The LinkedIn Story Continues

As I’ve been writing over the past couple days, LinkedIn is rumored to be in the middle of a round of fundraising which values the company at $1 billion. Many were wondering what that money would be used for though. Eric Eldon is reporting that LinkedIn may use the money to try and enter the enterprise software space, extending beyond their existing social networking model.

This would make a lot of sense considering the demographic currently on LinkedIn. There are also a lot of services that LinkedIn could build into their site. As Eric speculates, it could include a competing software service to Salesforce.com. I doubt this though considering Salesforce.com is one of LinkedIn’s platform launch partners. What do I think is more likely?

I would argue that LinkedIn would be a great platform for building out a conference management platform. The site should dominate everything related to professional networking. As of now, they have added few features since they launched almost 5 and a half years ago. While they have upgraded the design and have added answers and company profile pages, it has been an extremely slow evolution.

This hasn’t hurt the site’s growth though. If anything it may have potentially furthered the site’s phenomenal growth over the past 12 months. While LinkedIn’s purpose of a new round is completely speculation at this point, entering the software as a service space makes a lot of sense especially since they have millions of users available to directly market to.

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