Seth Yates

That’s the best way I can think of to describe this video….FAIL!!!

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A small storm rolled through Sydney’s Inner West this afternoon. Some brief rain, but fantastic looking scenery:

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As covered by TechCrunch, LinkedIn has added a Company Profiles feature. This feature shows detailed information about companies, including data from Capital IQ, Business Week as well as information discovered from its own database.

Information includes:

• Summary description
• Employees
• New hires
• Recent promotions and changes
• Popular profiles
• Related companies (career path before and after)
• Top locations
• Common job titles
• Top schools
• Median age
• Median tenure
• Gender

Its pretty impressive what they’ve been able to pull together from their database. Here’s a sampling on interesting info from the Fairfax Digital company profile page:

Fairfax Digital is an online publisher that focuses on areas including news and classifieds and city search directories [ed. not since 2002 when we sold CitySearch]. The company operates Internet portals such as the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Australian Financial Review [ed. operated by Fairfax Business Media], mycareer.com.au, drive.com.au and domain.com.au. Fairfax Digital was formerly known as F2 Network. The company is based in Sydney, Australia…. see more Fairfax Digital operates as a subsidiary of John Fairfax Holdings [ed. now called Fairfax Media].

Mostly right, but looks to be based on information that several years old.

Popular Profiles

• Ed Schmidt, Director of Operations - Southern Cross View
• Seth Yates, Chief Technology Officer
• Jack Matthews, CEO
• Nikhil Jain, Online Marketing Manager - RSVP
• pippa leary, Product and Marketing Director

Related Companies
Divisions

• Fairfax Media
• The Age

OK, so they got that wrong, Fairfax Media (the parent company) and The Age (a sister subsidiary) aren’t divisions of Fairfax Digital. Sure we can get it fixed up.

Here’s where it gets interesting:

Career path for Fairfax Digital employees before:

• News Corporation
• Sensis
• IBM
• Telstra
• ninemsn

Career path for Fairfax Digital employees after:

• News Corporation
• ninemsn
• BBC Worldwide
• Optus

So there’s a lot of two-way traffic between Fairfax and News Corp and ninemsn. But it looks like once you’ve left Telstra/Sensis, there’s no going back.

Fairfax Digital employees are most connected to

• Myca
• News Corporation
• realestate.com.au
• Sensis MediaSmart

Looks like LinkedIn has misinterpreted “MyCareer” / mycareer.com.au (one of our business units) as Myca, which is a startup hedge fund in New York. Again, probably easily fixed.

Key Statistics

Top Locations

• Sydney Area, Australia (300)
• Melbourne Area, Australia (62)

Industry: Online Media
Type: Public Company
Status: Operating Subsidiary
Company Size: 1001-5000 employees [ed., that's the size of Fairfax Media]
Website: www.fairfaxdigital.com.au

Median Age: 30 years
Median Tenure: 2 years
Male: 58%
Female: 42%

Common Job Titles
Business Development Manager 7%
Web Developer 6%
Account Manager 6%
Journalist 4%
Developer 3%
Top Schools
Univ. of New South Wales 10%
Univ. of Sydney 10%
Univ. of Tech., Sydney 9%
Queensland Univ. of Tech. 4%
Royal Melbourne Inst. of Tech. 4%

Its interesting to have a look through the company profiles of companies in the industry and see the similarities and differences (e.g., most other media companies I browsed was 62% Male / 38% Female according to LinkedIn).  Although they have some work to do on getting the data more accurate (and they are apparently going to “wikify” the profiles to let employees edit the data), this is a great start.

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Sandra Hanchard has shared some interesting research on the Kiwi Webosphere, with her key takeaways being:

• News & Media – 6.7% share of visits
• Portal Frontpages – 5.78% share of visits
• Travel – 2.67% share of visits
• Shopping & Classifieds – 7.18% share of visits

My key take aways were:

• How dumb are Telecom feeling now? One year ago, Telecom split from a JV xtramsn.co.nz with Microsoft and relaunched a new portal offering with Yahoo!7 in which both parties were panned for poor sites. One year on and MSN.co.nz has a commanding 38.31% share of visits, and Yahoo!xtra a paltry 15.98%. Go from owning 50% of the leading portal to owning 50% of the #2 portal with half the traffic. FTW!

• Shock: TradeMe leading in Shopping & Classifieds. Real shock: Category higher than in Oz. Shopping & Classifieds sites accounted for 7.18% market share of visits in NZ compared to an underweight 5.73% in Australia. Can this be accounted for by the concentration/network effect on TradeMe NZ (general, cars, property, jobs) and the fragmentation (in the big end of town: ebay, trading post, carsales/carpoint, carsguide/drive, seek, mycareer, careerone, realestate, domain, myhome, etc, etc, etc) in Australia? Or are Kiwis just bigger (online) shoppers than Aussies?

Disclosure: I am employed by Fairfax Media, who own TradeMe in New Zealand.

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The Age had a report today stating that “Fairfax online a threat to WAN: Seven“.

Disclosure: I am employed by Fairfax Media.

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Choice, bro:

Stumbled across this and just had to share, eh…

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Thanks to Scott Savage for pointing out that the CAPTCHA image on my comment form was jiggered.  All fixed up now.

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Apparently, by most accounts…yeah.  Brad Howarth offers his reasons for thinking that we (they?) do in Australian Anthill - Why do Australians suck at pitching?.  Its a good read, so head on over, but his main reaons are:

• We are not trained to present.
• We are shy.
• We do not do enough research on the audience.
• We forget what we are doing.
• We do not understand brevity.
• We have no idea what we are doing anyway.

Having been on the receiving end of several web entrepreneur pitches over the last 5 or so years, I can relate to all of his points.  One particular example came to mind:  This entrepreneur pretty much ticked every box above. He came in and insisted that we sit while he read prepared notes (no slides, no eye contact, no rapport), starting with a recounting of our company and where we were positioned in the market. At least he got most of his facts right ;-)  I let him get a good two minutes into his shpiel before asking him to please get to the point. Poor guy.

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I recently tweeted:

sethyates linkedin UI sucks on a mobile - both mobile ui and web ui 03:09 PM March 15, 2008 from web

Steve Ganz (from LinkedIn) promptly replied:

steveganz @sethyates, what can we do to make it better? 09:10 PM March 14, 2008 from im in reply to sethyates

BTW - looks like the timestamps in Twitter are local to the sending user (I’m in Australia, he’s in California), hence why he replied to me before I tweeted

Well, a proper response wouldn’t fit into a 140 character tweet, so here goes in a blog post:

First, I use LinkedIn quite often and would love to use it on my BlackBerry Pearl when on the road/away from the laptop, but the UI when rendered on a mobile (either using www.linkedin.com or m.linkedin.com) just doesn’t do it for me. These improvements would help me and fit my use case, maybe they wouldn’t fit the majority cases. Disclaimer over, here’s my list:

mobile UI (m.linkedin.com)

1. The home page (after logging in) is simply a Search box. Now, the time I spend searching in LinkedIn is rather limited so this isn’t really an appropriate home screen. Here’s what I want to see here: let me set my status (”What are you working on?”, contacts’ status updates and inbox/action items (Invitations, Accepted Invitations, Recommendation requests, In Mail, etc). It’d also be nice to know some of the connection stats from the www home page (# connections, network size, new people in network since X date, # views of profile, etc).
2. I manage a group that gets several new member requests a day. There’s no way to manage the group using this UI.
3. The contacts page only has next/previous, and starts on A-C surnames. If I want to get the contact details of a Contact with a surname starting with M-O, I’m many clicks away. Add a quicker way for me to get to another page. Move the Search box from the home page here.
4. Once I’ve found a contact, you don’t display their contact details like you do on the www UI. Sometimes I just want to grab their email address (yes I know you have “Send a Message”, but often I want to contact them from my email account directly).
5. On the contact’s profile, perhaps start out showing an abbreviated experience listing (e.g., don’t show details - I often don’t need to see that and am happy to click again if I want to see the experience details).

Web UI on the mobile (www.linkedin.com)

1. Only one comment really: its just a jumble. This is a result of the BB not rendering the stylesheet. To see what it looks like in your browser, run up Firefox with the Web Developer toolbar and disable CSS. Luckily there’s “Skip to content” near the top, because the top several pages is just the menu in list format.

With these tweaks in place, I reckon the LinkedIn Mobile UI would be the ducks nuts.

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Last year, Sydney turned off for Earth Hour. This year, Earth Hour goes global from Sydney. At 8pm on 29 March 2008 millions of people in some of the world’s major capital cities, including Copenhagen, Toronto, Chicago, Melbourne, Brisbane and Tel Aviv will unite and switch off for Earth Hour.

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