LinkedIn’s Jeff Weiner says the barrier to his vision is scale, so it’s beefing up its mobile experience with Intro, an integration adding LinkedIn and Rapportive info to the iOS Mail app, and a redesigned iPad app. Intro works with Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Aol Mail, iCloud, and Google Apps, and inserting LinkedIn profile photos and job titles below the To/From section of emails in Apple’s Mail app.
Today’s news comes beside new stats showing LinkedIn is making the shift to mobile. 38% of LinkedIn’s unique visits now come from mobile, up from 8% in Q1 2011. LinkedIn also launched a new version of Pulse, the news reading app it acquired in April.
Intro is available on an invite only basis starting today but you can sign up here to get access when it’s ready. The app is based on Rapportive, which LinkedIn acquired in February 2012. Rapportive is a desktop app the provides a sidebar of info on who you’re emailing with inside your mail app of choice. Intro brings this same info to the Apple mail app.
You’ll instantly see a photo, job title, and company, but by clicking on the Intro panel of an email, you can see their previous jobs, college, current city, links to web presences like their blog, and a LinkedIn button to connect with them on the professional network. You can see the side by side comparison of iOS Mail with and without Intro below.
The new LinkedIn for iPad app comes out today, and is built to be tablet-specific, not just a website scrammed into a medium-sized screen. It has a personalized navigation carousel at the top and lets you search for companies and jobs, not just people.
LinkedIn for iPad also now has a beautiful reading experience for LinkedIn Influencer content. The program publishes blog posts of professional tips from 400 industry-leading executives. Now these posts appear in their own clean reading screen. Since LinkedIn monetizes in other ways, it doesn’t need to show ads on these blog posts like most thing you read on the web, so they look great on iPad. Photos expand to full-screen and videos play in-line.
We’ll have more details shortly.
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