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LinkedIn announced its second acquisition today with its purchase of ChoiceVendor, a review site for business services. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
We initially described ChoiceVendor as “Yelp-for-businesses” — a description that goes a long way towards explaining why LinkedIn would be interested in owning it. The site allows businesses to review business service providers and find things like a new accounting or web design firm in a pinch.
Following the announcement this morning, ChoiceVendor shut down its site. Most likely, we’ll see ChoiceVendor’s data reappear within LinkedIn, where it will be accessible by the social network’s more than 75 million members worldwide.
LinkedIn will also be gaining the talent behind ChoiceVender: co-founders Yan-David Ehrlich and Rama Ranganath. Ehrlich was an entrepreneur at Battery Ventures, served in software engineering and product management roles at Google and Microsoft, and also founded the instant messaging service Social.im (which was acquired by iSkoot in 2008). Ranganath is a former Google employee who served as an early AdSense engineer and managed several teams, including the Google Ad manager team. Ranganath mentioned that he and Ehrlich had previously worked with members of the LinkedIn team in their time at Google.
The acquisition makes LinkedIn more of a destination for users — instead of a service they only visit occasionally when they need to network with professionals. The company made its first acquisition in August with recommendation technology company mSpoke.
Based in San Francisco, Calif., ChoiceVendor previously raised $4.5 million from Battery Ventures.
Photo Owais Khan
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