Ending long-run speculation, Steve Jobs has announced today that the Apple iPhone is here.  Where do I get one?  Read more at Engadget.

UPDATE: Baris, who was there in person, agrees, and provides a nice summary.

Webrazzi author Arda Kutsal’s looking for software engineers and designers for a new Web 2.0 project.  Details in Turkish at Arda’s blog.

Emre Baran has announced a new service he’s created (by using Google’s Custom Search Service, it looks like): Teneke.com searches all available news sources in Turkey for Turkey.

A first try yielded a decently accurate set of results.  Congratulations, Emre.

There’s a well known story about Chevy’s introduction of Nova in Mexico, where the name means "no go".  I must have heard about it ten times in the importance of local insight in business context.  With the global nature of the Internet, there must be a ton of new similar anecdotes.

A good friend of mine, who’s Turkish, is an academic in the US.  He recently admitted that when he first started receiving LinkedIn invitations, almost exclusively from Turkish friends and colleagues, he assumed it was a Turkish company.  His reason:  "Link Edin", in Turkish, means "get connected".

UPDATE: Seth Godin, in a post, comments that the story about Nova is not accurate – that Nova tanked because it was a lousy car.  I am sure he’s right.

Om reported this week that Jobster is going through a tough period.

Jobster, a Seattle-based job-focused vertical search engine, is mulling
a big round of layoffs and may cut up to half of its 145-strong
workforce, according to sources familiar with the company’s plans.

According to John Cook, the issue is a quest towards profitability.

Goldberg (CS: Jobster’s CEO) uses the words profitable or profitability half a dozen
times in the memos, saying at one point that "we are committed to
building a profitable company in 2007." He adds that "official news"
will be released in the new year and asks employees to "please try to
stay as focused as possible."

The interesting part of this news is that it highlights the lack of success stories in Jobs 2.0.  The Ladders, seems to be kicking butt in the $100K+ area, and I hear Accolo is doing well, too.  But, there has not been a serious challenge to the reigns of Monster.com and Hotjobs.  Jobster, Indeed or SimplyHired are not wowing people the way many expected them to.  I’d say the biggest careers story is Craigslist, but we all know their semi-business ways.

I must say I am surprised.  However, the social side of the careers marketplace has not been fully explored yet.  I expect a player in 2007 to make a lot of noise by taking some well explored Web2.0 tricks strongly into the jobs area.

I would bet that LinkedIn is pleasantly surprised by its jobs-related revenues.

MarketWatch’s Bambi Francisco has a revealing article on a new round of financing LinkedIn has raised.  After the OpenBC/Xing IPO, the $250m figure is not surprising.  However, Bambi has dug deep to bring some numbers to the surface at LinkedIn:

Today, Linkedin has 70 employees and estimates to be a year behind
popular social network Facebook in generating sales, according to
Rabois. That means Linkedin is set to generate between $45 million and
$60 million next year. Linkedin CEO Reid Hoffman boldly predicts the
company will hit $100 million in 2008.
…
Today, it has 8.5 million members, with 30% to 40% active users. It’s
the No. 23 top social network site, with 1.5 million unique visitors
and 36 million pageviews, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.
….
Linkedin has three revenue streams today —
sponsorships, subscriptions to scour and contact Linkedin’s 8.5 million
membership base, and job listings. About 45% of the revenue comes from
subscriptions, according to Rabois. Corporations, such as Microsoft and
Salesforce, pay between $10,000 and $100,000 annually to let their
internal recruiting staff use Linkedin’s database for potential hires.

Individuals also pay $20 per month to
be able to contact people outside their network, but those paying
subscribers are 1% to 2% of the members who enjoy the service for free.

I have been receiving LinkedIn invitations from Europe lately, so it looks like there’s a big push there.  I think we’ll continue to hear about growth at LinkedIn, and this round will seem relatively cheap soon.

OP-IM is looking for Technical Project Managers and Software Engineers in Istanbul.

In a comment, Alfonso von Wunschheim brings a welcome explanation to the confusion around how much OpenBC intended to raise.  Thanks, Alfonso.

The rumored 100Mio are based on the fact that they announced to
float 2’509’049 shares at 30-38 euro range, which make 75-100Mio, they
finally went public at 30 and as the greenshoe of 327’268 and 831’781
other shares went to former shareholders, only the remaining 1’350’000
went to the company representing 35Mio.

Why this?
You need to float 100Mio to justify a prime standard quotation in
Frankfurt, and if you don’t need that much money and/or you do not want
dilute some shareholders (the founders!?) too much you sell some
investor shares instead…
source:
http://www.dgap.de/link.php?plugin=db_anzeige&id=75088&b

Ending a cuirous wait for me, OpenBC/Xing is now listed, with a market cap of about 157MM Euros.  They raised 35MM Euros, falling short of the once rumored 100MM mark, but very impressive nevertheless.  Congratulations to all involved.

I now have my eyes on LinkedIn, whose revenue numbers indicated in Business2.0 are eye popping.

R/WW has an early review of hakia and its semantic search endeavor.  At the end, Alex Iskold answers the fundamental question that’s on everyone’s mind:

Will Hakia beat Google? Hakia itself
has no answer, but my answer at this point is no. This current version is not exciting
enough and the resulting search set is not obviously better. So it’s a long shot that
they’ll beat Google in search. I think if Hakia presented one single answer for each
query, with the ability to drill down, it might catch more attention. But again, this is
a long shot.

I still think it’s too early to call the game in the case of hakia.  As Melek notes in the comments, they are continuously improving.  Also, this kind of attention from the digiterati can not hurt.