Like most people in the communications and tech sector, I joined business networking service LinkedIn a few years back, thinking it was possibly cool. But, after a few half-hearted attempts to beef up my connections, I forgot about the service, with the exception of another half-hearted attempt about a year ago (spurred by an email I received from LinkedIn) to once again make more connections.
But lately I’ve been getting more and more requests for connections and LinkedIn now seems, somehow, more alive than it has been. As it turns out, LinkedIn is gaining steam and may in fact be at a tipping point according to this long profile of the networking service by Business 2.0’s Michael Copeland.
Copeland calls it the MySpace for grown-ups, but LinkedIn is all about business and there’s little socializing going on. Membership has doubled over the past year and rumors are afoot that Yahoo! is looking to buy LinkedIn, which is backed by A-list venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Greylock.
(Note: I just went to check out LinkedIn and blew a precious hour sending out invites to contacts I discovered are also on LinkedIn. Perhaps LinkedIn, if not a truly social networking site, is nevertheless becoming as addictive as MySpace or, more currently, Facebook…)
But it’s the membership boom that is making LinkedIn suddently hot, and the recent wave of high-tech start-ups has helped propel growth.
How did LinkedIn go from lame to, well, linked in? Web 2.0 came along, for one thing. A new wave of dotcom startups drew more entrepreneurs and investors to the service, which already boasted Silicon Valley’s A-list. As the network grew, more people began noticing the quality of the links and realized that real deals were getting done.
Co-founded by PayPal veteran Reid Hoffman, who currently runs LinkedIn, the service just feels to me like it has momentum and sure enough it does. More than that, it sounds as if LinkedIn is become a mandatory business nicety.
“For many, it’s become irresponsible to not invite business associates into your LinkedIn network,” says Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School who specializes in sociology and strategy. “When that kind of cultural inflection point occurs, which is what LinkedIn is going through now, that is when things really begin to take off.”Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:37 PM | Print | Comments (1)
It’s a jungle out there when it comes to consumer electronics. The dizzying array of proliferating products gets kind of exhausting after a while, particularly if you’re not a gizmo-head. HD TVs, cell phones, MP3 players, PVRs, place-shifting devices, desktops, laptops, video cameras, digital cameras, gaming consoles…the list goes on and on, and it’s really hard to decide what to purchase and why.
For those of who need help figuring out all this stuff,Wired magazine has come out with a very cool guide called Wired Test which provides user-friendly reviews for 300+ products. And it’s just in time for the prime holiday shopping crunch.
Take the section on portable audio. The guide offers reviews of sixteen different MP3 players, from mini-players all the way to high-capacity units. In a bit of a surprise, the editors chose Toshiba’s Gigabeat as the best MP3 player to buy because it’s got tons more video capabilities (with built-in TiVo, Vongo, and Windows Media PC compatibility) plus does everything the iPod can do.
But there are also reviews (all gear was tested by Wired’s editors - “We brought them home, to the office, on our commute; we even took them to dinner,” the pub says in a note from the editors) of portable satellite radios, MP3 speakers, iPod accessories and web sites for buying music. This section is a one-stop shop, as are the others, which cover pretty much every category of consumer electronics most people buy. Check it out.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:04 AM | Print | Comments (0)
It seems like a no-brainer — CNBC, the favorite breaking news TV channel for Wall Street, has taken its video content online with a revamped CNBC.com. The channel had been held captive on an MSN portal under a five-year deal with Microsoft, which expired in June 2005, and now it’s taking to the web in advance of the launch of Fox’s new business channel later this year.
The video is integrated with other content, such as charts and text, and the site currently features at least one web-only show called Market-in-a-Minute, available at the top and bottom of each hour. CNBC.com also offers a $9.95/month premium option that gives subscribers access to live feeds (my bet is that this option will be a big seller) as well as six months’ worth of video clips.
Fox, meanwhile, isn’t sitting idle until it launches its business news channel. The network is gearing up to announce this week a deal to provide business news content to Yahoo! Finance. Fox will provide “Your World with Neil Cavuto” clips, and other video content, including market updates, to the top finance portal.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:40 AM | Print | Comments (1)The latest development in the ongoing saga of the AT&T-BellSouth merger delay: FCC Chairman Kevin Martin sent a letter last Friday to Congressional leaders putting them on notice that he will ask the Commission’s General Counsel to clear fellow Republican Commissioner Robert McDowell of any conflict of interest problems so that McDowell can vote on the deal and break the current deadlock.
Without McDowell’s vote, the FCC’s approval of the AT&T-BellSouth merger is hopelessly deadlocked, split between two yea votes by the two Republican commissioners and two nay votes by the two Democratic commissioners. McDowell, however, has a past that conflicts with his ability to vote on the deal — in previous incarnations he was a lobbyist for competitive phone companies that opposed AT&T, BellSouth and other incumbent telcos on key matters.
There is precedent for Martin ordering the FCC’s General Counsel to clear McDowell of any conflict of interest liability (former FCC Chairman Bill Kennard was once released from his conflict of interest obligations in a broadcasting-related matter), but public interest groups think this move stinks.
Public Knowledge’s Gigi Sohn said in a statement that rather than pull McDowell back in as a tie-breaker, the FCC’s approval of the deal should be rejiggered to include tougher conditions advocated by Democractic commissioners Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps.
In response to Chairman Martin’s letter, members of Congress should make clear that having Commissioner McDowell participate in the AT&T-BellSouth merger at this point would deeply compromise the integrity of the Commission. It is unseemly to try to force the Commissioner to violate the ethical constraints not only of the Commission, but of the Virginia Bar as well. A better solution would be for Chairman Martin to reconsider his opposition to the pro-competitive and pro-consumer merger conditions being advocated by Commissioners Copps and Adelstein.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:46 AM | Print | Comments (2)
Everyone is a citizen journalist in the making and Reuters and Yahoo! have teamed to give the photos and videos of the general public a wider circulation. Starting tomorrow, Yahoo! will kick off You Witness News, a site where users can submit videos and photos.
All of the photos will appear on Yahoo-owned Flickr and a similar site for video. Editors from Reuters will then review the submissions and place selected ones on pages with relevant news articles. In the future, Reuters will actually circulate the images and videos to their member newspaper and news organizations for inclusion in articles. Reuters is also toying with the idea of setting up separate web sites that consist of nothing but the submitted content.
From a business perspective, this is a flying leap into the unknown — no immediate bottom-line impact is obvious from the alliance. Yahoo!, however, has the possibility of generating more ad revenue from the additional content and Reuters gets a richer online service and one more thing to keep its paying newspapers and magazines happy.
A similar alliance between Yahoo! and Current TV, called the Yahoo! Current Network, formed only two months ago, sputtered to an end last week. That venture had intended to accept user-generated videos with the idea that some of them might make it to Current’s regular cable channel. As of now, a message appears on the site that says “We are no longer accepting uploads to the Yahoo! Current Network.”
It’s possible that Yahoo!’s deal with Reuters spelled the end for Yahoo! Current Network, or it’s possible, as Rafat Ali suggests, that the site generated little interest, traffic or submissions.
One other possibility: YouTube is so dominant in the user-generated video category, including video that might be newsworthy, that users won’t think to go anywhere else to submit content.
“The average person witnesses something that is considered news once every 10 years,” said Steve Rosenbaum, who created MTV Unfiltered, one of the first viewer-contributed video programs on television. “When it’s time to put something on the Internet, they will put it in the place they have used before. The numbers tell us that is YouTube.”
In any event, the Yahoo!-Reuters venture doesn’t entail a lot of costs, yet. Users don’t get paid and Reuters is paying Yahoo! nothing for the portal. That will change once Reuters starts submitting the video to its member companies — at that point, users will get paid for their content and Yahoo! and Reuters will share revenues.
Yahoo! could use a hit in the original content department (if that’s what user-generated videos could be considered). Yahoo!’s efforts to beef up its content offerings as the portal tries to remake itself into a media company under the leadership of former ABC president Lloyd Braun haven’t paid off yet. Last week, Yahoo!’s media group pushed out top entertainment and sports executive David Katz. Katz didn’t oversee the Current/Yahoo! ventures, but he was in charge of a unit called Yahoo! Studios, an arm of Yahoo! charged with the creation of original content.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 6:55 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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