinkedIn, Twitter, and Youtube caused almost no stress, as did MySpace. In MySpace’s case, of course, that’s because no-one actually uses the site anymore. But the social media site that are the most positive are Instagram and Pinterest, with only .3 percent and .1 percent, respectively, saying they were stressed out by those services.

One other interesting data point the Rebtel survey highlighted is how social media makes us feel.

On days when we check into social accounts more frequently than normal, we’re typically bored. Of course … that might be the  reason we’re checking in in the first place. But on days when we’re checking in less frequently than normal, we’re typically feeling left out, like we’re missing out on something.

In other words, we’re addicted.

photo credit: Amir Kuckovic via photopin cc

The new search feature will be interesting for people who just want to find out interesting things about their friends or get together a Tolkien-loving crowd for an LOTR video-watching marathon. But what it’s really going to do is open up the vast hoard of Facebook data and eat the lunch of a thousand large and small companies that make money by aggregating and rating what people do and where they go.

Here are just a few examples:

Yelp

Yelp is essentially a social business directory with ratings, strong in entertainment industries like restaurants and bars, but growing in local services like home and automotive and beauty. Now Facebook’s Graph Search will let a billion-plus people type in search queries like: ”Restaurants in San Francisco liked by Culinary Institute of America graduates.”

Likes are much lower-fidelity than reviews, but still: watch out, Yelp. (Yelp’s stock just tanked.)

TripAdvisor

I guess having a partnership with Facebook and being one of the first travel sites to integrate with Facebook’s “instant personalization” back in 2011 is not enough to stop Facebook from competing with you.

All that new local search capability that competes with Yelp is also relevant to TripAdvisor. Hotels in New York that my friends like? Most popular vacation destinations in North America?

And it’s not just about what you and your friends like — Facebook explicitly referenced ”Bars in Dublin liked by people who live in Dublin,” which is a promising way to find the places locals like, explore the world, and find the best places to visit.

Plus, it’s only a hop, skip, and a jump from that to full-on booking the hotel or setting up a reservation with the restaurant, all within Facebook.

Yellow Pages (and any other local search apps)

OK, so maybe the printed Yellow Pages are passé.

But millions still visit YellowPages.com, which had over 30 million unique visitors just last month. Once there, they’re looking for dentists and carpenters and mechanics and decorators and roofing companies: all the local services that haven’t, by and large, adopted Facebook pages and hard-core social media campaigns yet.

Now Facebook will let you find ”Dentists liked by my friends,” and any other service category you can think of. RIP single-function local search sites and apps?

Apple’s Siri

The least of what Siri does is help you phone Mommy without dialing.

The vision for Siri is that as a full-fledged personal assistant, she can help you book hotels, get a restaurant reservation, and find you the best information about what to do and where to go. Siri is a key part of how Apple is fighting Google’ dominance in search.

But now Graph Search from Facebook has the potential to get better answers and find more relevant places, because it has access to a wealth of data Siri can never see.

Can you imagine Facebook releasing a companion app sometime with natural spoken language support and booking deals in place with entertainment, travel, and service industries? I can.

And, of course, Google

Google is the king of search, but Facebook took a little potshot at the giant today by talking about the “difference between web search and Graph Search,” saying that Graph Search is designed to “show you the answer and not links to answers.”

The hope for Facebook here is that if users can search for all the things they want and need inside Facebook; they will never need to leave. And Google, with its Facebook-wannabe Google+, will be starved of searches and then starved of revenue.

. . .

More companies than these will feel the impact of today’s Graph Search announcement, I’m sure. Add your thoughts in the comments.

But one caveat: Until we can get our hands on Graph Search and play with it hard, it’ll be tough to tell how much of this is real and and how much is potential.

One thing is for sure. It’s going to be interesting.

Image credit: Meghan Kelly

LinkedIn is catering to the entrepreneurially minded people on its team with a new program designed to advance great ideas they dream up in the workplace.

Appropriately called [in]cubator, the program allows employees to group together and pitch their big ideas to executives once a quarter. Should the team win the approbation of founder Reid Hoffman and co., the group will get to allocate up to three months of their time to bring the baby idea to life. They will also get weekly guidance from company executives, Hoffman included.

The safe cocoon was created after the company noticed that its monthly Friday “hackdays” were resulting in viable product prototypes, [in]cubator executive sponsor and LinkedIn engineering SVP Kevin Scott wrote in a blog post.

go/book, an [in]cubator idea

To date, LinkedIn has approved five projects through the initial pilot of the [in]cubator program, one of them being an internal meeting scheduling tool called “go/book” that’s already in use. The smart booking system, which works across the company’s 26 offices, has done so well, Scott said, that it’s been approved for a second round of development.

LinkedIn certainly isn’t the first company to fund ideas spawned from inside the company. Chipmaker Qualcomm used to run an internal business plan competition called Qin, but it has just kicked off a new program called Impaqt. Currently in its first iteration, Impaqt encourages staffers to pitch ideas to a panel of experts. The best ideas get funding, moved to R&D, or incubated in Qualcomm Labs.

Photo credit: MarioSundar/Flickr

Its best, most educated, and highest-paid staff are continually trolling on Twitter for a new job. They’re not actively looking for a better job, just keeping an ear to the ground in case one comes up.

That’s just one of the insights from social recruiting company Jobvite‘s latest poll.

“The mass layoffs that we saw in 2008 and 2009 frightened people so much that essentially they’re always looking for the next job,” Jobvite chief executive Dan Finnigan told me this morning. “The root of it is the presumption people have that they need to be the drivers of their own careers … that one company won’t do it for them.”

The survey looked at 2,100 adults’ behavior on Twitter, finding that college-educated professionals who are open to new opportunities but not actively seeking new jobs — passive career managers — are more than three times as likely to be using Twitter to advance their careers than even proactive high-school educated jobseekers who don’t have a job.

“We’re seeing more and more white-collar professionals doing this,” Finnigan said. “They’re currently employed, more likely to be higher income, and higher educated … and more likely to use Twitter to keep up on job opportunities.”

Those passive career managers are also, unsurprisingly, four times as likely to have found their job on Twitter or another social network, such as LinkedIn.

Passive career managers, Finnigan said, tend to create Twitter lists of companies they admire, plus lists of top companies in their industries and leading professionals in their area. Then, when an opportunity comes along, they see it immediately. Alternatively, over time, they build up a relationship with a hiring company or manager, which can lead to a job switch.

“We have a designer who got his job via Twitter — he followed our lead designer, and, over time, just asked if we were hiring,” Finnigan told me.

Forty-six percent of the American workforce now uses Twitter, Jobvite says, and LinkedIn is at 41 percent. That’s basically half the workforce. But more importantly, it’s the higher-skill, higher-pay half.

Which means companies have their jobs cut out for them to continue to engage existing staff. And recruiters, Finnigan says, need to change their game plans.

“This sought-after talent pool is using Twitter more than ever to stay on top of new opportunities. Recruiters failing to take advantage of this shift are missing out on this to the detriment of their clients.”

photo credit: Stéfan via photopin cc

That chief executive is Damien Patton, the founder of Banjo. A couple of years ago, Patton almost met a friend in Logan International Airport in Boston. The friend had posted on Facebook, Patton had tweeted on Twitter.

Predictably, they missed each other. But the occasion did give Patton an idea for an app that brings all your social networks together and one that treats location as an organizing principle for social updates … which seems, in retrospect, to be such an obvious and intuitive idea.

The third version of Banjo, available today, showcases both location and friends differently than any other app I’ve used. I got an advance preview of the app, which already has three million users in 194 countries, to test yesterday.

Location: the here and the there

Social apps with location awareness are often all about “here” — what’s happening around you right now. ”We want a way to see important things near us, across networks … we shouldn’t miss out on things that are important to us,” Patton told me.

Source: John Koetsier

Banjo organizes all your friends across all your networks into locations

But the “here” is only part of the story, he argues. Often, because you are where you are, you know what’s happening … in your office, your home, or the restaurant. What you don’t know is what’s happening where your 10 friends in New York are, or where your 15 friends in London are.

“Actually, the ‘here’ gets pretty stale,” says Patton. “For most people, 80 percent of their life is office and home. But people don’t want to miss out … they want to know what is going on for their friends everywhere.”

So Banjo organizes all your friends across all your social networks — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and more — by location. And it will alert you to common connections who you might know via another friend.

For example, I have friends in Monaco. Sometimes it would be nice to just notice what they’re up to, and perhaps find out that they’re watching the Monaco Grand Prix, or just whiling away the day on a boat in the Mediterranean. For Patton, who is still into racing, knowing that a friend is at a Formula One race in Seoul, Korea, is priceless … as is experiencing the event through his Facebook updates.

It’s not difficult to do the local, Patton said, but doing the “there” is hard — very hard.

Indexing everything

Local events happening now are bounded in time and space. Global events — since you have friends in many cities, potentially around the world — may be bounded in time, but not in space.

The challenge is indexing everything for you real-time, in cities that the cloud-based service behind the Banjo app doesn’t even know you’re interested in, until you start up the app. Patton calls it a “real-time geospatial engine.”

And the connections aren’t just to people you specifically know, either. Banjo goes a little wider than that.

“Banjo created the ability to cross the social graphs,” Patton told me. “For example, it can tell me that a person taking a photo on Instagram is friends with a friend of mine on Facebook … even if I’ve never heard of Instagram.”

Source: John Koetsier

Banjo map view shows you what’s happening across your social graph at a very granular level of location

Patton calls those “common connections.” Banjo starts with friends, moves to connections, and can even show you a public feed of publicly-available social updates: photos, statuses, tweets, and more.

“We’ve indexed 52 billion unique connections,” says Patton. “So when you go to Atlanta, it’s customized to you. We can personalize everything to you as an individual user as it happens.”

That enables all kinds of possibilities, like the ability to find a specific location, filter by a keyword, and find all the people in Chicago at the Bears game, for instance. Or everyone in Silicon Valley who is talking about Ballmer’s recent interview with Reid Hoffman.

That’s both cool and useful, and Banjo’s home screen, which shows you your friends organized by where they are are, is as well. I asked Patton if he envisions people using Banjo as their primary social app, since you can also use it to post to multiple social networks.

“For some, yes,” he  replied. “But it’s really about the power to not miss out on things that are happening all across your social landscape. It’s so noisy right now … but when you look at it through the lens of connections and locations, it’s less noisy.”

Less noise? Sign me up.

Banjo is available for both iPhone and Android.

photo credit: plums_deify via photopin cc

It took LinkedIn nine years to reach 187 million members. It took the professional social network about one month to pass 200 million endorsements.

Endorsements are LinkedIn’s lightweight version of recommendations. The one-click, vote-of-approval option was released in late September; it offers members a quick and easy way to tell the world that a friend or co-worker is skilled in any area imaginable, say journalism, social media, or even kettlebells. Received endorsements are listed on member profiles in the skills and expertise section.

Apparently, the people of LinkedIn love these little recognitions and just can’t get enough. More than 200 million endorsements have been doled out by members since release, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said in an earnings call with investors and analysts Thursday afternoon.

Endorsed skills

LinkedIn has designed the endorsements product to be both addictive and viral. The company pitches endorsements to people visiting member profiles, and then follows up with additional folks to endorse should people take the initial bait.

But the downside to endorsements is that LinkedIn’s algorithm automatically suggests skills, sometimes rather odd skills, which means your pals are being guided to endorse talents that you may not want publicized — or even have. VentureBeat executive editor Dylan Tweney, for instance, has somehow managed to glean a few endorsements for his rumored “kettlebells” talents. I can confirm that he does not have kettlebell skills.

Weiner said that new LinkedIn products, including endorsements, are contributing to a compound effect of increased engagement with the professional social network’s web and mobile apps. With the rollout of notifications and the new homepage, comments on LinkedIn have increased four fold since June, he said.

Photo credit: nanpalmero/Flickr

Professional social network LinkedIn handily exceeded Wall Street’s expectations with its third quarter 2012 earnings report.

The nine-year-old company made $252 million in revenue, $2.3 million in net income, and posted Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share of $0.22 for the quarter. It also closed the quarter with more than 187 million members. The market is rewarding the beat with fervid after-hours trading, pushing LinkedIn’s stock up by more than 7 percent.

“LinkedIn had a strong third quarter with all of our key operating and financial metrics showing solid growth,” CEO Jeff Weiner said in a statement. “The last few months mark the most significant period of product development in the company’s history. This accelerated pace of innovation is fundamental to our goal of driving greater engagement on the LinkedIn platform.”

The stellar third quarter was once again fueled by continued growth to the company’s hiring products, now called “Talent Solutions.” The recruiter- and employer-friendly products brought in 55 percent of total revenue for the quarter, or $138.4 million. Revenue from Talent Solutions was up 95 percent year-over-year.

LinkedIn’s other moneymakers, Marketing Solutions and Premium Subscriptions, also showed strong annual growth. The professional social network’s marketing-related products contributed $64 million to the bottom line, or 60 percent year-over-year increase, though the amount is only about $1 million more than what LinkedIn made in the previous quarter. Revenue from paid subscriptions was up 74 percent year-over-year at $49.6 million, or 20 percent of total revenue.

So far, Wall Street is loving the news. LinkedIn closed Thursday slightly down at $106.85, but is rallying in after-hours trading. The stock price is hovering around $115 per share, more than 7 percent up, at the time of this report.

LNKD data by YCharts

Photo credit: Mario Sundar/Flickr

Marketing software company VerticalResponse surveyed almost 500 small businesses, finding that 66 percent are spending more time on social media this year than last.

In fact, more than half of small business owners and managers spend more than an hour a week on social media, and a staggering 43 percent spend more than six hours every week blogging, sharing, and tweeting about their business. Those are massive numbers — I’ve spent some time in the local search industry working with small business owners, and many were not willing to look at Facebook and Twitter for even 15 minutes as little as two years ago.

More than half have a blog and, as mentioned above, most are on Facebook and Twitter.

But small businesses are virtually ignoring LinkedIn (participation at just 4 percent), Google+ (3 percent), and Pinterest (one percent). In other words, owners and managers are still very focused in their digital market efforts … and that’s likely leaving some vast untapped resources for savvy marketers.

There are some, however, who wish that social media wasn’t such a high-maintenance squeeze. A full third wished they’d like to spend less time on social media … which, I suppose, means that they are not yet seeing the kinds of returns that justify their investment.

Even so, the number of small businesses that have increased their social media budgets is four times higher than those that have decreased their budgets. So something is definitely working.

Full details here in the infographic:

photo credit: Vainsang via photopin cc

Content marketing company Compendium ran a study with more than 200 companies, checking on how social media marketers can get optimum engagement in business-to-business and business-to-consumer conversations. The study looked at factors such as word count, punctuation, time of posting, and day of the week of posting to determine success factors.

It turns out that who you’re marketing to makes a massive difference.

For instance, if you’re talking to consumers, Monday and Wednesday are best on Twitter, and LinkedIn is better on Monday. But if your company is marketing to other businesses, post to LinkedIn on Sunday, and to Twitter on Wednesday. And while hashtags are great for consumer-focused posts, they really don’t work at all for B2B marketers.

The one great commonality?

Question marks significantly reduce clickthrough on posts aimed at both consumers and business clients. Posts with question marks get between 25 and 52 percent fewer clicks than other posts.

Here’s the full infographic:

photo credit: paurian via photopin cc

Meritful is a platform where high school students aged 13-18 can create a professional online identity while hooking into mentorship opportunities in education and the workforce. The company launches into public beta on Monday.

A sample page on Meritful

“College admissions officers look for you online,” says chief executive and newly-minted comp-sci PhD Azarias Reda, who used to work for LinkedIn. “So it’s really important to have a great polished profile on the web.”

LinkedIn itself is not an option: Kids are not welcome, and due to LinkedIn’s work history orientation, it’s not suitable either. And the existing portfolio sites, Reda argues, lack the mentorship opportunities Meritful provides.

In addition, they lack connection to schools.

For the past six months, Reda and his team have been working with four Michigan high schools in a private beta. Next week, the platform will be open to the world. Schools can join, bringing their students with them. But Reda is most excited about individual students sharing the network with their friends and growing virally.

“We want it to be something that students do because it’s cool,” he says.

Students have school pages, and can see the hottest and most exciting projects and portfolio items their friends are sharing.

The company is funded with $25,000 in friends and family money and support from an accelerator, Ann Arbor’s SPARK.

Image credit: Thomas Photography/ShutterStock

Performance monitoring service Pingdom has done another one of its mammoth social media studies, this one on the demographics of social media sites – every site imaginable, one would think, except for Google+. (Because Google+ is not directly monetized yet, the service does not appear in DoubleClick Ad Planner, the tool Pingdom uses to gather the data.)

The average ages of social media users holds no surprises … more than half are between 25 and 44 years old, with only 5 percent under 17 and only 1 percent over 65. The absolute average across all social networks is 36.9 percent.

More interesting is Pingdom’s graph showing the distribution of people across all the surveyed networks, showing that deviantART is the youngest social network and LinkedIn is the oldest:

Source: Pingdom

Age distribution across social networks

Interestingly, Google’s Orkut — big in Brazil — stands out as the social network with the largest chunk of its users in the 35-44 demographic.

(Which, if the data is correct, shows why Orkut is starting to falter: very few users in the younger, more dynamic segments. But I have my doubts on this one, since all of Pingdom’s data is U.S.-based, and Orkut is not big Stateside.)

Another interesting stat, this on on gender: 71 percent of the sites Pingdom checked are dominated by women.

The geek and propellerhead sites Slashdot, Hacker News, Stack Overflow, and Github buck this trend, being the sausagefests of the social networking world. Between 70 percent and 90 percent of their communities are male. Quora and Orkut are also male-dominated, as is Reddit.

It’s no shock that Pinterest is female-dominated, with a 79 percent ratio. Reading social network Goodreads is also heavily female, and then there are a lot of other sites that are in the 50 percent to 60 percent range: Tumblr, Tagged, Yelp, and Flickr.

Both of today’s social networking heavyweight champions, Twitter and Facebook, fall into this category.

Source: Pingdom

Distribution of men versus women across social network

The biggest question in my mind: Where are all the men?

Probably fishing — and not tweeting about it.

photo credit: solidether via photo pin cc

Fresh off a stellar second quarter earnings report, the professional social network LinkedIn has today released new developer tools and resources in an effort to stimulate application development and supply its service with enough content to keep members continually engaged on its web and mobile platforms.

LinkedIn sign-in experience

In the form of developer tools, LinkedIn has released a refreshed sign-in with LinkedIn experience, a reworked share API to give developers more exposure on LinkedIn, and a cleaner, simpler developer website. The company has also revised its developer terms of service.

Specifically, the sign-in experience, which appears to be modeled after the screens used by Twitter and Facebook, has been improved with a new design and enables developers to request email addresses from the people who want to log in with LinkedIn. The screen now shows users exactly what types of data the application in question may access. The upgrade should encourage more publishers and mobile app makers to add a log in with a LinkedIn option.

The spruced-up share API is equally important as it gives approved devlopers exposure inside LinkedIn. The API has been updated with an attribution element so that should a LinkedIn member opt to share a piece a content to the site, the publisher will receive credit in the form of a “via” link listed atop the post.

The message from LinkedIn today is this: Come build your media-rich applications on LinkedIn and integrate with us, and we’ll put your content in front of 175 million people. In return, LinkedIn gets content flowing into its network that should further engage its members who, especially on mobile, are consuming it even more rabidly with each passing month.

Head of API platform product and strategy Madhu Gupta summed up the intent of the changes: “We’re now making it even easier for our developer community to use LinkedIn as their main distribution platform for discussing and sharing professional content.”

You can read that statement as LinkedIn wanting to be the single place where business folks go to get, discuss, and share news. And really, this is all about content, as evidenced by developer tool launch partners WordPress, Flipboard, and Business Insider.

Content will be the thing that keeps LinkedIn relevant on mobile. CEO Jeff Weiner said as much to investors last week. Content is driving especially high engagement rates in LinkedIn’s iPad application, where the company is starting to experiment with advertisements, he said. “We are seeing encouraging signs of engagement as more than half the page views on the app are being generated by content-focused products such as updates, news and groups.”

LinkedIn also wants to be seen as having a platform as robust as any other. Twitter and Facebook, even amid a wave of recent criticism and growing tension with developers, sit very much atop the platform hierarchy. LinkedIn’s platform offerings seem at best tertiary when pitted against Twitter and Facebook, which have their sign-in buttons embedded everywhere.

Ever the professional, LinkedIn again proved to Wall Street that it can deliver on promises. The social network for workers came in fairly strong with its second quarter earnings report and posted $228.2 million in revenue, which was higher than expected, and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.16.

In the second quarter, LinkedIn grew revenue by 89 percent year-over-year. Non-GAAP net income for the quarter was $18.1 million. Wall Street was anticipating earnings per share of $0.16 on revenue of $215.8 million for the quarter.

The professional network also said that it has more than 175 million members, up 50 percent from one year ago, and now sees two member sign-ups per second. The company also reported 131 million unique visitors, when counting visitors to SlideShare, for the month of June. On mobile, LinkedIn uniques grew 68 percent and pageviews jumped by 60 percent, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said on a call with investors and analysts.

“LinkedIn had a strong second quarter with all of our key operating and financial metrics showing solid performance,” Weiner said in a statement. “Our ongoing investment in product innovation drove healthy engagement as measured by unique visiting members and member page views, and our three revenue streams all experienced significant growth.”

The bulk of LinkedIn’s revenue continues to come from the company’s hiring solutions products. In Q2, hiring services brought in $121.6 million, or 53 percent of total revenue. Marketing products contributed $63.1 million to the bottom line, up 64 percent year-over-year, and paid memberships grew by 82 percent from Q2 2011 to account for $43.5 million in revenue.

The company began testing mobile monetization in June by displaying ads in its iPad application, Weiner said. LinkedIn’s mobile monetization strategy doesn’t just revolve around advertising, Weiner added. The company believes it can further monetize its money-making products on mobile and provide additional value to premium subscribers and hiring solutions customers.

On the product and business front, LinkedIn’s second quarter was an aggressive one, with a celebrated iPad application release, a Windows Phone app, an acquisition of SlideShare, and a rumored purchase of Digg patents.

The professional network, however, experienced its fair share of disastrous events at the hands of others during the quarter. The company was a victim of a security breach that saw millions of user passwords leaked online. Twitter slightly hurt the company as well when it, in a very public maneuver, shut off LinkedIn’s access to its stream of tweets.

Q1 2012 was also a stellar quarter for the professional social network. LinkedIn posted $188.5 million in revenue and earnings per share of $0.15. It was also the seventh straight quarter of 100 percent year-over-year revenue growth for the company.

A public company for 14 months, LinkedIn has been the shining star of consumer-facing Internet companies, though it too has been hurt by Facebook’s poor-performing stock and a volatile market. The stock closed down 2 percent at $93.51 a share Thursday, but trading remains active in after-hours sales, with shares gaining significant ground.

LNKD data by YCharts

Photo credit: mariosundar/Flickr

[ updated July 20 with a confirmation from a competitor - see bottom for more details ]

Ahh, LinkedIn we love you.

People can never seem to wait with their profile updates until the public announcement is out. At least, that seems to be the case with Andrew Verbitsky, a former Accenture consultant, venture capitalist, and now Managing Director Russia & CIS for Kayak:

Yes, this Kayak.

The same Kayak that just priced its initial public offering at $23-25 per share, seeking to raise about $100 million. I just checked the company’s S1 filing for going public, and the word “Russia” makes not one single appearance.

Much of the S1 is pure boilerplate, probably including a fairly generic statement about expansion. However, if Kayak is indeed expanding to Russia, this is where the tip-off in the S1 filing would be:

We may also use a portion of the proceeds to expand our current business through acquisitions or investments in other strategic businesses, products or technologies.

In addition, as Quintura noticed, kayak.ru is now forwarding to kayak.com. Previously, the .ru domain had belonged to an actual kayaking club.

An expansion to Russia makes a lot of sense for Kayak, given that the Russian ecommerce market is booming — growing to $40-60 billion by 2020, and is the largest online market in Europe, with 70 million Internet users. Coincidentally, travel industry research firm PhoCusWright (!) just reported that online booking for travel in Eastern Europe and Russia is growing quickly: faster than 25 percent annually for the next two years.

VentureBeat has contacted Kayak PR for details and we will update as they come in.

Verbitsky, meanwhile, has added just one line to the Experience section of his LinkedIn profile that mentions his current job:

“Having great time swimming against the tide.”

[ update - July 20 ]

I received an email from Max Kraynov, who is the Managing Director of JetRadar (aviasales.ru in Russia).

I’ve just read your “Travel deals site Kayak entering Russia just prior to IPO?” article and want to offer a couple of insights if you’re interested.

First of all, I’m the CEO of aviasales.ru (AKA JetRadar in other markets), the key competitor of Kayak, Momondo and Skyscanner. We’re the #1 in Russia, hence, as you can imagine, the topic is quite interesting to me.

Secondly, KAYAK started advertising for an MD position in Russia in Feb-Mar 12. They found Andrey Verbitsky in May. He’s ex-Fast Lane Ventures person, and FLV has a mixed reputation since their model is taking Western startups and adapting them to the Russian realities.

Thirdly, they considered regional acquisitions but chose not to do them. (Won’t tell who they were looking at out of courtesy to KAYAK).

Now the interesting part. So far they haven’t got any contracts with the Russian OTAs and airlines. The ITA software technology is pretty much useless outside the US, hence they would have to build something similar to what we’ve done in Russia. They estimated their time to market to be around 4-5 months, but in reality (unless they make a fast acquisition, and there’s no one for sale on the block) if they want to make a product and not just put a lipstick on a pig, this would take 8-12 months.

Nice effort, though.

Image credit: Nickolay Vinokurov/ShutterStock

Twitter posted earlier today about “delivering a consistent Twitter experience,” which basically meant, as Owen Thomas at Business Insider noted, they were taking their ball and going home. The impact on LinkedIn is that tweets will no longer be displayed within LinkedIn accounts.

But LinkedIn wasted no time firing back. Perhaps you’ve also received this email in your inbox from the professional networking company:

Briefly, what the letter says is that if you want to share status updates on both LinkedIn and Twitter, start on LinkedIn:

Simply start your conversation on LinkedIn. Compose your update, check the box with the Twitter icon, and click “Share.” This will automatically push your update to both your LinkedIn connections and your Twitter followers just as before.

In other words, don’t use Twitter.com (which means that users won’t view any ads or sponsored tweets on Twitter), but spend your time on LinkedIn (which means that users will view ads there) and push your content out to that other network.

This is a very public rift that is somewhat shocking: LinkedIn has been consuming tweets for three years now. And as Thomas noted in his post, Twitter is punishing LinkedIn for exactly what the new Twitter app for Facebook does: cross-posting updates to both social networks.

Here’s the full text from LinkedIn:

LinkedIn and Twitter have worked together since 2009 to enable you to share your professional conversations on both platforms. Twitter recently evolved its strategy and this will result in a change to the way Tweets appear in third-party applications. Starting today Tweets will no longer be displayed on LinkedIn.

We know that sharing updates from LinkedIn to Twitter is a valuable service for our members. Moving forward, you will still be able to share updates with your Twitter audience by posting them on LinkedIn.

How can I continue to share updates on both LinkedIn and Twitter?
Simply start your conversation on LinkedIn. Compose your update, check the box with the Twitter icon, and click “Share.” This will automatically push your update to both your LinkedIn connections and your Twitter followers just as before.

What changes can I expect to see on LinkedIn?
Any conversation you start on Twitter will no longer be automatically shared with your LinkedIn network, even if you synced your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts.

If you would like more information about what this means for your synced LinkedIn and Twitter accounts, please visit our related Help Center topics.

Thank you,
The LinkedIn Team

Image credit: ShutterStock

And finally we gear up to say goodbye to Sarah Mitroff, who is trading-in her VentureBeat intern experience for a sweet gig at Wired. What’s that? You say you want to follow in Sarah’s footsteps? Then perhaps you should apply!

The problem is: LinkedIn isn’t telling you whether your password is at risk. The site’s news feature, LinkedIn Today, has the story (almost certainly as a result of an automated trending new algorithm), but the site itself has no warnings or means of checking.

That’s a little disappointing — not only because LinkedIn could be doing more to help its users — but also because many users (alas, I am among them) use the same password on multiple sites.

It’s stupid, it’s wrong, and it’s insecure, but we’re human. And, as VentureBeat’s own Sean Ludwig recently posted, when it comes to passwords we are all idiots.

So here’s how to check if your LinkedIn password was among the hacked accounts that are already being used to generate phishing attacks. Go to LastPass.com/linkedin:

Enter your password, and the website will tell you whether or not your password is now out in the wild. The obvious question: is it safe to give LastPass your password?

Here’s what the company says about their tool:

Only the hash of your password will be sent to LastPass.com’s servers, not your actual password. This hash will not be stored or logged at all. Please view source the page if you’re technically inclined. 

LastPass is an privately held company based in Fairfax, Virginia. Launched in 2008 by current CEO Joe Siegrist, it generally has a good reputation, and its software has been reviewed by CNet and others.

One caveat: because the search will look through all the passwords in the file, if you have a very common word or password, it will come up as compromised. For example, here’s what LastPass shows when the all-too-common password “password” is entered:

This does not mean your account is compromised, necessarily. It does mean your password is too common and should be changed. Ultimately, of course, we should all be smarter about passwords and use a tool like LastPass or 1Password to make sure we have complex and unique passwords for every single service and site we use.

Image credit: ShutterStock

Design is determining the winners in everything mobile. The most successful players are focusing on one thing: How to make products, services, and devices as compelling and delightful as possible – visually, and experientially. MobileBeat 2012, July 10-11 in San Francisco , is assembling the most elite minds to debate how UI/UX is transforming every aspect of the mobile economy, and where the opportunities lie. Register here.

Good news, Windows Phone owners. Professional social network LinkedIn, in its quest to master mobile, has released another stunning mobile application — but this one is just for you.

The application, the company’s first official release for the platform, is a full-featured release that plays perfectly with the Windows Phone operating system, and even incorporates the unique Microsoft Metro style and design. (Check out our gallery of screenshots below.)

And, as a little bonus gift, LinkedIn said that the Windows Phone application offers users more functionality in the companies and jobs sections than it offers in its apps for iOS and Android.

“You can find and connect with millions of professionals worldwide, quickly access a real-time update stream with news and information from your professional connections, read timely news impacting your industry, keep up-to-date with your professional groups, search for jobs, and follow your favorite companies’ news,” LinkedIn’s mobile product manager Tomer Cohen said.

LinkedIn for Windows Phone is out now and works on devices running version 7.5 or higher of the operating system.

The professional social network now has more than 150 million members and is performing well on the public market. The company recently reported strong first quarter earnings of $188.5 million in revenue and $5 million in net income.

Here’s our slideshow of screenshots from the app:

Photo credit: coletivomambembe/Flickr

Expectations were astronomically high for LinkedIn’s first quarter 2012 earnings, and the professional social network more than delivered with $188.5 million in revenue and net income of $5 million.

The revenue figure is up 101 percent from the same quarter last year and represents the seventh straight quarter of greater than 100 percent year-over-year growth for the company. Net income more than doubled, growing from $2.1 million in the first quarter of 2011.

“We saw strength across all key metrics from member signups and engagement to significant revenue growth across our three product lines,” LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said in statement.

Analysts projected that LinkedIn would report earnings of $0.09 a share on revenue of $178.8 million for the quarter. LinkedIn, however, posted Q1 earnings of $0.15 a share on revenue of $188.5 million.

LinkedIn is making a majority of its revenue (54 percent in Q1) from its hiring solutions. The products’ combined revenue for the quarter totalled $102.6 million. The company made $48 million from marketing services and $37.9 million from premium subscriptions in Q1.

In an earnings conference call Thursday afternoon, Weiner said that LinkedIn, which has 161 million members, saw 58 percent year-over-year growth in member sign-ups, and is adding new members at a rate of two per second. More than 60,000 developers are using the company’s APIs, Weiner added.

The professional network said that revenue for the second quarter of 2012 is projected to range between $210 million to $215 million, and also upped its full-year 2012 revenue guidance range to $880 million to $900 million.

Today’s earnings report came on the heels of news that the company would be acquiring presentation-sharing startup SlideShare for $119 million in cash and stock.

LinkedIn’s stock is up nearly 3 percent in after-hours trading. LinkedIn earned $167.7 million in revenue during the fourth quarter of 2011.

Photo credit: nan palmero/Flickr

Dan Serfaty, CEO Viadeo

Proving that second place doesn’t always equate to being the first loser, the world’s number two social network for professionals, Viadeo, (LinkedIn is number one), is getting $32 million in fresh financing.

The $32 million round, Viadeo’s fourth institutional round, was pooled from the French Sovereign Wealth Fund, the Fonds Stratégique d’Investissement, existing shareholders, and a crop of new investors. The Paris-based company will use this stockpile to push deeper into China as well expand its presence in Russia, India, and Africa.

“We are a really local player with huge momentum and traction,” chief strategy and development officer Olivier Fecherolle told VentureBeat. “We think now is the moment to invest in China.”

Founded in 2004, Viadeo targets non-English-speaking businesspeople and has swelled to 45 million members across the globe, with an especially dominant presence in Europe, Latin America, and China. Viadeo is profitable and currently adds about 1 million new members to its service each month, the company said.

In China, Viadeo operates Tianji, the top professional network of that country (fun fact: CEO Dan Serfaty moved to Beijing in September). The localized Viadeo offshoot has 10 million members and is adding 500,000 new members each month, said Fecherolle. “In China, it’s our market to lose.”

LinkedIn, for comparison, has more than 150 million members, albeit with a small presence in China. The company went public nearly a year ago in a successful initial offering and is now valued at $10 billion.

Just as LinkedIn was making its public debut, Viadeo shelved its own plans for an offering. At the time, Serfaty told Reuters that, despite frothy levels of interest from investors and bankers, the company wanted to focus on growing the business.

Nearly 12 months later, Viadeo’s plans to go public remain on the distant horizon. Fecherolle referred to the $32 million round as pre-IPO financing and said that a public offering is still a target, just likely one that is several months out. Profitable since September 2009, the company makes or 50 percent of its revenue from premium accounts, earns 30 percent from hiring and recruiting tools, and brings in 20 percent from targeted advertising.

Viadeo, which employees 400 people across offices in Europe, China, India, Africa, Mexico, China, and Russia, has raised more than $52 million in funding to date.

Bored with the mundane, linear way of reading status updates? Fire up the iPad and load Biologic, a brand new app for browsing social network feeds.

Biologic, which comes from the creative minds at data science startup Bloom Studio, is a scientific experiment in social browsing. The iPad-only application, released Thursday, exhibits an alternative interface where social media activity is symbolized in mutating life forms.

The Biologic user can connect to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, with each existing as an independent entity. Pick a service to browse updates and you’ll quickly discover that each cell represents a person in your social network. The more vocal a contact is in a short period of time, the larger her cell. Touch a cell and you’ll find various particles, which represent individual status updates. There are four different types of particles — photos, videos, links, and check-ins — that designate the type of content contained in each update.

The application’s quirks, which include fun audio and visual effects, are quite delightful. And a little tip for the unhip (ie. folks like me): If you want to switch between your social networks, you’ll need to pinch to zoom out.

Biologic is seriously strange, but in the most fascinating of ways. “It is weird,” Bloom co-founder and president Ben Cerveny admitted to VentureBeat. “We wanted to provoke people into thinking about what these networks are and how complex and messy they can be.”

The app will captivate and delight, so long as you don’t expect it to satisfy all of your social media cravings. It’s not optimized for conversation or off-network content consumption, as links redirect to your iPad’s browser. But Biologic is still the simplest of organisms, and its creators have much more in store.

Bloom Studio is a small San Francisco-based startup dedicated to presenting social and streaming data in playful visualizations with personal context. The company has raised an undisclosed sum of seed funding.

Which celebrated technology company is growing revenue at a higher rate than all the rest? Hint: it’s not Apple or Facebook, as you might expect.

LinkedIn, the professional social networking company turned publicly traded powerhouse, is posting the highest year-over-year revenue growth. The newly public company is growing revenue faster than technology’s heaviest hitters — Apple, Facebook, and Google included — according to fourth quarter and fiscal year company filings.

You’ve heard these growth figures before — they’ve been reported on VentureBeat and are included in company quarterly earnings reports — but the graphic below, compiled for us by our friends at statistics portal Statista, tells a rather unexpected story of LinkedIn’s maturation into a money-making machine.

Year-over-year revenue growth is not the be-all, end-all of financial metrics, of course, and companies like Apple are already so successful that revenue growth rates are bound to plateau. It’s a lot easier to show 105 percent year-over-year growth when your quarterly revenue numbers are in the low hundreds of millions of dollars, as opposed to the billions.

Photo credit: coletivomambembe/Flickr

Sure, you can celebrate the expansion of your professional network with a little fist-pump, but are you really getting anything out of that connection? Favo.rs launches Wednesday to help ensure that you build more lasting relationships from your new business contacts.

The site can be likened to a marketplace for networking, where users barter for professional favors in exchange for status, points and the satisfaction of knowing that they’ve helped someone out.

“What we’re really trying to do is to provide people with an opportunity to discover new people that they want to network with professionally, and then give them reasons to connect with each other and build those relationships,” co-founder Adam Rodnitzky told VentureBeat.

Favo.rs users can pose general requests, ask for introductions and advice, or query their network for feedback. The service will reward each action with points, track favors and chart the evolution of relationships over time. People can, of course, link their accounts to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, and also follow each others’ good deeds. The service is also fully functional inside of Facebook as an application.

The I’ll-scratch-your-back-if-you-scratch-mine product for professionals first launched in private beta six months ago and currently has 1,200 users. Users have posted around 450 requests in total during that time, and 93% of all requests have been granted, Rodnitzky said.

Favo.rs has a bit of an odd backstory. The service is a product of ReTel, a 2009 TechStars Boulder startup that raised more than $1 million and created an in-store analysis service for retailers and restaurants. That product now runs itself and financially supports the company, and nine months ago the team decided it was ready to try something else.

“It didn’t evolve into the type of business that we or our investors wanted,” Rodnitzky said of RelTel. Favo.rs is not a pivot, he said, and instead ReTel will run the two businesses side-by-side.

Rodnitzky even spoke of wanting Favo.rs to become the next great social network, but it’s hard to see this ask-a-favor service as offering anything more than a nice-to-have feature. And so I wondered (aloud) whether the company was simply trying to build an attractive pump-and-dump acquisition target for LinkedIn, a newly public company that may be looking to fill a few gaps. Not so, Rodnitzky insisted.

“We developed this to solve a problem that we had, and we didn’t develop it with the intention of having a quick exit,” he said. “We want this to be something that is someday seen as another success story — like Twitter.”

Should the site wish to rise up the social networking ranks as Rodnitzky envisions, the company will need to better differentiate itself from LinkedIn, Hashable, Sumazi and other similarly-purposed sites, solve the user on-boarding experience, which leaves first-timers a little lost as to how and where to start, and further drive home the value of participation.

[Image via bartmaguire/Flickr]