With 40% of LinkedIn’s 300 million users accessing the social network for professionals via mobile devices, the company has been stepping up a gear on its mobile business, adding new apps around specific experiences like job hunting. Today comes the latest development on this front, a new app called LinkedIn Connected.
Designed as the next generation of its Contacts app — launched a year ago as a kind of personal assistant and now getting retired — Connected will be more than just a place where you can manage your contacts: the idea here is to strengthen relationships with connections you already have.
It’s another step forward in the company’s bigger bid to be an intelligent layer on top of a basic contacts database — a play on a wider strategy to do more in anticipatory computing, an emerging area in app development that plays on ideas of artificial intelligence and big data to “predict” what a user may want to see or do next.
“More and more apps should just infer what I need next. It’s like going to your favorite restaurant and they know your name, what you like, and how to cook it. As a result they anticipate what I need before I have to ask,” LinkedIn’s VP of Mobile Joff Redfern writes.
There are others going after this space as well. Humin, an app yet to be released, is going after a similar concept to LinkedIn’s Connected: it strives to work within a relevant context for the user to help them access their connections in a way that lets them network effectively.