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| NDTV Gadgets |
It's impossible to deny at this point that LinkedIn is a real
heavyweight in the social media game. The career-focused platform now
boasts well over half a billion users, and as such, they're setting
their sites on emerging markets. Accordingly, they've just released a
stripped down mobile version of the service - LinkedIn Lite - for
Android, and the plan is to make it available in more than 60 different
countries who have yet to become part of the LinkedIn family.
The app is already available in India, which tends to be the proving
ground when platforms are looking to expand in this way. The app itself
only takes up 1MB of storage space and has a significantly reduced data
footprint, but still allows you to access all the most essential
functions of the LinkedIn experience, including messaging and network
access. The only real concession is that it isn't as eye-catching as the
standard version of the platform.
LinkedIn has some 42 million users in India, one of the biggest markets
in the world for the service, and when it was originally designed and
launched last September, Lite was made specifically with Indian users in
mind. This, and the expansion into a more global market, are both
products of the new business plan put in place by Microsoft, with the
ultimate aim being to create a kind of global economic graph, similar in
structure to the social data Facebook have been gathering.
In some ways, it makes more sense for LinkedIn to expand into emerging
markets than any other platform. LinkedIn exists, at least in part, to
help people find work, and that kind of networking capability could help
people in countries with less advanced internet options find jobs they
would never have otherwise known about, as well as fostering more remote
and international contracts.
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