Last week LinkedIn launched their company directory which has been in beta for the past few months. They also introduced the ability to search by company based on industry, location and company size. I wrote about the new directory back in March but I didn’t have the chance to browse through the directory. My first search was to find all of the companies based in the “Internet” industry in D.C. The result? 118 companies. I then proceeded to do the same thing for San Francisco and came up with 505 companies! Not extremely shocking but still informative. Here are the number of internet companies in other popular “creative class” cities:

• Atlanta, Georgia – 48
• Austin, Texas – 41
• Boston, Mass – 132
• Chicago, Illinois – 76
• Denver, Colorado – 57
• France (Country) – 196
• London, U.K. – 125
• Los Angeles, California – 246
• Miami, Florida – 33
• New York, New York – 306
• Phoenix, Arizona – 21
• San Francisco, CA – 505
• Seattle, Washington – 84
• Washington, D.C. – 118

How accurate is this calculation? Not very accurate because in the United States, the total number of companies claiming the “Internet” industry only amount to 2,323 which is far less than I would imagine actually exist. Then again, LinkedIn was extremely accurate with the companies based in Washington, D.C. so there is a good chance that this is a pretty good indicator.

The directory couldn’t find my own company though (Social Times Inc.) which has been classified as an “Internet” company. There were also other companies missing but so far this is the most accurate directory I have found for “Internet” companies based in the Washington, D.C. area. Take a look around the LinkedIn company directory and let us know if you find any problems with it. Do you think this is a useful tool?

Eric Eldon has been pulling sources out of his hat today. The latest one claims that LinkedIn employees have been given a similar agreement to Facebook in which they can sell up to 20 percent of their shares at a $500 million valuation. I’m guessing that a source came out of the woodwork after they saw the earlier story about Facebook letting employees sell their shares.

This is an interesting phenomenon as it has become more challenging for web start-ups to go public. It’s now more challenging to keep the top tier employees working at valley start-ups as the exit period has become extended. Enabling employees to sell some of their shares is supposed to provide employees an incentive to stick around. Unfortunately I don’t have more details on how this plan works

LinkedIn should generate $100 million in revenue this year in comparison to the $300 million that Facebook publicly stated they would generate this year. If you were to value the two companies strictly on revenue, it would appear that Facebook is extremely overvalued even at a $4 billion valuation. The differing valuations could be a result of opportunity cost as well as unknown internal valuations that both the companies produce when filing reports with the SEC.

However this new system works, it is definitely interesting to see employee liquidity opportunities prior to the companies having liquidity events. I’d wonder if it’s only employees and not the venture investors that have an opportunity to sell shares as well. For now, all we know is that this is options for employees according to Eric Eldon’s sources.

While I was busy traveling around the country last week, LinkedIn was busy announcing new partnerships and new features. On Monday LinkedIn announced that they would be partnering with the New York Times. Their partnership enables two new features: the ability to receive targeted news headlines and the addition of LinkedIn to the Times’ share feature.

The targeting of articles is based on your profile information that you’ve entered on LinkedIn. The primary source of information is your industry. Once activated, you will see up to five articles that are relevant to your industry as embedded as illustrated below:

Unfortunately I haven’t tested out the new feature so I can’t tell you how well it works but the concept of targeted news is not a foreign one. For example the Seen This application on Facebook, enables users to find news relevant to them based on what their friends are reading. This is a big partnership for LinkedIn though as it could also help increase the number of new user registrations.

Last week LinkedIn also announced that they would begin offering the site in Spanish. This is the first new language that the site has launched in. In comparison to other social networks, LinkedIn has been relatively slow on the foreign language front. Both Facebook and MySpace have launched in multiple languages. Thanks to Facebook’s translations application, the site has been translated into 15 languages to date.

Finally, LinkedIn announced that they will begin integrating with Xobni, which has been hailed as the most useful email add-on, and LexisNexis. The partnership with Xobni emphasizes something I was discussing almost two weeks ago: the social platform race is really a race to my contact list. The faster that these companies can make my contact list accessible anywhere, the faster that they make my reliance on them as a service more critical.

While the Facebook news last week may have quieted some of LinkedIn’s buzz, the new partnerships did not go unheard. LinkedIn is still clearly one of the primary competitors in the social platform wars. Last week’s announcements by the company emphasizes their continued dedication to rapid expansion.

Last week LinkedIn quietly launched their new LinkedIn Direct Ads service. LinkedIn Direct Ads is a similar service to that which is currently offered by Facebook via their SocialAds program. LinkedIn’s offering targets based on age, gender, industry, and seniority of ad viewers. As pictured in the image below, advertisements show up above the fold. Additionally, these advertisements are currently limited to the United States.

One thing that was substantially different from SocialAds is that the owner of advertisements is displayed next to ads. As the Direct Ads documentation reads, “LinkedIn DirectAds feature your name and a link to your LinkedIn profile on advertisements that you purchase. We want to provide LinkedIn members who view your advertisement with as much transparency and visibility into the advertiser as is appropriate for our community.”

Currently the minimum order for advertisement purchases is $25 and it appears that ads are charged based on a CPM model (cost per thousand impressions). While there has been no test of the advertisements run on this system versus Facebook Ads, this systems has been positioned as a direct competitor. I’m not so sure that the CPM model will wok in the long run though.

Thanks to Rob Webb for the heads up.

LinkedIn has raised $53 million from Bain Capital Ventures giving the company a $1 billion valuation. The company has experienced massive growth over the past year. 319 percent to be exact according to statistics released in April. While the company is a fraction of the size of Facebook, the company has an extremely targeted user base with high average household incomes and a higher median age then most of the large social networks.

A good analogy would be that LinkedIn is the Wall Street Journal of social networks. There’s no clear path for LinkedIn from here but there is a lot of buzz surrounding their soon to be released platform which is expected to attract the attention of premium brands. LinkedIn has now raised a total of $80 million. Don’t expect them to start selling virtual goods anytime soon though.

LinkedIn appears to be focused on building out their rapidly expanding user base. There had been substantial speculation that the company would get acquired by News Corp to integrate into the Wall Street Journal. Based on the recent round of financing any partnership between the two companies will most likely be delayed.

The social networking space continues to heat up with new rounds of financing by the industry leaders. It will be interesting to see how this all transforms over the next 6 to 12 months as the focus shifts to cross-platform communication and integration. Oh and lets not forget monetization.

As I’ve been writing over the past couple days, LinkedIn is rumored to be in the middle of a round of fundraising which values the company at $1 billion. Many were wondering what that money would be used for though. Eric Eldon is reporting that LinkedIn may use the money to try and enter the enterprise software space, extending beyond their existing social networking model.

This would make a lot of sense considering the demographic currently on LinkedIn. There are also a lot of services that LinkedIn could build into their site. As Eric speculates, it could include a competing software service to Salesforce.com. I doubt this though considering Salesforce.com is one of LinkedIn’s platform launch partners. What do I think is more likely?

I would argue that LinkedIn would be a great platform for building out a conference management platform. The site should dominate everything related to professional networking. As of now, they have added few features since they launched almost 5 and a half years ago. While they have upgraded the design and have added answers and company profile pages, it has been an extremely slow evolution.

This hasn’t hurt the site’s growth though. If anything it may have potentially furthered the site’s phenomenal growth over the past 12 months. While LinkedIn’s purpose of a new round is completely speculation at this point, entering the software as a service space makes a lot of sense especially since they have millions of users available to directly market to.

Yesterday I “revealed” LinkedIn’s plan for global domination. While it wasn’t much of a plan and instead a confession of my belief that LinkedIn will be extremely successful with their platform, there was a lot of buzz surrounding LinkedIn yesterday. Venturebeat began a rumor that LinkedIn might get acquired due to a board meeting going over.

Later in the day Techcrunch reported that there was some legitimacy to the rumors saying that their sources informed them that LinkedIn was being pitched by Allen & Co. at $1 billion for a new round of venture financing. The round was being led by Dave Wehner who led the sale of Bebo for $850 million to AOL.

This is pretty big news as the valuation of top social networking sites continues to skyrocket. As I mentioned yesterday, LinkedIn has been receiving CPM (cost per thousand views) ad rates as high as $75. As of yet, this is probably the highest rate in the industry and much of it is due to the premium demographic that they are targeting. While I’m not quite sure why the company needs to raise more money, a $1 billion valuation is completely reasonable given Facebook’s recent $15 billion valuation.

There’s no word on when a possible round would be closing but it will be interesting to see if this speculation turns out to be true.

Last May, Facebook announced that they were launching their platform for any developer to build applications on top of the Facebook social network. The opportunity was too big to give up and almost immediately, Facebook had an onslaught of 60,000 developers all trying to get a piece of the action. A few developers became overnight millionaires leaving others to continue their search for gold.

Almost a year later, many developers still haven’t found their gold and Facebook is still left trying to figure out how they are going to begin making serious cash flow that justifies their $15 billion valuation. It appears that LinkedIn may have taken advantage of the shadow cast by Facebook as the press and blogosphere buzzed about everything Facebook (myself included).

I at one point went so far as to suggest that LinkedIn would soon see its end as Facebook took up its role as the social network of choice for professionals. Boy was I wrong! As I wrote last week, LinkedIn’s growth has surpassed Facebook. Not only did their growth surpass Facebook but according to Alley Insider, LinkedIn is also earning CPMs as high as $75.

Whether or not the numbers are true, LinkedIn has figured out a way to capitalize on their highly valuable user base. I would suggest that they are about to further this with the launch of their application platform. A few months back they announced a few launch partners including Salesforce.com, but stated that even at its full capacity, platform developers would be limited as well as applications.

Get ready to see applications that provided extended utility with mobile phone integration, applications that promote high end goods and services (AMEX, Ritz Carlton, etc) and apps that help your overall experience on LinkedIn a better one. While they will never be as large as Facebook or Myspace, they have no need to be. They can always point at Facebook and Myspace and argue that those two platforms are for games whereas LinkedIn is for business.

There’s no way around this and businesses are also taking note. Different platforms work for different demographics and while Facebook would like to have the largest mapping of the social graph, the reality is that business connections are still taking place on LinkedIn. As long as LinkedIn can keep their platform strictly for business and can maintain their select demographic profile, they will continue to produce more value per user on the site.

Mario Sundar, the community evangelist for LinkedIn, has posted a chart of Nielsen’s March ratings which shows LinkedIn surpassing Facebook in growth. According to Nielsen, LinkedIn grew a whopping 319 percent since last year. This is in comparison to Facebook which grew almost 100 percent.

Percentages can be misleading though and these numbers also can be highly inaccurate as show with Google’s recent quarter and Comscore’s blunder. The report shows that Facebook only had approximately 25 million users in March, whereas Compete.com says Facebook had 31 million unique viewers the same month. No matter what numbers you look at though, LinkedIn is experiencing phenomenal growth.

This could be a direct result of the growth of social networking sites into demographics that traditionally stay away from social networking. As I wrote about this morning, the Boomer generation has an increasing number of people on social networks. Users over 45 now account for a whopping 31 percent of LinkedIn’s user base. Which demographic is experiencing the most growth though is currently an unknown.

Whatever the case, social networking is still booming and LinkedIn has proven its ability to experience continued growth even in the face of Facebook where business networking in now pervasive. Perhaps not all social networks need their own platform!

LinkedIn will be launching company directory pages today. The pages show employees from the company as well as company data which has been compiled by Capital IQ. Aside from the addition of company data, these new pages are pretty much the same thing as network pages within Facebook. The only difference is that other people can view the pages without being members.

I’ve discussed this before, social networks are transforming the way that businesses find new employees. A college student trying to figure out which company to go join when they graduate (if that’s what they want to do), can simply do a search in Facebook and find all the employees that work there. After browsing through some of the employee profiles they can get a pretty good feeling for if that company is a place they want to work.

While I think these directory pages are a great addition, I don’t think LinkedIn profiles give you much insight to the personalities of the individuals. Instead they are promotional tools to simply display how connected you are as well as what type of clients you have worked with (via their recommendations system). As such, I think a lot of these features would be better leveraged on Facebook. Do you think these new pages are useful?

Image via Caroline McCarthy