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We’ve just heard from LinkedIn that the Sequoia-backed business network will be cutting 36 of 370 employees, or around 10% of the company. LinkedIn is saying that some of these employees will be reassigned to new roles (though the company won’t comment on how many new roles there will be).

It’s likely that the cuts were prompted by investors like Sequoia pushing for cost cutting (the VC gave portfolio companies a 56 Slide Presentation of Doom last month in light of the economic crisis). But LinkedIn isn’t about to run out of money: the company just closed a $22.7 million infusion, which came on top of a $53 million Series D round in June that pegged LinkedIn’s valuation at $1 billion.

Less than a week ago the site launched its application platform, the grown-up answer to platforms on sites like Facebook and MySpace that are overrun with games and trivial apps.

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Source: Jason Kincaid

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a study by Anderson Analytics confirms what everyone already suspects: LinkedIn users are rich.

Nearly 60% of users have incomes of $93,000 or more. Executives with an average income of $104,000 make up 28% of the 2,000 random users polled for the study. Another 30% are self-identified “consultants” with an average income of $93,000.

People with lots of connections tend to make more money, according to the study - those with incomes between $200-$350k were seven times more likely to have at least 150 connections than lower income users.

The study segmented users into four categories: executives (28%), networkers/consultants (30%), late adopters (22%) (not sure what this is) and “exploring options (20%).

I mostly abandoned LinkedIn long ago, simply because i couldn’t deal with the volume of inbound requests for introductions and other LinkedIn business. It’s a salesperson’s heaven (another word for “consultant” and “saavy networker” is salesperson). Rich people tend to have more connections, says the survey, which makes sense. These poor executives are constantly being bombarded with connection requests.

So if you have something to sell, stop wasting time on Facebook and MySpace. Get yourself on LinkedIn and add a couple of hundred connections. Before you know it you’ll be pulling in $350k.

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Source: Michael Arrington

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Yahoo is making a number of changes to its default search experience tonight to add more structured data to results. Yelp, Yahoo Local and LinkedIn SearchMonkey widgets are being added to search results automatically, eliminating the need for users to go into the search gallery and add them manually.

SearchMonkey is a key part of Yahoo’s attempts to embrace the semantic web and open standards in general.

With SearchMonkey, site owners create “applications” for Yahoo search that can be installed by users in the same sense that Facebook applications can be installed. Each application modifies results for a certain URL specification (for example, all reference pages on Wikipedia or product pages on Amazon). Modifications include both changes to the basic elements of a search result (the title and description) and additions such as an image, deep links, and key/value pairs.

Users can also add additional widgets via the Yahoo Search Gallery.

Here’s the Yelp search result example we used in our first post about SearchMonkey:

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Source: Michael Arrington

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This is my last post at TechCrunch as a full time writer (I may yet do the occasional guest post). It’s exactly 12 months to the day since I started writing here and the date seemed like a good time to go. I won’t bore you with a self indulgent retrospective; if you are interested in my reasons and thoughts I did a podcast with my old site The Blog Herald yesterday - listen to here.

We cover some amazing startups here at TechCrunch, and for every service we cover there’s probably a dozen we miss as well, given the hyper-inflated nature of the second great web boom. You can appreciate a service without ever actually going on to use it, but the better ones can change the way you interact with the web or run your working day. I thought as this is my last major post here that I’d share some of the services that I actually use. I started using most of them based on posts at TechCrunch, so if you like these turned out to be my practical standouts in the sea of noise.

Evernote

Evernote has completely changed the way I deal with paper (yes, old fashioned paper). Its been described as everything from a scrap collection through to a bookmarking service, but at its core its a database service with industrial strength OCR capabilities. To use, you can clip data or a link, type a note, add a photo (with support for webcams) or scan info in. Everything added can be tagged and indexed, and is searchable via the text within each document, for example a wine label with no other information becomes searchable by every word on the label itself. I scan every paper bill or letter I receive, allowing me to shred/ dispose of them cutting down on the need to file things manually. More importantly it cuts out the need to have to go through my filing cabinet searching for the bill later. The service has a desktop client and web interface, so you have the security of knowing that your scanned documents always have a local copy, but if you’re at another computer or on the go, you can easily access the same data.

See Erick’s review here.

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Source: Duncan Riley

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Allen & Co. Managing Director Dave Wehner is out pitching a LinkedIn venture capital round at a whopping $1 billion valuation, multiple sources say. This is a story we’ve been working on and isn’t fully baked yet, but VentureBeat started speculating about a potential buyout and so we’re going with what we have now.

Wehner is one of the senior guys at Allen & Co. and isn’t new to big deals - he supposedly led the sale of Bebo to AOL for $850 last month on behalf of Allen & Co. If it’s accurate that he’s pitching a LinkedIn round at a $1 billion valuation, it will be one of the most expensive private venture deals in recent history.

Like many investment bank led deals, the rumor is that this started off as an attempt to sell the company and moved to a funding round when there were no takers. Late last year TechCrunch UK reported that News Corp. may have been in talks with LinkedIn around an acquisition in that price range.

To date LinkedIn has raised $27.5 million over three rounds. They have said publicly they will reach $100 million in revenue in 2008.

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Source: Michael Arrington

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LinkedIn is now offering RSS feeds for network updates.

The feature allows users to track updates and connections across their LinkedIn network via their favorite RSS Reader. For example the feed shows when people in your network connect with other people, make recommendations or update their LinkedIn status.

As Ben Barren points out, it’s a handy way of keeping up to date for those who live in their feed readers “because if its not in my google reader it doesnt exist to me, so now I’ll see what people are doing.”

Access to set up the feed on LinkedIn here.

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Source: Duncan Riley

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LinkedIn, the boring social network that won’t find you a date but may land you a job, is expanding beyond people profiles.

On Friday morning they will launch company profile pages that partly serve as fact sheets for about 160,000 companies and partly serve to reveal the connections that members have with them.

These private pages (you have to be signed in to see them) pull in some information from Capital IQ, a sister company to BusinessWeek, such as company descriptions, industries, types, statuses, headquarter addresses, sizes, founding dates, and websites. Many of the companies to which people belong on LinkedIn, however, aren’t big enough for Capital IQ to recognize them. So the bulk of the data shown on these company pages comes from LinkedIn’s own knowledge of people’s careers.

LinkedIn uses this knowledge to display recent hires, related companies, recent promotions, top locations for employees, and so-called “popular profiles” (people who get lots of profile views and mentions in the press). The data has also been used for company comparison purposes. You can see which companies employees usually come from and leave for, as well as which companies the current employees are most connected to.

Additional features include relevant news articles to a company (first discovered on LinkedIn last December) and personalized job listings.

The company says that it plans to wiki-fy these company profile pages in the next few months, allowing employees to edit company overviews, upload logos, and add other custom modules. Some of the information on these pages will also be distributable via widget.

The addition of company profile pages (which, dare I say, remind me of Facebook network pages) and the plans for more user generated content are good moves for LinkedIn, since the company needs to give users better reasons to return and use the site on a regular basis.

LinkedIn says it attracts one million new users each month and plans to have company profiles for a million companies. The social network has raised $27.5M so far.

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Source: Mark Hendrickson

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Having a page put up about you in Wikipedia is difficult, mostly because of the Notability requirement for inclusion - and you aren’t “notable” unless you’ve received significant media coverage elsewhere. Other services have filled in the gap for the billion or so people online who can’t get onto Wikipedia - sites like LinkedIn, Wink and Spock (as well as most social networks, for the less professional profiles).

New Y Combinator startup Biographicon, founded by CEO Ethan Herdrick and CTO Daniel Terhorst, aims to fit itself somewhere in between Wikipedia and LinkedIn. Anyone can be included. And anyone can edit any page, like on Wikipedia. For now, that’s it. The founders say they’ll add more structure over time, and give dedicated places to add bio information (schools, work, etc). Here’s my page.

Biographicon will have a significant hurdle to overcome - until it gets traction people won’t for the most part bother entering in their information. But like all Y Combinator startups it’s used just a tiny amount of capital to get to launch. We’ll check back in in a couple of months and see how they’re doing.

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Source: Michael Arrington

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