The reason for my slower posting lately is the upcoming launch of Mondus, a new web service for the Turkish market.  It’s been great getting immersed in the pre-launch crunch and we are looking forward to launching next week.

I will be making a presentation on Mondus at the upcoming Mobile Monday meeting on February 5th, at 6pm.  The topic of the day is Web 2.0 and I am sure it will be a very interesting event.  If you’d like to attend, and have not received an Evite, please let me know.

Just as I am whining about the lack of an impressive move in the careers space, utilizing the well-proven social networking utilities, here comes the rumor, reported by Om, that Jobster and Facebook may be contemplating an exclusive partnership.

This is one to watch.  If Zuckerberg wants to prove that he was right in turning down the rumored offers, this is an area he can not ignore.

LinkedIn’s new round is covered in VentureBeat today, verifying the previous rumors.

LinkedIn, the networking site for professionals connect, has raised $12.8 million in venture funding.

The venture capitalists, Silicon Valley’s Bessemer Venture Partners
and the European Founders Fund (EFF), an internet focused firm, placed
a value of more than $250 million on the Palo Alto company, after the
investment.

I think it’s an impressive valuation.  However, the more interesting number is the 100,000 new members per week.  That’s 5m per year and suggests a >60% growth rate.

EFF’s participation is also noteworthy.  On the heels of Xing/OpenBC’s successful IPO, LinkedIn is signaling that it will agressively push into Europe.

The February meeting of Mobile Monday Istanbul is coming up.

When:  February 5, 2007 at 18:00
Where: Ericsson Mobility World (directions)

I think the topic this month is especially relevant for the readers of this blog.  Alemsah Ozturk and Arda Kutsal will have an interactive presentation on Web 2.0, highlighting developments in the world and how they affect the internet in Turkey.

This month I am one of the presenters. I will introduce Mondus, our stealth(!) project that is launching as a brand new web service.

Let me know if you’d like to attend.

The assertation that content/information wants to be free is frequently mentioned on this blog.  Now (via Fred) comes the big news that,

at least one of the four major record companies could move toward the
sale of unrestricted digital files in the MP3 format within months.

This is a very significant step towards the edge by an entertainment company.  I think it’s obvious that the other labels would follow.  Apple must be pissed.  As usual, the winner is the consumer.

Jon Udell (via Paul) touches on a point very close to my heart:

…I was struck by how hard it is for the benefits people to explain their offerings.
…
Benefits people and coworkers often won’t be in a position to meet that
need. But a social application that matched up employees in similar
life circumstances could be a great way to transfer highly particular
kinds of benefits knowledge.

Employee benefits communications, in fact the entire onboarding process at corporations, can be tremendously streamlined, and the lives of the subjects enhanced, by applying very basic social networking and knowledge sharing tenets.  At SelectMinds, we spent a lot of time communicating this issue to our clients, and the resulting SelectMinds Employee Onboarding Program is a great example of what can be achieved.

Emre Sokullu, as a guest blogger on Read/Write Web, has a thorough look at Yahoo’s recent acquisitions, and concludes:

Yahoo’s latest acquisitions are cheap and smart. In effect the Peanut Butter manifesto
is actually the new de-portalization strategy. However, although it’s good not to kill
brands (but keep them as separate entities and don’t touch the soul that brought them
success) Yahoo could be faster in getting the advantages of having so many related
products. For instance, del.icio.us and Yahoo Search, or Jumpcut and Yahoo Video – these
really should have been brought together already.

I think Yahoo’s been very opportunistic, and I am not sure that I follow the overall strategy here.  I agree with Emre that there’s the de-portalization, but outside of that, I see no overarching pattern.  I can imagine that the corp dev folks at Yahoo are nervous to make bold moves, with Wall Street eager to pick Google as the winner of the internet wars.