Pulse.ME joins LinkedIn as a “Particularly Great Fit”
Editor’s note: Since writing this article, Pulse.ME has ceased to operate. This post remains as part of their legacy. However, you can read our story about a similar .MEr here.
We love it when websites from our .ME Family become successful! We share their joy and we feel proud. We were proud of Pulse.ME‘s success in the App Store and the recent news has not surprised us!
From our .ME Family to LinkedIn Family
Linked.In bought Pulse.ME for a whooping $90 million! Pulse.ME is an app that collects news articles from a range of topics chosen by users and presents them in a clean, stylish format. More than 10 million stories daily are read via this application.
LinkedIn believes it can be the definitive professional publishing platform – where all professionals come to consume content and where publishers come to share their content. On their blog they explained how Pulse complements this vision:
Pulse’s core value proposition is to help foster informed discussions that spark the decisions shaping the world around us through news and information. This shared view that the power of professional information and knowledge can transform lives and the world makes LinkedIn and Pulse a particularly great fit.
From Solving Frustrations to Successful Business
Pulse.ME started in 2010, as a class project at Stanford’s d.school. The founders were motivated by their own frustrations with mobile news reading: they wanted an effortless experience, with clean design and easy access to all of our favorite sources. In three years the app became successful and the Pulse team found itself joining a much larger family. Here is how they comment this big next step:
[LinkedIn] shares our passions and values, our belief in the power of knowledge and elevated discussion, particularly for professionals looking for insights to help make them better at what they do. We believe this important step is the key to an even better experience for our community, and we’re excited for what’s to come.
LinkedIn’s Big Plans for 2013
Over 200 million people use LinkedIn and Mike Isaac from AllthingsD describes “Engagement” as LinkedIn’s key theme for 2013. The website is, he says, going through multiple design revamps across user pages and the company’s profitable recruiting products.
LinkedIn is trying to escape its image as a one-off, sparingly used online resume service. It wants to be the home page for professionals, including the place where those pros go to catch up on the biz news they care about.
So a service like Pulse, which lets a company know exactly what sort of stuff its users want to read and care about, is likely pretty valuable to what LinkedIn is trying to do.
If your daily dose of news if valuable to you, you should download Pulse for iOS and Android and give it a try. It’s obviously well worth it!
