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LinkedIn Puts A Face To E-Mail With 'Intro,' Sees Mobile Usage Soar

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LinkedIn's executives did their best to tune out to reports of connection problems for about an hour on Wednesday morning, making a slew of announcements about how the professional networking site was repositioning itself for a more mobile future. There were several new features being added to LinkedIn's five mobile applications, and a remarkable new stat: 38% of LinkedIn's monthly unique visitors now access LinkedIn through a mobile device, up from 8% in the first quarter of 2011.

"There's two and a half times the activity on mobile compared to desktop," LinkedIn's CEO Jeff Weiner said on stage at the launch event in San Francisco. LinkedIn, he and other executives said, had been refocusing its design and monetization methods for mobile first, rather than transferring an already-established system from desktop and tweaking that. "Mobile is redefining LinkedIn," Weiner added.

The stand-out new feature was Intro, a mobile app that allows you to see LinkedIn profiles in the iPhone Mail app, via a bar that's embedded in the email. The bar displays a LinkedIn profile picture and title, and you ca tap on it to see that person's other LinkedIn connections, their employment and education history and endorsements. The app works with accounts on Gmail, Yahoo and iCloud, but is crucially missing integration with Microsoft Exchange.

Intro joins LinkedIn's four other mobile apps, including its flagship app LinkedIn, Contacts, an app for recruiters called Recruiter and the news aggregation app Pulse. LinkedIn bought Pulse for $90 million in April, and said today that it would soon release an integrated app that shows personalized news.

Similarly Intro is the fruit of LinkedIn's February 2012 acquisition of Rapportive, a Gmail add-on that showed social media information about contacts within email.

"Intro gives you everything you need to put faces to names, establish rapport, and be better at what you do," said Rahul Vohra, the co-founder of Rapportive.

Vohra told Forbes that LinkedIn bought his company, a Y Combinator graduate, because it wanted to create a contextual service that integrated with mail. It took many hours of problem solving for he and his team of engineers to figure out how to integrate with Apple's Mail platform - several iOS engineers had originally told him it was impossible.

They ended up using a publicly available API and configuration profiles. The service works by having users visit LinkedIn's Intro website, sign up with an email address and password, and then agree to a new configuration on the iPhone. "It took lots of lateral thinking," Vohra says.

He added that integration with Microsoft Exchange was coming soon, but would take more development time because of the different technology it used compared to the IMAP email protocol; essentially one is plain text and the other, binary. "We don't want to put a timeline on it," he said.

Vohra also denied that the rise of photos and other extra, personal details in email would open the door to racial and gender discrimination when professionals communicated with one another.

LinkedIn also announced a complete refresh of its iPad app, positioning it as a passive, search service that chimes with the most popular way people use tablets these days - on the couch when they're at home. The app brings images and content about people to the fore, as well as content from LinkedIn Influencers, and for the first time it also includes a job search tool.

Weiner spoke about a long-term term project of LinkedIn, to become a global network indexing vast data points about industry and developing economies. "Our vision is to develop the world's first economic graph," he said. It's a project Weiner has spoken about before, and is more of a long-term vision for the company than a pet project of Weiners, a spokesman said.

"We want to step out of the way and allow all nodes to connect… to lift and transform the global economy," Weiner said. "The only thing standing in the way of realizing this vision is scale. Mobile will be a big part of accelerating that scale."