Professional social network LinkedIn has just released Q1 earnings. Revenue for the first quarter was $188.5 million, an increase of 101% compared to $93.9 million in the first quarter of 2011. Net income for the first quarter was $5 million, compared to net income of $2.1 million for the first quarter 2011, in increase of 140%. Non-GAAP EPS for the first quarter was $0.15. Analysts expected earnings of $0.09 cents per share, with quarterly revenue in at $179 million. Clearly, the company blew past Wall Street expectations.

“LinkedIn’s solid performance in the first quarter built on the company’s momentum in 2011,” said Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn. “We saw strength across all key metrics from member signups and engagement to significant revenue growth across our three product lines.”

LinkedIn says this is the seventh consecutive quarter of revenue growth for the company.

Revenue from Hiring Solutions products totaled $102.6 million, an increase of 121% compared to the first quarter of 2011. Hiring Solutions revenue represented 54% of total revenue in the first quarter of 2012, compared to 49% in the first quarter of 2011. Revenue from Marketing Solutions products totaled $48.0 million, an increase of 73% compared to the first quarter of 2011. Marketing Solutions revenue represented 26% of total revenue in the first quarter of 2012, compared to 30% in the first quarter of 2011. Revenue from Premium Subscriptions products totaled $37.9 million, an increase of 91% compared to the first quarter of 2011. Premium Subscriptions represented 20% of total revenue in the first quarter of 2012, compared to 21% of revenue in the first quarter of 2011.

Revenue from the U.S. totaled $120.8 million, and represented 64% of total revenue in the first quarter of 2012. Revenue from international markets totaled $67.6 million, and represented 36% of total revenue in the first quarter of 2012.

Revenue for the second quarter of 2012 is projected to range between $210 million to $215 million.

For LinkedIn, it’s been nearly a year since the company’s IPO in May of 2011. And the company has been steadily increasing revenue and profits. In Q4 of 2011, LinkedIn doubled revenue and increased profit, surpassing Wall Street expectations. And the company is currently valued at over $11 billion.

From the product iteration standpoint, Q1 was a slightly slower quarter for the network.

In March, LinkedIn introduced a new version of People You May Know. LinkedIn also launched an embeddable “Follow” button that companies can add to their websites. And LinkedIn made the acquisition of contact manager Rapportive official.

Last week, the company debuted its iPad app, which was a key step in the company’s mobile strategy.

We’ll be following the earnings call in an hour and updating this post with additional details.

Earnings Call:

LinkedIn now has 161 million members, adding 15 million members over the past quarter. The company is seeing the fastest growth in Latin America, Asia Pacific, and Europe.

The company will refresh many of its pillar products this year. LinkedIn is expected to have 5.3 billion professional searches in 2012.

Mobile continues to be the fast growing product for LinkedIn.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook either hired a lot of people recently or revamped its Careers page by removing redundant postings this week, as there were quite a lot of jobs removed from its employment page. Its LinkedIn feed only showed a few hires of software engineerings, recruiters and various other staff. Some of the positions removed from the Careers page included engineers, policy jobs and account management staff.

New hires per LinkedIn and other sources:

• Justin Pasqualini, Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure – former software developer at Tagged.
• Alessandro Presta, Software Engineer – former intern at Art.sy.
• Charles Gorintin, Quantitative Business Analyst – former fixed income intern at J.P. Morgan.
• Renette Thom, APAC Recruiting – former consultant, specialist contract division at Robert Walters.
• Shirish Kumar Ghosal, Global Marketing Solutions – former intern at Orios Pvt. Ltd.
• Gavin Nolan, Service Desk Tech for Milestone – former technician at Google Ireland.
• Kristine Angeles, User Operations Analyst (Contractor) – former student.
• Damien Gagnevin, User Operation Content Analyst – former postdoctoral research assistant at UCD School of Geological Sciences.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook strategy software company Zuum today releases a new dashboard interface designed to give marketers an understanding of metrics and trends on a number of Facebook pages at once, regardless of whether they have admin rights to the pages.

With Zuum’s subscription service, companies can monitor between five and 10 pages to follow the competition or see how other industries are using Facebook. Zuum collects and organizes all the pages’ publicly available data, such as People Talking About This, the number of posts per day and engagement per post. Zuum then creates leaderboards, word clouds and and other views of what’s being shared on a page and how it’s performing.

The updated dashboard section of the tool is more visual than the text- and data-heavy dashboard Zuum had previously. The dashboard now includes the following features:

• Leaderboard – A breakdown of how various pages perform across industry benchmarks, including People Talking About This, fan growth rate, engagement rate and community involvement.
• Brand Voice – Subject analysis, media type analysis, People Talking About This and a keyword cloud of the most engaging terms for all brands in the report.
• Most Engaging Posts – A list of the most engaging posts for client page as well as competitor pages.
• Community Health – Includes the most common subjects posted about for both client brand and their competitors, images of the most popular fan posts for all pages and a list of the most engaging fan posts.

Zuum emails a daily, weekly or monthly PDF of the dashboard to subscribers and anyone they work with. Company co-founder and social content strategist Doug Schumacher says some subscribers have been sending the PDF to their whole team or printing it out for brainstorming sessions.

Zuum is commonly used to track competitors but businesses can also monitor pages in order to see what works in different industries and get inspiration. The tool could be useful for marketers working on regular campaigns or preparing for pitches. Zuum offers some historical data going back to January 2010.

As marketers begin to focus more on content and engagement than building large fan bases, features like Zuum provides are increasingly valuable. Unmetric Inc., which offers a similar tool with the objective of letting brands benchmark their success against competitors, raised $3 million in Series A funding from Nexus Venture Partners earlier this month. As it happens, Inside Network has its own PageData service that we use for tracking growth and engagement across pages. With Facebook making more insights and demographic data public, these tools can aggregate information in ways that would be very time-consuming and less meaningful if viewed individually on the social network.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook marketing software company Involver today introduces a new application programming interface to allow marketers to optimize their Facebook ad campaigns based on post-click engagement.

With the Engagement Optimization API, Involver apps can pass optimization data to the customer’s ad platform of choice. We’ve seen a number of ad providers and app management companies partner to create unified products that enable this type of optimization, but it often requires brands and agencies to change their software or service providers. Involver says it can provide the same optimization features while being agnostic to which ad provider a customer wants to use. Facebook ad partners Marin, Unified and Social Code have already integrated the new API.

“We want to change the way this market operates,” Involver VP of Marketing Roland Smart says. “We believe things need to become more technology-driven and [social marketing tools] should interoperate with each other.”

When businesses develop applications using Involver’s Social Markup Language, they can get parameterized URLs so each Facebook ad can include unique click tags. Involver assigns a score to every interaction within an app — watching a video, filling out a form or claiming a coupon, for example. Involver’s system tallies that score and returns anonymized, aggregated data for each ad so that ad platforms can make decisions accordingly.

“We’re not telling ad platforms how to optimize,” Smart says. Involver simply delivers the data in a way that is Facebook-compliant.

Smart says the Engagement Optimization API can also be used beyond ads to provide insights for email marketing campaigns or posts across different social networks.

Facebook Preferred Marketing Developers with access to the Ads API can enter into a referral agreement with Involver for access to the Engagement Optimization API. This move could serve Involver well if more ad providers sign on. Instead of investing in acquiring a single ad company as Buddy Media and others have, Involver can work with several at a time. However, it remains to be seen whether the market will continue to consolidate as it has been or if Involver’s API approach can disrupt that.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Enterprise cloud storage provider Nirvanix has raised $25 million in Series C funding round led by Khosla Ventures with previous investors Valhalla Partners, Intel Capital, Mission Ventures and Windward Ventures participating in the round. The new investment brings Nirvanix’s total capital raised to $70M.

Nirvanix is a fully-managed, enterprise cloud storage service capable of storing, delivering and processing storage requests. It’s an alternative to Amazon Web Services, or Box.net. The company specializes in storing amounts of large unstructured content files, and offers usage-based pricing across public, hybrid and private cloud storage deployments.

Scott Genereux, President and CEO of Nirvanix, tells us that the platform is specifically designed for millions of users, billions of files and exabytes of data, which helps differentiate its offering from other cloud storage providers. “We’ve architected cloud storage specifically for large, unconstructed data files. The size of deals we are going after relates to the infrastructure we have. This is not consumer-grade storage that we are scaling up. This is very high-end,” he explains in an interview. “Box and Amazon are not architected for enterprise large data sets.”

Genereux was formerly SVP of Worldwide Sales and Marketing at QLogic and held executive roles at DataDirect Networks (DDN) and Hitachi before that. He took on the CEO role at Nirvanix in 2010.

For example, a movie studio could upload a film to the cloud (terabytes of data), which can then be accessed in another country for translation. Another differentiator, says Genereux, is Nirvanix’s ability to upload data once and have it be available in all data centers across the world. The Nirvanix geo-diverse namespace creates a logical pool across all deployed nodes in a public, hybrid or private cloud implementation. “Everything is interconnected, so there is real data collaboration on large files,” he explains.

Data recovery is another key feature for Nirvanix. If data stored in a primary location is unavailable for any reason, the cloud software autonomously serves up data to customers from a secondary or tertiary location while the software continuously checks the integrity of files and automatically repairs any potentially corrupted files in the background.

Customers include Cerner Corporation, IBM, USC Digital Repository, National Geographic and Relativity Media, VMWare and Cisco. NBCUniversal uses Nirvanix to store 3 Petabytes of data, including videos, photos, and movies. And Nirvanix actually built a replica of its Cloud Storage Network for IBM to sell as its own public cloud, called the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise.

Nirvanix is for customers used to buying on-premise harware from EMC or NetApp and want to shift to cloud, Genereux adds.

“We look to bet on fundamental technology shifts that create big markets, and with Nirvanix we see two of these fundamental shifts occurring together: cloud and data,” said Khosla partner David Weiden. “The advantages of cloud computing are becoming more clear all the time, and it is inevitable that storage will also move to this architecture. Data, particularly unstructured data, is exploding in volume and ways to leverage it.”

Genereux says the company booked more revenue in Q1 of 2012 than nearly all of 2011. And he adds that over the past year Nirvanix has secured more petabytes under management than the prior three years combined; and deployed the largest private clouds in the world.

The company plans to use the funding to expand its engineering staff. The company will be opening a cloud competency center in Colorado, which will work on the next generation of solutions and innovations in the cloud storage space. Nirvanix also plans to increase the number of data centers it operates worldwide; adding 6 additional data centers to its current count of nine. And the infusion will be used towards sales and marketing efforts.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities across social and mobile application platforms. Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at: Fiveonenine Games, Sociable Labs, SponsorPay,  Kixeye, PopCap Games, Ryzing, Machine Zone, King.com, GameHouse, IMVU, Nuukster, Kobojo, Sneaky Games, Circle of Moms and SoJo Studios.

• Director of Monetization

• Social Interaction Designer

• Senior Agency Sales Executive

Ifeelgoods hired an SVP of sales, Scale Venture Partners hired a new executive-in-residence, Nanigans brought on a technical advisor and Strutta has a new director of marketing, among other notable hires made this week at Facebook platform companies.

If your company is hiring new people or making a notable promotion, please let us know. Email mail (at) insidefacebook (dot) com, and we’ll get it into our next post. Also, please note that information about most new hires, below, comes either from the companies themselves or from company updates from LinkedIn.

Looking for new opportunities? Check out the Inside Network Job Board, which shows the latest openings at leading companies in the industry.

Here’s this week’s list of hires:

Ifeelgoods

• Tyler Hoffman, Senior Vice President of Sales – former managing director of commerce sales at Google

Scale Venture Partners

• Eric Tilenius, Executive-in-Residence – former general manager at Zynga.

Nanigans

• David C. Parkes, Technical Advisor – also works as a professor of computer science in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University.

Strutta

• Joeline Hackman, Director of Marketing.

Vitrue

• Elisha Phoenix, Visual/UX Designer – former designer at Razorfish.

AdParlor

• Mike Empey, Sales Engineer – former software development support specialist at Research In Motion.

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

JP Selects, an online marketplace for selling sustainable and ethical brands has acquired LovingEco, a flash sales site for eco-friendly fashion and natural beauty products. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

LovingEco, which was founded by Justine Lassoff and Melinda Moore, features daily sales on discounted eco-friendly, natural items. Similar to OneKingsLane and Gilt, LovingEco features ‘tastemaker pics,’ where celebrities and environmental experts curate their favorite products from the sales. The site also features a V-Wall for the community to share their donations and eco-friendly content.

And LovingEco takes sales a step further and donates 3 percent of net proceeds from each purchase to a ‘tastemaker charity’ to help support a social or environmental cause.

LovingEco says that JP Selects’ growing distribution channels, will allow the flash sales site’s members to access a much broader range of eco-friendly categories and products, expanding from fashion and beauty to home, pets, health and food.

LovingEco previously raised funding from angel investors including Allen Debevoise; CEO of Machinima; Emily Della Maggiora, VP of comScore Marketing Solutions; Douglas Abel, former VP at Sapient; and Jackie Wilgar, SVP Marketing at Live Nation Entertainment.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Local advertising startup, and recent Google Offers partner, Signpost is announcing its Series A funding round this morning to the tune of $3.75 million, led by Spark Capital. Other angels also participated in the round, but the company isn’t disclosing names. This new round is in addition to previous funding of $1.25 million, which included an investment from Google Ventures.

The company is also announcing a new hire today: Christopher DePatria, who most recently led AOL’s Patch sales force.

DePatria started his career at Yahoo, where he was the youngest director at age 25, managing a sales team of 40. Just prior to joining Signpost, he worked at Patch, where he scaled the sales force to 80 reps. (Patch and TechCrunch are both AOL properties). And before Patch, DePatria was at Yodle, where he was involved with direct sales, sales management and planning. At Signpost, DePatria’s title will be VP of Revenue, putting him in charge of its sales operation and revenue strategy, which includes overseeing and scaling the sales force.

That sales force is about to grow quickly, too. Signpost’s CEO Stuart Wall says the company is adding 25 to its sales team (now just seven folks) during this quarter alone. For a company totaling only 24, that’s a big jump.

For a bit of background on Signpost, the startup is focused on operating what’s basically an “AdSense for local commerce.” Businesses use Signpost for access to its 1,200 partners (including Google Offers), to run their marketing campaigns on both web and mobile.

Wall notes that around 93% of merchants renew with the service monthly, a testament to the success they’re seeing with the product, which is more about bringing in “quality” customers than it is about targeting them with daily deals. Wall says merchants on Signpost are moving away from daily deal outlets, like Groupon and LivingSocial. “There’s a realization that you might get a thousand customers from one of the daily deal sites, but probably less than a hundred of them ever come back. So that’s not worth the investment,” says Wall. “We’re increasingly focused on platforms that reach a more targeted group of consumers, which means lower volume but higher quality,” he says.

In addition, Signpost is focused on helping merchants with so-called “utilization offers,” meaning offers that are targeting customers during slow periods. The offers run online and/or on mobile, depending on the businesses’ needs. However, with this latter category, mobile offers make sense, given access to location-based services on mobile devices.

Prior to closing the funding round, Signpost recently rolled out several new features targeted towards its merchant customers, including a new website, cleaner emails, and a more powerful merchant center with improved analytics reporting. The company added comparison metrics for viewing Signpost’s performance alongside averages from other services, like Google and Yelp. Also new is integration with Constant Contact and MailChimp, support for rewarding customers for their Yelp reviews, and a feature that lets Signpost add a tab to a company’s Facebook page.

With new funding in tow, Walls says the focus is now on improvements to the publisher side of the business. While he couldn’t get into specifics, the overall goal is making the process easy on their side, with little to no technical integration, a good user experience, incremental monetization, and no need to build a sales force.

Signpost doesn’t talk total merchant customers at this time, but says that since January (when it shifted to the monthly subscription plan offering), it has added 3,500 merchants. And while there is a bit of churn, says Wall, “the majority stick around.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Uzi Shmilovici is the CEO and founder of Future Simple, the company behind Base CRM.

“If you don’t have any facts, we’ll just use my opinion.” – Jim Barksdale (former president and CEO of Netscape).

Startups are the sum of the decisions made by the people who run them. Should you raise money? Who should you raise money from? What should be your marketing strategy? What are the next features you should build? Who should you hire? Ok.. you get the point.

If decisions are so important then it might be worthwhile to think about how to make them better. A lot of research has been done on this subject and you can literally spend years going through the books, papers and the various theories and schools of thought in decision-making. Needless to say, that will probably be a bad decision by itself. Instead, it is more important to understand why data driven decisions work and to instill such a culture in your company.

Why Data Driven Decisions Work

From all the papers written on the subject, there was one paper that left a huge impression on me. In 1979 the late psychologist Robyn Dawes wrote a paper titled “The robust beauty of improper linear models in decision making”. The idea is simple. Prior research discovered that a decision made using a good professional objective decision-making model will always trump expert intuition. The breakthrough in Dawes’ work was the finding that even improper, simple, “stupid” models are better than intuition.

Let’s put that into context and talk about hiring. Say you want to hire for a new position. Building a proper model would require you to collect and analyze all data about people you hired so far and come up with a statistical model to evaluate and identify the top candidates based on various parameters. This is what Google does. However, Google has a LOT of data since it hired tens of thousands of people so far. As a startup, you don’t.

Turns out that you can build a simple model based on what you think are the important parameters of a candidate and then evaluate candidates based on that model. More importantly, it will force you to think analytically about what are the important parameters to consider for that specific role. This by itself will lead to a better decision and will remove subjective biases. This is why data driven decisions are so powerful.

Instrument Everything

The idea from Dawes’ paper can be extended to other areas in your startup. Almost everything that you do can be boiled down into a formula. Doing that will force you and your team to think about what are the critical parameters for success in any given project or initiative and then better optimize for that success.

As mentioned before, as a startup you don’t have a lot of data. There are many resources online that you can use on day one. For instance, if you are building a marketing model and are wondering what is an average conversion rate for the freemium model, you can find an answer. However, it is critical that you start collecting data from day one so you can make more accurate estimations and as a result, better decisions.

Jack Dorsey and The Inference Team

I am not a fan of the “before and after” marketing tactic but it works well because it focuses on results. In the case of the data driven startup, one of the most interesting cases is the case of Jack Dorsey who has seen the power of data driven decisions and made it his job to put together an “inference team” at Square. This team focuses on collecting and analyzing data to make better decisions. In his words: “For the first two years of Twitter’s life, we were flying blind… we’re basing everything on intuition instead of having a good balance between intuition and data… so the first thing I wrote for Square is an admin dashboard. We have a very strong discipline to log everything and measure everything.” Amen.

Start Now

The earlier you start collecting, analyzing and inferring from data, the better your decisions will become. A year from now you may wish you had started today.

If you are interested in decision-making theory, then you should really spend time reading about Prospect Theory – the Nobel Prize winning work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. It will give you a good grip about how we make decisions and what are the common biases we fall into.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch