At a press event Thursday at its headquarters in Mountain View, California, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and SVP of product Deep Nishar discussed the company’s new product strategy and revealed a few new products.
Weiner says that the company has three central goals as part of its quest to deliver value to its membership. First, LinkedIn wants to be the professional profile of record. Second, the company wants to be the primary source for professional insights. Finally, LinkedIn wants to be ubiquitous in the workplace.
SVP of product Nishar then took the stage to explain that vast amounts of business information pass through LinkedIn’s servers, things like profile views, connections, polls, sharing stats and more. The challenge is finding a way to synthesize and deliver this information in a way that gives its users actionable business data.
To start the event, the business network demoed two previously launched products: LinkedIn Skills and LinkedIn In Maps.
LinkedIn Today. Nishar says that products like Skills and InMaps provide its users unparalleled business insights, but that users have to dig into these products for the relevant data and insights. The company wants to take things a step further by delivering that data to its users fingertips.
LinkedIn says that two of its products fit into this model: the already-launched LinkedIn Signal and the new LinkedIn Today product.
LinkedIn Today is a professional news product that aggregates and delivers a personalized news experience to each user. Product manager Liz Walker says that it chooses stories based on what stories a user’s network is sharing.
It’s similar to apps like Paper.li in terms of design and functionality. Today provides different lenses for checking out top news in not just a user’s network, but in entire industries. For example, users can check out the hot stories in marketing and advertising, private equity or politics. The company says it’s a quick way for busy business users to get the top stories of the day.
LinkedIn also released a mobile version of LinkedIn Today that gives users the ability to check top stories within their network on the fly.