LinkedIn Uploads Slideshare

LinkedIn and Slideshare

View more presentations from LinkedIn

The takeover and initial public offering (IPO) season appears to be in full swing in technology market and following Microsofts dive into Barnes and Noble we now have LinkedIn’s acquisition of Slideshare and Facebook’s share price for its upcoming IPO being set at at between $28 and $35 per share, which values the company at between $85bn-$95bn (£52bn-£59bn).

The Facebook IPO is now set to become the largest internet share offer topping Google's 2004 valuation of $23bn. News Corp must be kicking its heels that it got it so wrong with MySpace who were number one only a few years ago and are now slipping into obscurity.

LinkedIn is the biggest socil network for professionals and is the place to not only connect to your business network but to find people and jobs. It is like a gaint Roldex and who’s who of the business world, hosting discussion groups and connecting business people to business people. It not surprising that they have now acquired Slideshare for US$118.75m. Slideshare is what it says on the tin a place to share slides which as everyone knows are used everyday by business people and in business conferences. SlideShare users have uploaded more than nine million presentations and had nearly 29 million unique visitors last March.

So we now have the social giant Facebook which is reshaping how we share and communicate in communities and with friends and LinkedIn which is starting to reshape how business people connect, reconnect and expand their networks and knowledge. LinkedIn has still got some places to go and could still have some parts of the jigsaw to plug in but is clearly destined to grow further. An ex collegue said to me recently that he didn’t get LinkedIn until he lost his job and now he gets it 100%.

The new LinkedIn will now enable professionals to also discover people through their presentation content and that starts to open up significant avenues for further growth as well as becoming an effective store and archive of business content. Imagine if LinkedIn next bought the likes of Wattpad?