The No. 1 activity people do with their smartphones is email—LinkedIn says that up to 28 percent of a typical professional's day can be gobbled up by reading and responding to email on a mobile device.
And in LinkedIn's continued quest for world domination (the stated goal is to have no fewer than 3 billion professional profiles, one for every single member of the global workforce), the company wants to put its network where your eyeballs are: in the email app you're already using.
On the left, a message in Mail without Intro installed—David who? On the right, the same email using Intro, which shows you David's LinkedIn profile in an expandable strip.
LinkedIn's solution is Intro, which places a strip of LinkedIn profile information on every email you receive in the default Mail app for iOS. So if you get an email from someone you don't know, you can see at a glance their headshot, company, and title, with a handy button to let you add them to your LinkedIn network with one tap. Pull down on the strip to expand pretty much their whole LinkedIn profile, including the conections you share, their personal summary, work experience, education, you name it.
You can link Intro to your Gmail, Google Apps, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, and iCloud—no Exchange support at the moment. It adds a new account to your Mail settings, and instructs you to go turn off your older, non-Intro'ed account. You don't have to delete that account, only disable its Mail service, so it's easy to to go back at any time. But if you leave both accounts on you'll see all those email messages twice in Mail's unified inbox).
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