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April 26, 2013

LinkedIn Launches New Contacts Section and App

By David Delony, Contributing Writer

LinkedIn is rebranding its contacts section into a personal assistant and launching a new iPhone (News - Alert) app to go with it.



The new app joins both LinkedIn’s (News - Alert) mobile app and its CardMunch business card-scanning app.

“Have you ever wished for a personal assistant who reminds you when your colleagues are celebrating new jobs or birthdays? Or have you wanted to quickly pull up the last conversations you had with people before you head out to meet them?” Sachin Rekhi, founder and CEO of the Linkedin-owned Connected, said in a company blog post.

LinkedIn Contacts integrates a user’s address books, calendars and e-mails together in one place. It also integrates with Google, Yahoo, Tripit and Evernote (News - Alert). It will be available to a number of select users on an invitation-only basis, but will be rolled out to the general public later.

Users will be alerted to major events like job changes and birthdays, giving users a greater opportunity to network, both online and offline. Users can change the view to show their most recent connections and also the oldest, giving them an opportunity to get back in touch with contacts they haven’t talked with in a while.

“LinkedIn Contacts brings together all your address books, emails and calendars, and keeps them up to date in one place. From these sources, we’ll automatically pull in the details of your past conversations and meetings, and bring these details directly onto your contact’s profile,” Rekhi wrote.

LinkedIn isn’t the only app maker taking advantage of its contacts. The startup match2blue has introduced a new app, mapp2link, which detects when LinkedIn contacts are nearby. The app runs in the background, and users get a push message when a contact is physically near the user. mapp2link claims that the app conserves battery power by using smart programming techniques. Users can use a chat function to get in touch as well.




Edited by Alisen Downey
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