Exclusive: LinkedIn Has Bought Contact Management Start-Up Connected
LinkedIn has acquired Connected, a small contact management start-up that unifies and dynamically updates users’ connections on email, social networks, calendars and phones, according to sources close to the company.
Connected is similar to Xobni/Smartr, but it’s more of a dashboard than a plug-in, and it costs $9.99 per month. The company had raised a seed round of $500,000 led by Trinity Ventures in June. The service has been called “bloody awesome” by Tim O’Reilly.
Connected, which should announce the acquisition later today, consists of the husband-and-wife team of Sachin and Ada Chen Rekhi, who will both be joining LinkedIn. Sachin was previously co-founder of Anywhere.FM, which was acquired by IMEEM, while Ada was director of product at Mochi Media, which was acquired by Shanda Games.
In an email thread last month, I’d asked Sachin to suggest some Connected features that I should check out. Here was his reply:
-Try the search drop-down to find specific people in your network by name, company, title, or location. Curious if anyone in your network works at a new startup? Just do a search by Company which will find all relevant contacts across email, social networks, and address books.
-Click on a given contact to drill into their contact profile. From there you can take notes on the contact, annotate who introduced you, and set contact reminders that will automatically notify you when a certain amount of time has passed since you last contacted them.
-Search for a contact that is not already in your network. Say a new startup founder. If the person is not already in your network, Connected will search across LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter for that person. If one of the resulting search results is the person you are looking for, just press “Create” next to their profile and Connected will automatically create a profile with all their public profile data (without having to connect with them). Once you are in the profile, you can also press “Bookmark” next to their other appropriate social profiles and that data will also be pulled in. This is how I was able to create a comprehensive profile for you.
-In addition to the above functionality, there are a set of relationship management apps that try to make this data useful to you on a day-to-day basis. You can explore those apps here: http://connectedhq.com/apps/overview/