Fresh from closing its purchase of newsreading app Pulse, LinkedIn has made another acquisition to dive deeper into the mobile space. TechCrunch has found out, and confirmed, that the social network has aqui-hired Maybe, the social polling startup founded by Omar Hamoui — the man who set up, ran and then sold mobile ad company AdMob to Google for $750 million.

All staff from Maybe, except for Hamoui himself, are now at LinkedIn and working in its mobile division. That includes four engineers and one designer, LinkedIn has told us. Meanwhile, Maybe itself has now shut down. Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed.

Maybe first emerged in June of last year, a startup that was incubated and spun out of Hamoui’s now-defunct startup generator Churn Labs.

Maybe was one of the contenders in the area of polling startups — an area that has seen some other M&A activity, specifically with the acquisition of GoPollGo by Yahoo. Others include Seesaw, Fashism and Thumb.

It’s not clear why Maybe closed up shop so fast. Maybe because the polling space is so crowded? Maybe because Hamoui is working on something else? Maybe because LinkedIn made Maybe an offer it couldn’t refuse? LinkedIn is not commenting further, and we have not yet heard back from Hamoui himself. Maybe we will update when we do.

Update: Hamoui has now responded to confirm the acqui-hire as well, and explain a little more of what went on:

“After a number of different product directions we didn’t feel that what we were building was having the impact we wanted,” he says.

Putting aside competitive pressures in the polling space and startups in general looking for just the right product for the market, there is a connection between LinkedIn and Admob: Kevin Scott, SVP of Engineering at the social network, was previously VP of Engineering at AdMob. TechCrunch understands that after Hamoui and his two co-founders, Haider Sabri and Wayne Pan, met with him, they all decided it would be a natural next step for the mobile-focused team that they had built up.

“Although we had plenty of cash of in the bank, we were really impressed with the team and vision at LinkedIn,” says Hamoui. “Having the excellent mobile focused team we had built join them was clearly a way to have the kind of impact we were hoping for.”

Hamoui says the his own next steps “aren’t locked down yet.” We’ll definitely keep you posted with what we find out.

LinkedIn, now at 225 million users, continues to introduce more features to its site to keep people returning to it and staying there for longer. Today it’s the turn of LinkedIn Today, its social news page, which is getting a new feature called Channels. Channels is rolling out starting today to English-speaking users. LinkedIn says that it plans to announce the service formally on Wednesday. Update: here’s the formal announcement.

Channels bring together curated content around general subjects like technology, marketing strategies, retail and healthcare — 20 in all, with more getting added soon — with each one combining popular posts from news sources with those from selected people deemed influential (LinkedIn’s list of “influencers”) in the given topic.

Channels will be replacing “industries,” a feature that has been around since LinkedIn first launched LinkedIn Today in 2011. Industries were both more specific in terms of what they covered (eg, internet instead of technology), and also geared at news that was trending on LinkedIn, and specifically among your contacts.

Channels, on the other hand, attempts to be more interdisciplinary and less newsy. It makes use of the idea that there will be people interested in “social media” who are not social media professionals, and who are using LinkedIn as a learning resource rather than just a news source.

“We believe Channels better represents the content and topical conversations professionals are discussing and sharing on LinkedIn, which go beyond specific industries,” said spokesperson Julie Inouye. “Topics like Entrepreneurship and Your Career are applicable to more than just one industry.”

It also gives some more mileage to the hand-picked list of 250+ influencers that LinkedIn introduced in October 2012, with their posts also getting rolled into the channels mix.

It looks like over time, this could also include added multimedia such as presentations using SlideShare and more. And that could also potentially leave the door open for other kinds of additions, too. Although LinkedIn has not said yet where it will be using the technology/services that it picked up when it acquired the Pulse news aggregating app, you can see that the channels section on LinkedIn Today is one place that could become a natural home. (Another, which I’ve pointed out before, is in a revamped LinkedIn iPad and other native tablets app, which did not get upgraded at the same time as the iPhone and Android apps did the other week.)

Product manager Kevin Gu notes that among the other new features that will come along with the new channels will be the ability to see the updates from channels on your own homepage stream; the ability to sort content either by most recent news or most popular features; and a look at the top influencer posts on a given day. On top of this, users will also see channels making their way to their LinkedIn email digests, which will now include influencer posts, trending professional news as well as Slideshare content.

All of this, of course, comes back to how LinkedIn is shaping itself up for its longer-term growth strategy. Last week’s quarterly earnings showed LinkedIn still beating sales targets and earnings estimates, but the company’s stock still took a hit on evidence that revenue growth is slowing down.

In that sense, the move to enhance LinkedIn Today is more about improving the time its audience spends on the site. More time spent on the site could have a subsequent positive effect on advertising, a key revenue source for the company going forward — a model followed by companies like Facebook and Twitter, which have also made moves to introduce features that get users to linger on their pages for longer. Conversely, LinkedIn has confirmed that channels and influencers are not direct routes to revenue in themselves for now.

“Our influencers are not compensated to share their unique insights on LinkedIn and we do not have plans at this time to monetize our Channels pages or our Influencer platform,” Inouye said.

In the last several months, LinkedIn has introduced a number of changes. They’ve included upgraded, more media-enhanced profiles; a Contacts update to add in more “personal assistant” life organizing features; new iPhone and Android apps; an expanded search engine; @mentions in status updates; Klout-style endorsements; and a Recruiter homepage redesign for the site’s most dedicated user vertical. As with many of these other enhancements, LinkedIn Today, and its new channels feature, offer a more slick look and more functionality.

It’s fair to say that the “ambient location” craze has passed. Several of the mobile apps intent on connecting people with friends and other recommended users nearby are still struggling to find mainstream adoption. Some, like Glancee and Glassmap have sold. Others, like Kismet, have moved into new product categories. And today, the business-focused networking app Intro, is pivoting.

Gone are the “ambient location” features which once alerted you to nearby users based on things like geotagged tweets or check-ins. With the new version, the company has shifted the focus solely to making one-to-one introductions between members of LinkedIn or Meetup groups.

Explains co-founder Anthony Erwin, the decision to make this switch came from observations of user behavior. The best and most powerful introductions the app enabled were those where the members were each in the same group already. 90 percent of the time when an intro was created and members would connect, they cited being in the same group as the reason, he says.

“I think what’s happened in this space, is because it’s dealing with connecting strangers – people are kind of wary of that,” says Erwin. “If you’re going to create connections that work, they’re going to have to be very familiar; almost not like strangers, in a way.”

Users told him that when they were shown other group members, those people didn’t feel like random strangers.

Intro has always been more sensitive to the potentially creepy nature of ambient location apps, having previously introduced features that would allow users to switch of networking with those not outside of a set of preferred groups, for instance. The revamped version of the app is something of an extension of that earlier concept more than it is a hard pivot to an entirely new vertical.

In the updated application, available now on iOS and for Android in a few weeks time (currently the Android app is the older version of Intro), you’ll still be shown other group members who are nearby, but now the app take a wider view of your location. It begins by offering you connections across your city, as opposed to at your exact location. You can then quickly swipe through the suggestions to connect or reject the proposed connections.

However, when there is an event or other congregation of members in the same location, the app’s algorithm will immediately adjust to sort its recommendations by degrees of separation and other signals which would indicate closer ties with that user. These same signals come into play any time you’re sorting through connections, but they’re even more critical when there’s a crowd.

In addition to finding users who are in your same LinkedIn and Meetup groups, the updated service also now lets group administrators import their member list to Intro, then use an online web dashboard to view demographic data or to create and send out messages and alerts to users, such as meeting details. Recipients can then add these event reminders to their iOS calendar.

During testing and in the past few days when the app quietly relaunched, hundreds of group admins have claimed their groups on the app, and thousands of their members have begun networking. Groups where the admin has taken control include the NY Tech Meetup group, Founders Network, the Lean Six Sigma group, Soho House, the Silicon Roundabout group, the U.S. Realtors Association, the Pharmaceutical Association of America, a Red Cross group for frontline aid workers, and others.

Groups are free for members and admins of those with up to 100 members. Afterwards, pricing ranges from $10/month to $100/month, depending on the number of members. Around 30 percent of the group admins are now paying users, and the average price falls around $49/month.

The updated Intro app is available here in the iTunes App Store. The Android version will be updated soon.

LinkedIn has just reported Q1 earnings of $324.7 million, up 72% year-on-year, and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.45, both soundly beating analysts’ estimates (via First Call) of $317 million and EPS of $0.31; as well as LinkedIn’s own guidance from last quarter, when it said it expected between $305 million and $310 million in revenues. Net income for Q1 was $22.6 million a big rise on the $5.0 million in earnings last year. Nevertheless, shares of the work-focused social network, however, are down nearly 11% in after-hours trading on news that next quarter won’t be quite as rosy.

First Call had estimated revenues of Q2 of $359 million, but today LinkedIn issued guidance that it expects sales of between $342 million and $347 million. That’s up between 50% and 52% on the same quarter a year ago, and is a sign of how growth is slowing. This slide from the earnings presentation says everything about the company’s revenue decline:

The company says it now has 225 million users, up from 200 million last quarter. Judging by some of the product launches in the last few weeks it may have been that LinkedIn is laying the groundwork for how it will better monetize the users it has longer term as other revenue streams and customer acquisition decelerate. The new launches have included upgraded, more media-enhanced profiles; a Contacts update to add in more “personal assistant” life organizing features; new iPhone and Android apps; an expanded search engine; @mentions in status updates; Klout-style endorsements; and a Recruiter homepage redesign for the site’s most dedicated user vertical.

Here is how different divisions of the company have performed this past quarter:

Talent Solutions revenue was $184.3 million, up 80% over last year. Talent Solutions revenue was 57% of total revenue in the first quarter of 2013, versus 54% last year.

Marketing Solutions revenue was $74.8 million, up 56% compared to the first quarter of 2012. Marketing Solutions revenue declined by 2 percentage points to make up 23% of total revenue in the first quarter of 2013.

Premium Subscriptions products revenue was $65.6 million, up 73% compared to the first quarter of 2012. It remained level at 20% of total revenue for Q1.

The U.S. remains the biggest market for the company, with $201.4 million in revenue, 62% of the total. That’s the same proportion as the previous quarter, and has generally been declining over the last several years. International markets sales were $123.3 million.

LinkedIn continues to have a heavy amount of its sales coming from its “field sales channel”: $184 million compared to $140.7 million online. Field sales, involving actual people, are more costly for LinkedIn and so the company will likely be trying to increase its online sales in quarters ahead to improve earnings as growth slows.

We’re just about to listen to the call and will update with details from there.

Yelp, the local online business and restaurant guide that first launched in the U.S. in 2004 and now lives in 21 countries and 12 languages, and has more than 100 million monthly unique visitors as of January this year, launched in New Zealand this morning. On the heels of bringing its review data to Kiwis and continuing its international expansion, Yelp announced its first quarter earnings at market close today.

In the fourth quarter, Yelp missed earnings expectations, with net revenue coming in at $41.2 million in Q4 of 2012, a 65 percent growth in new revenue from 2011, while it saw a net loss of $5.3 million, or $0.08 per share. Today, Yelp turned things around, as it announced net revenue jumped to $46.1 million in Q1, reflecting a 68 percent growth from Q1 2012, while cumulative reviews grew 42 percent year-over-year to more than 39 million, average unique visitors grew 43 percent y/y and local business accounts grew 63 percent.

Wall Street’s consensus estimates were that Yelp would see $44.5 million in revenue for the quarter, and $1.5 million EBITDA. Yelp hurdled over the bar, in fact, seeing a net loss in the first quarter of 2013 of $4.8 million, or $0.08 per share. This means that while net losses only fell slightly from Q4 2012, it saw a more significant reduction in losses year-over year, $9.8 million, or $0.31 per share, over the first quarter of 2012.

In addition, compared to Wall Street estimates, Yelp said that adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter of 2013 was $3.2 million, in comparison with an adjusted EBITDA loss of approximately $1 million for the first quarter of 2012.

In the quarterly earnings release today, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman trumped up Yelp’s milestones in the last quarter, namely its hitting a record 102 million unique users over the last quarter, while touching on its plans to improve on its mobile experience. Something that should be music to the ears of anyone with a smartphone.

“We had a great start to the year and are excited about the large opportunity in front of us,” Stoppelman said. “This quarter we achieved many milestones including a record 102 million unique visitors on a monthly average basis, demonstrating the strength of our content and the trust we have earned from consumers. We provide valuable leads to local businesses because consumers turn to Yelp at the critical point when they are making purchase decisions. Looking to the rest of the year, we will continue to focus our product innovation around the mobile experience and new features to better serve the consumer and local business owners, and we will continue integrating Qype into the Yelp platform.”

Other business highlights?

Yelp mobile saw 36 percent of local ads shown on mobile devices in the first quarter, while the app was used on 10 million unique devices over the quarter, building on the company’s launch of display ads on mobile for the first time in Q1.

In terms of guidance, Yelp expects revenue in the second quarter of 2013 to be in the range of $52.5 million to $53.5 million, which would represent a growth of around 62 percent compared to the second quarter 2012. Adjusted EBITDA is forecasted to fall in the range of $4.5 million to $5 million. For the full year 2013, net revenue is expected to be in between $216 million and $218 million, representing a 58 percent growth year-over-year.

LinkedIn has acquired one million users in Singapore, or 20 percent of its 5 million population, since the service’s launch there in 2011, the professional networking site announced today. This milestone means that about 70 percent of Singapore’s labor force and students now have accounts on the Web site, according to the company.

Singapore is the home of the company’s Asia-Pacific HQ and its fourth market in Southeast Asia to surpass the one million milestone, after Malaysia (about one million), Indonesia and the Philippines (1.5 million each). Other Asia Pacific countries with more than one million LinkedIn members are Australia (4 million), India (19 million) and China (3 million).

The site’s rapid growth in Singapore is not surprising because the country is an important business and financial hub. Its expanding user base in the rest of Southeast Asia also underscores that region’s potential as an emerging market for tech and online services. Indonesia in particular sees high usage of social networking services–according to research from Brand24.co.id, Indonesians contribute 2.4 percent of tweets, while Jakarta ranked second in terms of the world’s top cities on Facebook. According to Mary Meeker, Indonesia saw a 58 percent increase in Internet users in 2012, superseded by only China and India.

The top five industries represented among LinkedIn’s Singaporean members are IT, banking, financial services, oil and energy, and education management, while the top five international companies followed are Standard Chartered Bank, Hewlett-Packard, Google, Solutions for Emerging Asia, and IBM.

LinkedIn says that globally it attracts more than two new members every second and has more than 200 million members worldwide.

With the ink still drying on last week’s acquisition of news aggregation app Pulse, LinkedIn continues to double down on mobile, the fastest-growing consumer service among its 200 million members. Today it’s announcing a major update to its iPhone and Android apps — the first big upgrade in nearly two years. And, to take advantage of the traffic it’s seeing on mobile, it is also introducing ads, in the form of sponsored content in the LinkedIn stream.

With the sponsored content introduced as a “small test” on LinkedIn’s desktop and iPad versions in January, “We’re now expanding this test into the mobile phone experience,” says Joff Redfern, head of mobile products for LinkedIn.

Redfern says that the two new, free apps being launched today were created out of the feeling that the originals “were just not as shiny as they were one year and eight months ago,” when they were first launched. After LinkedIn created the new apps, it used its own staff as guinea pigs. “We’ve had the whole company using it,” Redfern says. “And they have given us 10,000 individual pieces of feedback.” The products of that trial are the two apps being launched today.

The new look is focused primarily around an upgraded, and more interactive, activity stream. As with the desktop app, the stream continues to bring in content posted by people in your network; but it also includes posts from “influencers” as well as news from within your network (the montage of job changes at the top of the main illustration here on the left is one example). It also has bigger, less statically-placed pictures and a generally slicker look. Like the desktop app, LinkedIn uses algorithms to help personalize this experience to each user. The new apps also give users the ability to comment on items in their stream, as well as endorse items, by way of a new thumbs-up icon that glows and grows when you tap on it (you can see it in the video below).

Here’s a look at how the old and new apps compare:

The new apps also let users more easily toggle between this new stream and several other features. A swipe from the left side of the screen to the right brings up a menu of options that include accessing your private messages, connection invitations, calendars, jobs from your job searches, groups you belong to, and more. And the “in” icon at the top of the screen, near the search, also serves as a way to notify you when you have a message pending.

As for the sponsored story test: there have been a lot of signs pointing to LinkedIn introducing more of this in its mobile apps. Not only are the apps free to use, but LinkedIn has been increasing how and where it uses paid promotions on its desktop version. Competitors like Facebook are also seeing a lot of interest, and good user response, to its mobile ads. And, of course, there are the mobile traffic numbers: LinkedIn says that 27% of its 155 million monthly users visit LinkedIn via mobile apps (up from just 8% two years ago); and weekly mobile page views have jumped 250% year-over-year. So while users typically only stay in the mobile app for 2 or three minutes at a time, there are a lot of them doing that, day in and day out.

The trade-off for possibly seeing more ads are more features in the apps. Kiran Prasad, head of mobile engineering for LinkedIn, says that both versions will be upgrading and expanding their features a lot more frequently going forward. The company continues to tinker and work with what he calls the “personalization aspect.”

“It’s hard to get everything that LinkedIn does on to a single application on a small screen,” he says. All the same, he says that this is the “first time that we are leveraging in the app the data that we have about our users. This is not just to make the stream more relevant but also the application as a whole.” He says LinkedIn has built the app using Hadoop and Hive “to find the best areas recommentded for you to navigate.”

To get a sense of where its mobile apps are going in terms of new features, it’s worth looking at what LinkedIn has been doing on the desktop.

Since last summer, LinkedIn has been making a number of upgrades to its desktop version — releasing a whole new homepage redesign; adding more interactive, social features like Klout-style endorsements, easier content sharing and the ability to tag users in status updates; and building a completely new search engine. The mobile apps that are launching today are laying the groundwork for more of those changes to make their way to the smaller screen. These are only coming over time, however. The search feature, for example, is still focused only on giving people results, leaving out jobs and companies.

“Right now search on the apps is very much focussed on people search,” said Redfern, pointing out that at the moment LinkedIn sees 26 people searches, and 90 profile views, per second on mobile devices.

Part of the reason for sticking to people results is because of how LinkedIn sees its mobile app getting used. “We think of people doing pre-meeting intelligence on a person, seeing their education, connections and work experience so that it’s easier to start a conversation,” he says, adding that additional search capabilities for companies and jobs — as exists on the desktop search — will be “in one of the later versions of the mobile apps.”

But one area where LinkedIn will not be investing too much more, it seems, is in HTML5, for now at least. Prasad and Redfern both said the HTML5 app took up too much memory to run and ended up crashing.

“We were seeing that people are engaging a lot more on mobile, and so we wanted to make the experience more efficient,” says Prasad. “That meant moving away from an HTML5-based app and to more of a native app experience.” Redfern points out that even small things, like that new “like” icon, would not have been possible. “Plus, we need to go where our users are,” he says, and that is on native apps for Android and iPhone handsets.

LinkedIn is following its users in another sense, too. The company says some 64% of its overall member base now comes from outside the U.S., and so to make sure users in its biggest international markets are not being left out of the mobile game, the company is also adding support for several different languages, taking the total to 15, including Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Malaysia, English, German, Spanish, French, Korean, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Swedish, Chinese (Traditional, Simplified), Dutch, Norwegian and Turkish.

With today’s news focused on iPhone and Android, the next step will be to see how and if Pulse makes its way into an update of the LinkedIn iPad app, and when the company may next revisit Windows Phone and BlackBerry.

LinkedIn today announced that it has acquired Pulse, the popular newsreader for the web and mobile. The transaction, LinkedIn says, is valued at approximately $90 million in a combination of about 90 percent stock and 10 percent cash. The acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of 2013.

Today’s announcement doesn’t come as a total surprise, given that there had been rumors about talks between the two companies for a few weeks now.

LinkedIn argues that it is acquiring Pulse because it wants the site to “be the definitive professional publishing platform – where all professionals come to consume content and where publishers come to share their content. Millions of professionals are already starting their day on LinkedIn to glean the professional insights and knowledge they need to make them great at their jobs.”

“We are thrilled to be able to add Pulse’s considerable talent, technology, and products to our growing ecosystem of content offerings, and we believe that they will help us accelerate our ability to deliver to our members the insights they need to be better at what they do, on any device,” said Deep Nishar, LinkedIn’s SVP of Products and User Experience, in a statement today. “To continue to deliver that value to our members, our vision for content is that LinkedIn will be the definitive professional publishing platform, and Pulse is a perfect complement to this vision.”

Pulse was founded in 2010 by Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta while they were still students at Stanford University. The service started out as an iPad app, but quickly expanded to other platforms, including the web. Just recently, Pulse started to dip its toes into social by adding a number of social features to its apps. Given today’s acquisition, chances are Pulse will put a stronger focus on this in the near future.

The service currently has about 30 million users in more than 190 countries. Approximately 40 percent of its users are outside of the U.S.

Kothari writes in his announcement today that the “Pulse apps will remain the same, and our two teams are excited to work together to create cool and useful new offerings.”

Pulse raised an $800,000 seed round in October 2010. Redpoint Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Mayfield Fund, e.ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners participated in this round. In June 2011, Pulse raised a $9 million Series A round from New Enterprise Associates, Greycroft Partners, and Lerer Ventures.

LinkedIn has been launching a number of new features to improve engagement on its site, and today it’s taking that strategy out to one of its premium products, LinkedIn Recruiter, with the launch of a new look for the homepage. It brings the look and function of the Recruiter page closer to that of LinkedIn’s main homepage — including the new search features introduced in March. The idea is to increase the amount of time spent on the page and usage of LinkedIn’s Recruiter homepage, both to get more people signed up to use it, and to make sure that those who are already paying for premium features continue to do so.

LinkedIn, which now has over 200 million members, in February reported strong earnings for Q4, up 81% to $304 million. More than half of that revenue, $161 million, comes from Talent Solutions, which includes the company’s recruitment business. Currently, Talent Solutions is growing faster than overall revenues; they were up 90% on a year ago.

LinkedIn wants to become the default place for people looking for new jobs, and for those hiring them, moving both categories of users away from more traditional channels direct-mail resumes or job boards — opting instead to pay for LinkedIn’s recruitment services. The premium offerings let recruiters, for example, search for relevant candidates across all of the LinkedIn network, compared to limits of 500 for lower tiers of the service.

As part of that effort, LinkedIn is trying to take features and products that have become hallmarks of consumer-focused social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, and bring them into LinkedIn’s more enterprise-focused platform — its own twist on the consumerization of IT.

“Most recruiting products are outdated and designed for CIOs, not recruiters,” LinkedIn Talent Solutions’ Head of Product Parker Barrile noted in a recruitment presentation at LinkedIn’s HQ earlier today. “Fortunately, the consumerization of the enterprise has begun to infiltrate the recruiting industry and is influencing a new generation of products. Consumerization means putting the user’s priorities first.”

The new homepage acts like a recruitment dashboard, where users can look in and glance at different data points relevant to the process of finding people and filling jobs.

In addition to a new search feature, users will be able to tailor a status update river to monitor individual candidates, as well as news related to particular jobs that are being filled. It also offers users a recommendation engine to suggest people who might be good for hiring, based on past browsing history.

You can also get updates on particular jobs you are tracking, and the page also includes one of my favorite LinkedIn stalker alert features — a look at who’s been checking out your profile.

A screenshot of how it looks is below. As you can see, it effectively resembles a cleaner, pared-down version of LinkedIn itself. “A consumer app in the front, but has the power and rich feature set of an enterprise tool in the back,” as Liz Burstein, LinkedIn’s product manager for Talent Solutions, notes.

LinkedIn has just announced on its blog that a new Facebook-style mention feature, letting users tag companies or users, is officially official.

This morning, TNW noticed a feature being tested on LinkedIn that would let users mention other LinkedIn members or companies in status updates, instantly sending a notification to that user or company’s profile. Not every user had access to the mention feature this morning, but it appears LinkedIn is rolling it out to users as we speak.

Mentions aren’t revolutionary by any means. Facebook has had an auto-complete feature built in for a while now that lets you select a friend from a drop-down menu as soon as you begin typing a name. Before that, Twitter was the real origin of the mention, with the help of a now-ubiquitous @ symbol.

On LinkedIn, you simply type in the name of the LinkedIn connection or company within the status update field. You’ll see a drop-down menu with matches, and once you post, that user or company will see your status update appear in their notifications list.

You’ll also be able to mention other LinkedIn Members, outside of first-degree connections, in the comments section of posts on the LinkedIn Home Page. That is, as long as those members have engaged in the same comments section. LinkedIn is home to some of the most important business news in the industry, and this should help the social network grow engagement amongst its users on the platform itself.

According to the blog post, LinkedIn mentions “will make it easier for you to start conversations with your network while also enabling you to respond in real-time when someone begins a conversation with you.”

If you are an English-speaking member of LinkedIn, you should see the feature start working sometime in the near future. Meanwhile, LinkedIn is working on integrating mentions into other parts of the site, beyond status updates and home page comments.

Microsoft’s Bing search engine now knows quite a bit more about people and places, thanks to an upgrade to its Satori entity engine and a partnership with LinkedIn. This means Bing now features the profiles of “web-active” users, professionals and celebrities in its Snapshots bar and has a significantly better understanding about places and things. Today’s update, Microsoft says, marks the “most significant updates to Satori (which you will see show up in the Snapshot feature on Bing) since its introduction.”

The updated Bing doesn’t just show this information, though. It also makes it available through complex natural language queries like “Who won best actor in 2009?” The search engine is smart enough to understand that you are talking about the Oscars and knows that you are probably looking for Sean Penn. Because it also knows more about places, you can also ask it “What is the deepest lake in the world?” and get the answer immediately. For many of these questions, it is worth noting, Google doesn’t find an answer in its Knowledge Graph, though there are obviously some parallels between Knowledge Graph and Microsoft’s Satori project, which forms the basis of today’s updates.

In the view of Microsoft’s senior director of online services Stefan Weitz, Google’s Knowledge graph is indeed a “kick-ass encyclopedia” that’s great at highlighting facts. That, he said, “is interesting and hard and cool,” but he wants Bing to go a step further by not just linking all of this information together, but also by making it actionable. Restaurant data, for example, includes a link to reservations. Movie listings show you where you can rent online, and results about a school will show you where you can apply. And starting today, Bing is expanding this by adding more information about people, things and places to Satori, its answer to Google’s Knowledge Graph.

People On Bing

Currently, Weitz told me earlier this week, people searches account for about 10 percent of all searches on Bing. When it comes to people, profiles and Bing, the company that probably comes to mind first is Facebook, given that Microsoft already has a close relationship with the social network. However, most of the people searches on Bing, Weitz argues, involve people who are tying to find professional information about somebody, and that’s where LinkedIn has a major advantage (he did not exclude the possibility that Microsoft would add information from other sources later on, though).

Just showing information about people, of course, doesn’t sound so hard, but most names are ambiguous and could refer to numerous people. Because of this, Microsoft often shows you multiple options in the sidebar and then allows you to choose the one you are looking for, similar to what Google does with the Knowledge Graph. Once you choose the right person, the search results will then update to show you relevant results.

Bing also, of course, still uses data from Wikipedia for historical figures and celebrities. For celebrities and some “web-famous” people, the search engine even goes one step further and offers links to their Facebook and Twitter profiles, as well as their Klout scores and other information it can find (think spouses, children, specific events they were involved in, etc.).

For regular Linkedin users, the Snapshot feature will show you the usual biographical stats you would expect, including a person’s current job, work experience and education background, as well as a list of related people searchers looked for on Bing (for me, that’s my TechCrunch colleagues Rip Empson, Anthony Ha and John Biggs, for example). Search results from LinkedIn that don’t immediately trigger the Snapshot feature but appear in the regular search results can now be expanded to show all of this information, too.

Sidenote: Earlier this week, a number of people spotted what looked like author images on Bing. While it does indeed look like Bing is testing this feature, this isn’t part of today’s launch, though it is likely based on data from Satori. Chances are we’ll hear more about this project in the near future.

Places On Bing

As for places, including landmarks, rivers and mountains, Bing now incorporates a large amount of additional information and can show you more data about local airports, attractions and other cities people search for in the Snapshots bar. Microsoft started adding some of this information to Bing last December, but today’s release adds a lot more information to these Snapshots.

All of these attributes, Microsoft writes in today’s announcement, “reflect Bing’s understanding of peoples’ intent when conducting queries about this specific type of entity versus another.” This also means much of this data is now available through natural language queries.

The Power Of Satori

People and places, however, are only a small part of this wider project (code-named Satori, Japanese for understanding) around entities that Bing embarked on a while back. The long-term vision of Satori is pretty bold. As Weitz told me, Microsoft wants to try to “make sense of the physical world by using the digital world as a very high-definition proxy.” Ideally, Bing will one day allow you to find out anything about any object. For the most part, that information is available today, Weitz said, but it’s spread across thousands of unique sites.

As Dr. Richard Qian from the Bing Search Team writes in today’s announcement, Microsoft believes that “the sum of these updates equates to a greater level of understanding about the world around us. This is a long journey, and we expect to deliver a number of additional improvements in the weeks and months ahead.” Qian also notes that “over time, Satori will continue growing to encompass billions of entities and relationships, providing searchers with a more useful model of the digital and physical world.”

While Weitz wouldn’t tell me what exactly the team would launch next, he did hint that the team is looking at adding information about wine to Satori next. The Bing team is also looking at adding more action type functions to the search engine to make more of this information actionable.

Collegefeed launched today, offering a social platform for students to connect with each other and employers long before the career fairs and short interviews begin. The service is designed for college kids who do not have the experience yet to have any meaningful use of LinkedIn and need to connect in different ways than people already in the workforce.

The platform offers a Facebook-like news feed where students can access tuition help, job opportunities, interview-preparation help and access to alumni and mentors. Collegefeed seeks to “teach, tell and guide” instead of leaving students with search as the default when looking for a job. Relevant information, based on students’ interests, is “pushed” to a student’s news feed. The information might include what jobs the person may like; alumni to connect with; available internships or potential awards the student may be qualified to win.

The platform will connect employers with students as they progress through school as opposed to forcing decisions through short interviews, career fairs and campus visits. They do this by bringing together a network of employers and alumni who can get students access to well-paying jobs with the Valley’s leading technology companies. It will also offer competitions for students to  vie for awards and help pay for college tuition.

“Early career profiles need to be very different from late-career profiles. They need to focus on portfolios / class projects / thesis work, internships, etc.,” said Sanjeev Agrawal, founder, CEO of Collegefeed in an email interview. “Agrawal was formerly the product marketing chief at Google. “Very hard for these kids to stand out on other networks. Our competitions and awards program is meant to precisely help these students show off their skills.”

The service is going into beta with three Silicon Valley schools: Carnegie Mellon SV, Stanford, and the University of California, Berkeley. Organizers say the service will go nationwide by the end of 2013.

Collegefeed will market employer-branded pages that give them a presence on the site, Agrawal said. This will allow employers to connect in a news feed setting where students tend to gather.

Companies seeking college graduates have relied for the past 20 years on well-worn tactics. Recruiting can get expensive, and so employers usually do the bare minimum. If they do go to colleges, then it’s usually for individual interviews. The result: 40 percent of employers who try this method report they can’t fill early career jobs.

“We make many more employers relevant to many more students,” he said. “Everyone wants to work at Google and Facebook, but we can be smart about saying ‘If you want jobs in mobile payments or big data etc’ you have many choices. Even traditional companies like Safeway become interesting because they have had ‘big data’ before some of these newer companies existed and are working on some really interesting problems.”

Agrawal said competitors do not provide all that Collegefeed offers. He said some examples are, “Mindsumo (online challenges for college kids), Zinch (financial awards) Readyforce (tech/startup recruitment), Branchout (networking on Facebook) and BraveNewTalent (online professional networking).” Important to note that BraveNewTalent recently did a pivot.

Collegefeed is a smart play. It looks like it will provide a more holistic and complete service for students and employers, opening both to opportunities they did not know existed.

But is this something LinkedIn can kill if it decided to move into this market? Collegefeed has its work cut out for it with such a major competitor. Data analytics increasingly provide LinkedIn with ways to offer new services. Features that Collegefeed offers might be incrementally added to LinkedIn and packaged as a service. In the meantime, Collegefeed will need to gather as much interaction data as it can to provide a level of personalized service that will be critical to maintain.

The need for qualified people is increasingly a challenge for employers. Services such as Collegefeed will become increasingly valuable as companies modernize their approaches to job recruitment.

Endorsements, a lightweight way for people on LinkedIn to recommend each other’s skills, has picked up some significant traction in its first five months of life. Today, LinkedIn is announcing that Endorsements has passed the 1 billion milestone — with 58 million members getting recognition on their profiles for different areas of expertise, according to a blog post from Peter Rusev. The marker is a sign that, were LinkedIn so inclined, it could likely give sites likes Klout, which measure influencer status, a run for their money.

Before the introduction of endorsements five months ago, LinkedIn let users gather testimonials about their skills — but these were in the form of longer recommendations. Those written recommendations are still there, but what endorsements has done is turn this into a quicker process, as fast as it takes a user to click a box, with a prompt for adding them in appearing at the top of profile pages to encourage more endorsing.

Endorsements serve several purposes for LinkedIn. For starters, they help increase engagement on the site, and keep people on the site for longer, giving them more possibilities to get exposed to other services (and ads).

They also give users the chance to provide more enhanced pictures of themselves — useful, since one of the main reasons for LinkedIn usage (despite all its moves to become central news information hubs) remain around people finding jobs. And along those lines, endorsements are also getting used as ways for people to network with each other. LinkedIn tells me that when users get endorsed their profiles appear higher up in searches, making them four times more likely to be seen by others.

For now, LinkedIn is still focused on building up a massive data set based on these endorsements and is therefore keeping all monetization elements out for now. “The product is completely free to access/use and there are no plans to make this a premium experience,” a spokesperson tells me.

However, that’s not to say that LinkedIn’s endorsements won’t be evolving in other ways, including seeing the data get integrated into other paid products.

“We are looking at different ways to integrate the signals we are gathering from endorsements into other products across LinkedIn, such as search and our recruiter product,” she notes. “Our focus here will be on the most natural way for the data to help our members be found on LinkedIn.” That follows on from the fact that your profile is four times more likely to be found if you get endorsed. “We are also continuing to improve the algorithm behind the suggestions we prompt to our members to help them give relevant endorsements to their connections,” she added.

LinkedIn is keen to show that it is a social network for the whole of the working world, not just those of us who spend the whole day thinking about technology, glued to our screens. LinkedIn has singled out what it claims to be both its first endorsement and its one-billionth. They are, respectively, an endorsement was for C++ programming skills, and an endorsement for water treatment — conveniently jobs at the opposite ends of the career spectrum.

Still, the top 10 list remains fairly firmly in white-collar territory.

[Note: This post is not an endorsement of endorsements.]

Tech companies try to stay lean. They don’t want to hire too many sales people, and they can’t build the perfect advertising tool for every buyer. So following in Google and Facebook’s footsteps, today Twitter and in November LinkedIn launched ads APIs. They set up a powerful value exchange: “Help us sell more ads, and we’ll give you a cut.”

If you’ve ever bought online ads with a self-serve interface, you know it basically doesn’t work. I did it on Facebook at my first job out of college. ‘Twas hell. Maybe if you’re a small business trying to spend $50 with no regard for optimization it will “work.” But if you want to spend any serious money on an ad campaign without throwing handfuls of cash into a bonfire, you need a programmatic interface.

Every business wants a different interface, though. Some want a standalone buying tool for a specific ad platform or social network. Some want it built into the same system running their search ads so they can shift spend across the channels to get the biggest bang for their buck on any given day. Some want to control all the targeting, others want artificial intelligence to hunt for the best-performing creatives and audiences, and still others want their websites automatically packaged into ads. Trying to build all these different options in-house would be impossible for most ad platforms.

Meanwhile, there’s the job of actually selling the ads to all these different types of businesses. A platform’s biggest clients often get full-service hand-holding, while their smallest have to fight through the self-serve tool. In the middle there’s a thicket of businesses across verticals and international borders. Hiring and training an in-house sales team to machete their way into these company’s pockets can be a huge up-front cost and lead to a bloated head count.

What Google and Facebook found, and Twitter and LinkedIn are now exploring, is that by offering programmatic access to their ads inventory, third parties solve the problems for them.

In exchange, the platforms allow providers of full-service advertising or ad tool licenses to earn a margin. Typically that comes in the form of a 10 percent to 20 percent cut of total spend by clients that typically goes down the more they spend. Otherwise the margin comes by charging a “cost per action” where clients pay a certain amount per click, download, or certain level of downstream engagement, and the provider keeps the difference between what they paid and what they charged. Sometimes there’s a monthly fee, too. Twitter refused to specify whether there were any restrictions for businesses built on its new ads API, saying “We’re not commenting on partnership terms.”

Regardless, the idea is for the platforms to share the wealth, and thereby align their goals with the ad tool and service providers. This way they both can make a fortune when the third parties evangelize the channel. And my oh my can ads APIs bring in the dough.

Big providers taking advantage of ads APIs can pull in hundreds of millions of dollars in sales and earn enough profit to build sizable teams, as well as invest in algorithm development and rapid adaptation to the latest API features. The money pouring out of the Facebook Ads API in particular has led many providers on that platform to be purchased. Adobe bought Efficient Frontier for $400 million, Experian scooped up Techlightenment, Adknowledge bought AdParlor, and Buddy Media acquired Brighter Option to rear itself for acquisition by Salesforce.

Facebook’s social ads API is a very different beast than Google AdWords and AdSense, so it birthed a bunch of entirely new companies. Twitter and LinkedIn are similar enough to Facebook that I bet we’ll see established adtech players scrambling to get on board. LinkedIn’s could kick off some new recruiter-specific ad tools and services, and a few interest graph and public sentiment analysis-focused providers might pop up around the Twitter ads API that launched today. But of Twitter’s five initial partners, Adobe, HootSuite, Salesforce, SHIFT, and TBG Digital, only HootSuite doesn’t offer Facebook ad buying, too.

While LinkedIn is already public and doing well, today’s ads API launch will be crucial for Twitter to hit its stride in advertising revenue before it IPOs. Twitter needs a big boost if its going to hit the $1 billion in total revenue that TechCrunch, the New York Times, and Bloomberg have actually heard are a possibility in 2013. The ads API could be the difference between that $1 billion and the much more conservative $545 million in ad revenue eMarketer projects for 2013.

Facebook learned the hard way that you have to be raking in the cash where your users are (aka mobile) when you IPO, or Wall Street will put you in your place. With an army of adtech companies hawking the value of Promoted Tweets, Twitter might see sales soar just in time for its public debut.

More details on Twitter’s Ads API

[Image Credit]

Did you happen to get an email from LinkedIn recently, which congratulated you on having one of the most popular profiles on the site? Then, good news – you’re special. Just like millions of others. The campaign, which ran this month in celebration of LinkedIn’s 200-million-users milestone, involved these ego-boosting emails sent to the network’s “top” users, which urged them to share the good news on Facebook and Twitter. You might be surprised how many took the bait.

For those of you who were sadly not LinkedIn-famous enough (like me, ha) to get on the special list, here’s an example (below) of what the email looked like.

When you clicked through to “Read More,” the resulting web page included a brief message about the network’s milestone and then provided a social sharing box which suggested that “a stat this delightful deserves to be shared.” Users could then post the message to Twitter, Facebook, or, of course LinkedIn.

Typically, when companies urge users to post to social networks, it’s to participate in some sort of contest. Pin-to-win. Twitter sweepstakes. Facebook giveaway. Etc, etc. But LinkedIn tried a different tactic to get its message out there – instead of offering some sort of tangible reward, it offered something that perhaps makes even more sense in today’s navel-gazing, selfie-posting, retweet-begging, Klout accumulating, social media era.

LinkedIn offered social capital.

I mean really, who can resist posting that they’re in the top 1 percent of LinkedIn users? Even had they paused for a breath – or, I don’t know, actually read the email – they would have realized that they share that accolade with some 2 million others.

After seeing these tweets in my Twitter feeds, lists searches, and even discussed internally among TechCrunch staff, I was curious – did this silly, self-involved email campaign actually work?

It did.

And the way it works is not all that different from how spam works, either:

1) Send email

2) A handful of people click

3) Profit!

LinkedIn tells us that the contest began on February 7, 2013, and it wrapped up February 14. From the network’s 200 million members, the company looked at those who have active accounts, and were within the first million to register, who have more than 100 profile views (excluding self-profile views), have more than 100 connections, and have the most endorsements for popular skills in their country.

The congratulatory emails were apparently not sent all at the same time, which is good because otherwise, the campaign could have turned ugly. Given the ensuing tweet volume, people might have actually noticed how effectively LinkedIn was “spamming” Twitter.

We asked the company if it would share the results of the campaign, but it declined. Instead, we reached out to the social analytics company Topsy, one of the few that has access to Twitter’s “firehose” API. Using tweets as a gauge of success is a good indicator, because unlike on the more personal network of Facebook, it’s a place where people might be included to do a little bragging.

As it turned out, LinkedIn actually sent out several variations of its email message. It targeted those who are among the top 1 percent, top 5 percent and top 10 percent, Topsy found.

During the month of February up until the end-of-day Friday, there were 82,607 tweets about the campaign. Peak chatter, likely coinciding with the emails, occurred on:

• Feb 7^th – 3,164 tweets
• Feb 8^th – 3,770 tweets
• Feb 11^th – 4,432 tweets
• Feb 12^th – 6,667 tweets

With 200 million users, even emailing the top percentage constitutes a significant outreach effort on LinkedIn’s part. While the number of those who clicked “share” was small in comparison to those who were emailed, it still resulted in a fairly successful Twitter campaign. And LinkedIn never had to promise users anything in return.

A little ego boost goes a long way.

Image credit: top, GearDiary; chart, Topsy

Technology is a wonderful thing, especially when your employer hooks you up with gadgets for free. Today, we’ve learned that LinkedIn has decided to give all of its employees an iPad mini. This reminds us of Oprah Winfrey giving things to her audience and exclaiming “You get an iPad, you get an iPad!”

A spokesperson from LinkedIn confirmed this for us, as it’s not something that you’d want to report if it weren’t true. Employees could have gotten sad.

We wanted to acknowledge the hard work and accomplishments of all of our employees in 2012. During today’s bi-weekly All Hands meeting, we surprised our employees with iPad Minis as a small gesture of the company’s gratitude for their contributions.

Here’s a look at CEO Jeff Weiner standing with a whole bunch of them:

Expect $AAPL results next quarter to include a couple million in #iPad revenue for all the Minis @LinkedIn just bought for every employee!

—
Brandon Duncan (@duncanbrandon) February 13, 2013

The gifts were given out because the company had such a great 2012, “beating the streets” consistently in each quarter. The company currently has 3,500 employees, so if each costs $329, that’s $1,151,500.00. Someone at Apple is smiling.

I wonder if they got a discount?

In direct response, or not, we’re told by a source that every Intel R&D engineer just got a fully specced out Lenovo Yoga at $1,500 a pop. I’ll take the iPad, thank you.

Right after yesterday’s earnings, LinkedIn shares (NYSE:LNKD) have popped 19.16 percent to 147.86. It is clearly linked to the company’s earnings. Revenue is up 81 percent to $304 million and net income is following the same trend.

Since going public, LinkedIn’s revenue has been steadily going up and net income is finally catching up — compared to the previous quarter, net income is up five times from $2.3 million to $11.5 million.

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner even called 2012 a “transformative year” for the company in a statement. LinkedIn passed 200 million members with good international growth. The product received some improvements, such as a redesign profile page, new API implementations and upgrades to the mobile apps.

Overall, every metric indicates that the company is in a good shape. Contrarily to other companies that were under the IPO spotlights in 2012, LinkedIn fared pretty well. Shares have been up around 200 percent from 74.32 to 147.86 over the last 12 months. Facebook, Zynga and Groupon had more troubles on this ground.

The company’s NYSE IPO dates back to May 2011. Priced at $45 a share, the stock has more than tripled since that time. LinkedIn expects growth to continue. 2013 should be another good year for the social network.

The business-focused networking site of record, LinkedIn, rode a wave of growth through 2012, turning itself into a Wall Street darling in the process. The race to win the professional networking market isn’t really “a race” anymore, as LinkedIn dominates online networking for the world’s working professionals, now over 200 million users-strong. Oh, and it’s adding an average of two users per second.

With growth continuing, LinkedIn has consistently outperformed expectations over the last three quarters, so this time around, expectations are high. The consensus estimate for revenues in the fourth quarter has been $280 million, up 68 percent from the same period last year. Meanwhile, adjusted earnings has been forecast at 19 cents per share, compared to 12 cents for Q4 2011.

As such, the consensus has been that it would be a tall order for LinkedIn to beat the Street again. But the company managed to blow away expectations yet again, reporting non-GAAP EPS for the fourth quarter of $0.35 and revenue of $303.6 million, an increase of 81 percent compared to $167.7 million in Q4 2011.

Net income, too, increased for the quarter to $11.5 million from $6.9 million in Q4 2011. Non-GAAP net income for Q4 was $40.2 million compared to $13.3 million in 2011. Meanwhile, adjusted EBITDA for Q4 was $78.6 million — 26 percent of revenue — compared to $34.4 million in Q4 2011, which was 21 percent of revenue.

For the full year, revenue increased 86 percent to $972.3 million from $522.2 million, while non-GAAP diluted EPS increased to $0.89 from $0.35 and adjusted EBITDA jumped to $223 million from $98.7 million.

In the preceding paragraphs, you’ll notice the frequent appearance of the word “increased” in relation to LinkedIn’s fourth quarter earnings. “Fell” or “dropped” were nowhere to be found. “2012 was a transformative year for LinkedIn,” LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said in today 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. The products we delivered throughout the year drove member engagement and financial results to record levels in the fourth quarter.”

So, what were those product innovations and Q4 highlights? As mentioned above, LinkedIn passed 200 million members this quarter, ending the year with just over 202 million, which adds up to cumulative membership growth of 39 percent year-over-year. Another stat worth noting: At present, over 64 percent of LinkedIn members hail from international markets.

Additionally, LinkedIn rolled out a totally revamped profile last fall, which intended to make it easier for users to build their professional brands online — not just their online resumes — discover new connections and business opportunities and engage their networks. To that point, the company said that the average number of members who updated their profiles doubled from Q4 2011. The company also debuted LinkedIn Influencers in an attempt to develop its potential as a professional publishing platform, which the company said “helped drive an eight-fold increase” in traffic over the last year.

This makes its blockbuster fourth quarter performance all the more impressive, especially considering the fact that LinkedIn has continued to invest heavily in its business, launching a new API to make it easier for advertisers to run large-scale social marketing campaigns and for developers to build customized tools for those campaigns. It followed the massive overhaul of its core product (Profiles) with big upgrades for its mobile apps, the addition of notification features, among others.

The performance of LinkedIn’s growing suite of B2B products and services continued to accelerate in the fourth quarter, led by what has become its flagship product: Talent Solutions. The company said that revenue from Talent Solutions increased 90 percent over Q4 2011 to $161 million. In fact, the service represented 53 percent of the company’s total revenue in the fourth quarter.

Following Talent Solutions was LinkedIn’s marketing service, which saw revenue increase 68 percent to $83.2 million in Q4, representing 27 percent of LinkedIn’s total revenue. In turn, premium subscription revenue increased 79 percent to $59.4 million, comprising 20 percent of the company’s total revenue in the fourth quarter.

“Continued investment in our talent and technology infrastructure drove momentum in both product and monetization, resulting in record revenue, profitability, and cash flow,” LinkedIn CFO Steve Sordello said. “As we look forward to 2013, we remain excited about the value LinkedIn will create for members and customers in the coming year.”

Of course, in spite of its executives beating the drums, it’s not all smooth sailing for LinkedIn. Depending on whom you ask, Facebook Graph Search could potentially be a big threat to LinkedIn by stealing users from its “LinkedIn Answers,” for example. Some even went so far as to declare it “the future of social recruiting,” in that it can allow recruiters to uncover more details about potential leads and setting the stage for more referral opportunities.

Forbes provides a somewhat alternative angle, sharing results of a Bullhorn survey that found LinkedIn still dominating mindshare for job searchers and recruiters. However, once Graph Search goes mainstream, Bullhorn CEO Art Papas says, Facebook could very easily start to eat into a market that LinkedIn has “essentially had to itself.”

Just how much of an affect on LinkedIn’s core business Facebook can have remains to be seen, and, in the near term, the company expects growth to continue. The company posted a strong Q1 2013 guidance, expecting revenue to range between $305 and $310 million, with adjusted EBITDA ranging between $67 and $69 million. For the year, LinkedIn forecasts between $1.41 and $1.44 billion in revenue and adjusted EBITDA in the range for $315 to $330 million.

Thanks to its impressive performance in Q4, LinkedIn’s stock jumped 10 percent in after-hours trading. But, going forward, questions remain about whether or not LinkedIn will be able to continue to bring users to its content, an important source of ad revenue for the company — and continue to grow the mobile side of its business. The CEO said that 27 percent of the company’s unique visitors come from mobile apps, up from 15 percent a year ago.

LinkedIn wants to encourage readers to come to the site (and stay) to read news and engage with its content, but growing the publishing and content side of its business will be a much tougher uphill battle than adding value to its recruiting services. Mobile? If recent growth is any indication, expect mobile to continue pushing forward.

Further mobile stats absent in LinkedIn’s Q4 earnings release, but we hope to learn more in this afternoon’s investor call. Stay tuned.

For more, find LinkedIn’s fourth quarter earnings report here.

LinkedIn has announced it has reached 200 million user registrations worldwide — with new users being added at an average rate of two per second (or 172,800 per day). Not bad for a professional social network (but obviously still a far cry from Facebook’s one billion+ active users).

LinkedIn clocked up its first 100 million members back in March 2011, underlining how its growth rate has accelerated in recent times – with the network adding more than 13 million members since its last announcement on November 1, 2012. Back in January 2009 membership stood at 32 million. However, this is total users, not monthly active users or another indicator of active engagement, as others have pointed out. The company doesn’t disclose active usage numbers.

In a blog announcing the new membership figure, Deep Nishar, LinkedIn’s senior VP of products and user experience, described it as an “important and exciting milestone”. The company has produced a celebratory infographic to mark the moment.

LinkedIn’s membership spans more than 200 countries and territories. The U.S. remains its biggest market, followed by India. Membership in its largest markets breaks down as follows:

• USA (74m)
• India (18m)
• UK (11m)
• Brazil (11m)
• Canada (7m)

The fastest growing countries for LinkedIn membership are  Turkey, Colombia and Indonesia, respectively. Mobile use of the site is growing fastest in China, followed by Brazil, Portugal, India and Italy.

The largest industries on LinkedIn by membership unsurprisingly include several tech-focused sectors. The largest is IT & services (with four million LinkedIn members); followed by financial services (2.03 million); higher education (1.95 million); computer software (1.65 million); and telecommunications (1.59 million). It’s a testament to the granularity of LinkedIn’s career information that its largest industry accounts for less than 2.5 per cent of its total userbase.

The most followed ‘key influencers’ on LinkedIn — a Twitter-style feature, which LinkedIn added back in the fall that allows users to receive updates from other high profile users they are interested in — are 1) businessman and entrepreneur Richard Branson; 2) U.S. President Barack Obama; 3) alternative medicine guru Deepak Chopra; 4) self-help book author Tony Robbins; and at 5) LinkedIn’s own CEO, Jeff Weiner.

LinkedIn’s membership momentum this year has been matched by rising revenue growth: its Q3 revenues were up 81 per cent year-over-year, and up 10 per cent sequentially on Q2 revenues.

LinkedIn is announcing a new Ads API, which could bring more large-scale social marketing campaigns to the professional networking site.

In a blog post that the company plans to publish on its marketing website later today, Marketing Solutions Lead Jen Weedn writes that API access has been one of the most-requested features from LinkedIn’s “tens of thousands” advertisers. Until now, those advertisers were limited to the company’s self-serve interface, but with the API outside developers can build customized tools for running LinkedIn campaigns. Weedn says:

What if you could automatically generate dozens of campaigns and test hundreds of creative elements across LinkedIn’s B2B targeting facets? What if you could reallocate marketing spend across channels including LinkedIn in real time to optimize your goals? Now you can.

The initial API partners include Adobe (specifically through its AdLens product), business advertising startup Bizo, and social marketing platform Unified. LinkedIn says approved API developers will receive high-level support, including “a direct line of communication with our product management team.”

Interested developers can read more and apply here.