Germany’s Earlybird Venture Capital is on a roll. They’ve just moved operations to Berlin (PDF), raised $100 million for their new fund – target size $200 million – and a number of portfolio companies are doing very well (case in point: madvertise).

Today, the company is announcing that Konstantin Guericke, a co-founder and former VP of Marketing of business social network LinkedIn, is joining the firm as a US-based venture partner. Fun fact: he was born and raised in Germany.

Guericke, who left LinkedIn at the end of 2006 to become CEO of VoIP company Jaxtr, will help Earlybird’s European portfolio companies break into the US market and also look for new investment opportunities stateside.

In a statement, Guericke says he’s long been interested in supporting German entrepreneurial ventures “that are not copycats but have the potential to be a success on a worldwide scale”.

Guericke’s biggest assets are his experience and, of course, his many connections on LinkedIn (couldn’t resist, and it’s funny because it’s true).

He currently serves on the boards of several startups (including StartX and Doximity) and mentors student entrepreneurs at Stanford University, where he graduated with a B.S. and M.S. in engineering.

LinkedIn was one of the major social networks without a native Windows Phone app. The company, which boasts over 161 million members worldwide, managed to keep the file size of the app to below 1MB and the price at zero dollars.

It makes fantastic use of WP’s Metro UI and live tiles capabilities, and the app is super responsive, though I’ve also encountered a few bugs already.

For instance, it keeps telling me my Internet connection is unavailable, though I can visit everything on the app just fine. Scrolling lists also feels a bit quirky at times.

The app is getting mostly rave reviews on the Windows Phone Marketplace, however, so don’t hesitate to check it out for yourself if you’re a user.

➤ LinkedIn for Windows Phone

LinkedIn is arguably the most underrated of all major social networks. Its focus on professional networking means it isn’t likely a place for your LOL Cats, Instagrams from your recent holiday or videos you just checked out, but business networking is hugely important, if not entirely glamorous.

The fact that LinkedIn has grown into a business catalogue with 150 millions members, with representatives from hundreds of thousands of companies searchable, enables very focused networks of contacts to be developed. Added to that, it often throws up interesting contacts-of-contacts, making it a goldmine of potential new connections for whatever line of business you’re in; especially as ‘friending’ someone you don’t know is par-for-the-course.

That said, there is always a slight disconnect from the service. Social discovery — the art of finding new content and people using other services and data like location — is becoming standard in most social networks and I’d love LinkedIn to be closer integrated to my own activity, such as events – particularly given my penchant for misplacing the business cards that I tend to accumulate in large numbers.

One potential solution is Beepmo, a location-based mobile app that piggy-backs LinkedIn to make connecting with new people as easy as checking into Foursquare. Heralding Beepmo as the answer to my lost business cards is massively underselling its proposition, however, as social discovery is very much at the heart of this service.

Beepmo launched in beta on February 1 this year and, in essence, it allows LinkedIn users to discover other users of the business social network and upcoming events in their area. That’s a distance of up to 100 kilometres away from your device, thanks to data from mobile networks.

Users that download the app are prompted to log-in using their LinkedIn account — details of which are used to populate their Beepmo profile — and, once a mobile number (which can be kept private) is entered, the service is off and away.

Built with Asia in mind

Beepmo is designed for the growing professional social networking scene in Southeast Asia, India and Australia, Simon Lower, co-founder of Greencloud Labs, the Betaworks-inspired incubator behind Beepmo, told The Next Web.

Generally speaking, Asians are less inclined to ice-break with new people, compared to those in the US and Europe, but yet they are comfortable putting their details online and connecting via cyberspace, Lower explains.

Events are a key focus for Beepmo, and Singapore-based Lower believes it can make networking more productive and interactive for the 15 million plus LinkedIn members in Asia.

“Beepmo is built with Southeast Asia in mind,” outlines Lower, who was a founder of Soundbuzz, the mobile startup acquired by Motorola in 2008 but since shuttered. “The idea came about from talking to event and conference organisers about networking and how business people in the region connect.”

Equally, the fact that the service is mobile-only is another facet that draws inspiration from Asia. While the mobile Web is a more social experience in the West, thanks to apps and the growth of mobile social networking, it is the primary (or, for some, only) access point for many keen social network users in Asia.

Furthermore, with no service established as the de facto LinkedIn-like service for mobile, Lower and his Greencloud Labs partner Mark White saw a huge possibility.

“LinkedIn tends to be a Web-centric experience,” Lower says, “which gives us an opportunity to become a professional social network that sits on mobile.”

Addressing a gap in the market

While location-based services have surged across the world, and particularly in Southeast Asia and the continent as a whole, business services have been largely overlooked in favour of consumer-targeting services, according to Lower.

“There’s no existing tool or service that allows professional online network users to connect by location,” he says, “instead it tends to be piecemeal.”

Greencloud Labs has no intention of launching a standalone social network, but it is instead aiming to bring services together and provide additional functionality and options on top.

“We had the idea for Beepmo a few years ago but it is only feasible now with rise of LinkedIn, Facebook and others. These act as the backbone of the professional presence, with Beepmo is the utility.”

As well as finding new contacts, Beepmo is an event-centric service that allows users to discover upcoming events in their area using data from LinkedIn.

Going behind LinkedIn to break the ice

The service was originally solely devoted to serving LinkedIn but support for Twitter and Facebook has been added to provide a richer experience and more context.

While the user experience is still focused on the professional social network, and to that point a LinkedIn account is require in order to use Beepmo, it uses details from Twitter and Facebook accounts to “help show things in common” with other users.

While Twitter is commonly used for a mixture of business and personal content, Facebook may not seem like an obvious addition for a Beepmo. However, it’s addition is again related to Asia where there is “less separation between personal professional on Facebook”, Lower explains.

The calculation of common interests from the aggregation of other social networks serves as ammunition to help establish common ground between users — through the service’s ‘Ice Breaker’ feature — and other services may be considered in the future to help aid discovery.

“We’re also opening up to other social networks,” Lower reveals, ” as our value does depend on multiple integrations across all social networks.”

Bringing social discovery to business networks

Lower believes that social discovery is a huge new frontier for the online space, with business usage is particularly important.

“Social discovery apps have huge amounts of potential as social networking is evolving from connecting with those you know, to meeting new people. We can see this coming already with the next wave of services, such as Highlight.”

While Lower draws a comparison with popular consumer services, he further emphasises that the focus of Beepmo is to serve professional social network users.

“Our app is in the social discovery space, but we have a clear context: helping those in the professional space to expand their networks and meet new people.”

“Overwhelming” initial response

With just an iPhone app available to date, aiming to build a presence in a region dominated by Android and RIM’s BlackBerry smartphones is simply not possible, and plans are afoot to expand its support.

Apps for Android and BlackBerry are due within the next month and, with those two big platforms supported, Beepmo is putting itself out to a much larger audience in its target market and can expect to see further growth.

Lower says they have been “overwhelmed” by the interest its received since launching on February 1. He further reveals that it has helped facilitate more than 3,000 new connections during its first two months.

The app is seeing “massive amounts if interest” in Indonesia, where LinkedIn recently passed 1 million members. LinkedIn is growing faster there than Facebook, which has a colossal 43 million registered members in the country, which demonstrate that professional social networking is just dipping its toes there.

Though it is targeted at Asia, Beepmo is seeing an encouraging level of usage in Western markets. That’s impressive considering that all growth outside of Asia is purely organic, with no investment or focus from Greencloud Labs, for now.

Future plans and monetisation

Aside from the upcoming mobile expansion plans, Beepmo is zoning in on possible revenue generation options, although it is currently focused on scaling its userbase and activity levels.

When it comes to monetisation, the events sector is one area where Lower believes it can make a big difference, helping participants to network and interact and event organisers to better disseminate and manage the flow of information.

While the app will remain free to users, the next phase of its development will see the introduction of Beepmo’s dedicated event platform to cater for organisers with a greater level of functionality.

The upcoming platform will allow show organisers to distribute the app to participants, and specifically promote the events across the Beepmo userbase, and distribute content through it. Following the close of events, organisers will be able to grab analytical data of how Beepmo contributed to their event, which could provide  interesting indicators for future planning and more.

However, further specialised options and customisation could become available ‘power users’, with Lower saying that there is the possibility of introducing premium service for users that seek “more active ways to network.”

Lower also says that they may look to cater for organisations that seek enterprise options of Beepmo.

Conclusion: A more social LinkedIn ideal for a business trip or event

Beepmo is an alternative method for making the most of the growing data and people stored on LinkedIn.

So, if you are looking to increase your contacts on LinkedIn, Beepmo is certainly worth a look, particularly if you live in a busy Asian city like Singapore or Hong Kong, where thousands of potential new contacts are clustered together.

In other less obvious business markets, where there are lower LinkedIn member numbers, it will be interesting to see how Beepmo markets itself. There is an option to invite LinkedIn users to join but, with a focus on discovery, hitting up a few hundred existing contacts with a well-meaning (but ultimately spam-like) message may sit well with everyone.

However, LinkedIn continues to grow strongly across Asia (and other markets) thanks to a focus on internationalising its service, which puts Beepmo in a position to ride the wave and grow its own userbase as professional social networking continues to rise in Asia.

The app is one a few that is bringing something unique to the LinkedIn experience and, for that reason, it will keep its spot on my phone. I’m particularly looking forward to seeing its value the next time that I’m in a foreign country, unfamiliar city or at a networking event.

➤ Beepmo | App Store

Popular companies who have set up a page on professional networking site LinkedIn know how powerful it is to be able to share updates to all of its followers, which is very similar to Twitter and Facebook functionality. If you have some interesting news to share about a new product, you can simply blast it out to everyone that’s following you.

That “blasting out” is the process that most of us are used to when we’re using social tools like this, but LinkedIn has made some tweaks that allow you to target your audience with specific messages that should result in better interaction.

This is actually a genius feature, especially when you think about how little people engage with messages that they know weren’t meant for them. The best example is when a company sends out an email blast that isn’t tailored to your tastes at all. You know it’s meant for everyone, so you kind of glaze over the message, if you open it at all.

Since LinkedIn has access to a ton of data points, the company is putting its massive database to good use with this new update targeting feature. Here’s a video explanation of what a company could do with targeting:

The byproduct of this is that companies can now send out more updates without worrying about flooding all of its followers with content.

If Google were to want to attract a specific audience, or build a better relationship with graphic designers, it could post an update about its latest Google Doodle and pick all of the targeting criteria it wants to make sure that the update gets to the right people, and doesn’t bother the rest of us.

The feature is available now for everyone who administrates a company page on LinkedIn, and this is something that I’d love to be able to use on Facebook or Google+. Setting up a list without being able to access variables of information, like location, makes the manual process a pain in the ass.

For most people, online social networking in a purely professional context is almost synonymous to ‘using LinkedIn‘, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only business social network in town. Many countries have local networking sites for professionals, and a handful of companies are trying to compete with LinkedIn on a global level, including XING and Viadeo.

The latter was started in France back in 2004, but has expanded to other countries – mostly by acquisition – over the past few years, and has managed to attract over 45 million registered users to date.

For the record, that’s still a far cry from the more than 150 million members (in over 200 countries and territories) claimed by LinkedIn.

But Viadeo says 1 million new members join the online business network every month, so it’s not that it’s not seeing growth. The company claims over 3 million profiles are viewed, and 150,000 new connections made, on Viadeo every day.

Today, Viadeo is announcing a $32 million round of funding to boost growth in more regions across the globe, particularly in Europe and emerging markets like China (with Tianji.com as its local brand), Latin America, India, Africa and, from last December, Russia.

Viadeo has confirmed that one third of the funds (more than $10 million) will be given to Tianji itself. Viadeo’s arm in China is performing well, with 10 million members to date, and the revenue will help it develop towards the 100 million member target it is aiming to reach by 2013.

The $32 million round of financing comes from the French Sovereign Fund, the ‘Fonds Stratégique d’Investissement’, existing institutional shareholders and apool of new investors including Allianz, Jefferies and Middle Eastern private funds.

It’s straight-up growth capital, as Viadeo claims to have been profitable since early September 2009, so it didn’t necessarily ‘need’ the cash infusion.

Viadeo, which employs 310 staff worldwide, says its strength lies in approaching new markets not just by translating the site but with a focus on “leveraging and honoring the local language, business and culture of its members”.

The service is currently available in Mandarin, English, French, Russian, Italian, Spanish, German, and Portuguese.

Image Credit / wfabry

Globant, a massive Argentinian software development, IT services and maintenance outsourcing company serving customers all over the globe, this morning announced a major addition to its board of advisors.

Serial entrepreneur, startup investor and author Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, will be sharing his knowledge with the Latin-American IT giant, which counts companies like Zynga, Google and JWT among its customers.

According to press release issued earlier this morning, Hoffman comes to Globant following a recent $2 million capital injection in the company by the not-for-profit Endeavor Foundation‘s Catalyst Program, of which the affable American businessman is a Board Director.

That’s not the only connection, by the way: Globant develops LinkedIn’s mobile applications for Android and iPhone, and is also responsible for the implementation of the OpenSocial framework to integrate applications with the professional networking service.

Globant says it runs a network of more than 2,500 software engineers, developers and designers based in 15 locations across Latin America and the US.

In August 2011, the company acquired Silicon Valley-based mobile and social applications developer Nextive for an undisclosed sum after raising $15 million in funding earlier that year.

Hoffman currently serves on the boards of Airbnb, Edmodo, Mozilla, Shopkick, Swipely, and Zynga. He has co-led investments in Coupons.com, Groupon, and Viki.

This year will be forever remembered as the year that we lost the most creative mind that Silicon Valley has ever seen, as well as one where a few rough Tech IPOs scared away potential future investors. We also said goodbye to some CEOs and tech founders, and Facebook stayed in the social networking driver’s seat.

Lets get into the year that was in Silicon Valley.

Steve Jobs

What can we say about Steve Jobs that hasn’t already been said? The founder and most memorable leader of Apple resigned as CEO in August, making way for the Tim Cook era. In his resignation letter, Jobs didn’t give an actual reason for leaving Apple, but suggested that Apple move on with its succession plan:

To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community:

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

Many assumed that the reason for Jobs stepping down was his failing health, and unfortunately that turned out to be the case when he passed away on October 6th. As a Silicon Valley icon, Steve Jobs brought Apple back to life, which launched the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 this year, showing that hard work and determination can indeed pay off. Even after his death, Jobs continued to make headlines, with his biography shattering records and topping charts.

Read all about Apple’s entire 2011 in our rewind.

IPOs

2011 was a big year for going public in the tech space. With much of the year being filled with rumblings about whether Facebook would go public or not, four other companies took the huge step of going for the IPO.

Here’s a timeline of big-name 2011 IPO filings:

• January: LinkedIn found a way to make money, so the time came to go public.
• February: Pandora went from nearly being toast, to becoming to the toast of tech.
• June: Groupon took the world by storm with its group buying model, but is the sizzle gone?
• July: Zynga relies heavily on Facebook for its revenue and game players, but that didn’t stop them from going for the IPO hailmary.

Unfortunately, most of these public offerings ended up tanking, but that shouldn’t stop companies from taking the leap next year.

Facebook and Yelp are the two companies to watch out for in IPO land next year.

Silicon Shuffles

A few major notable founders and CEOs left or were booted from their positions in 2011. Some of them included companies that were synonymous with “Web 2.0″, which was the beginning of the social web.

In March, Kevin Rose decided to resign from the company he started in 2004, Digg. After a short stint as CEO of the company in 2010, Rose decided to give the big goodbye to Digg this year. In many ways, Kevin Rose was a symbol of how cool it was to be an Internet entrepreneur, serving as a way more social and popular version of Mark Zuckerberg. His resignation came after an unsuccessful attempt to revive Digg’s community with a new version that everyone ended up hating. Don’t worry about Rose, he got funding for his new startup, Milk.

In September, Carol Bartz was fired as CEO of Yahoo!, over the phone no less. With Yahoo! seemingly having no leadership or direction, the rest of the year was filled with speculation on when Yahoo! would sell, and who it would sell to. Some of the names thrown around? Google, Microsoft, Aol, and Alibaba. No sale yet, and don’t hold your breath in 2012.

HP, which Steve Jobs had noted was “being dismembered, destroyed” fired its CEO this year, Leo Apotheker. However, Apotheker’s tenure didn’t even last a year and was replaced by former eBay CEO Meg Whitman.

But it wasn’t all about high profile departures, as Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey came back to the company in March to split time as an adviser as well as CEO of his Valley startup Square, putting 8 hour days in at both companies.

Facebook gets competition, remains king of social

The existence of a Google social network had been rumored for years, but this year we finally got to see what the company had come up with. In a huge direction change for the company, Google has decided to go all-in with social by launching Google+. In doing that, it shut down previous social failure Google Buzz.

Even though Google+ shows strong growth, Facebook remained the king of social in 2011. The company told us that they had 800 million users, but what was more impressive, it had 500 million users on the site at once.

Facebook didn’t stand pat amidst numerous privacy issues and launched numerous new features this year including Timeline. But what made Facebook the real king of Silicon Valley in 2011? The fact that it could bank 1 billion dollars in net revenue this year. Growth in users is one thing, features are another, but bringing in that type of bank puts it light-years ahead of Valley darlings like Twitter.

These are the stories that in one way or another narrated the entire year of innovation in 2011 on the left coast. What were your most memorable moments in Silicon Valley this year? Share them in the comments!

Geekli.st, the social network for developers and engineers, has launched a cool integration with code repository site GitHub.

The new feature allows users to send a new achievement to the Geekli.st site along with the superstar code that you just checked in. If you’ve pushed something awesome, it’s worth telling people about. This integration makes it super simple.

Geekli.st has become a way for developers to interact with each other and share their technical achievements. It’s extremely difficult for developers to maintain a resume, since their best work is usually quite granular and rarely gets attention from recruiters.

Here’s what your profile on Geekli.st will look like when you publish an achievement at the same time you push code to GitHub:

In the video below, Geekli.st shows you how to integrate GitHub into your social experience on the site:

While LinkedIn has become the popular place for business networking, it really doesn’t cater to engineers and developers in the way that Geekli.st does. As it adds more features, Geekli.st has a shot to be the go-to place for the merit based developer resume.

Companies are looking to the site to find very specific talents, and the more achievements that a developer publishes, the more attention that they’ll get by way of high-fives and shares. Smart.

➤ Geekli.st

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Professional networking site LinkedIn has posted its most shared stories of 2011. It wasn’t YouTube videos that were shared the most, it was stories that focused on making you a better worker and employer. The topics ranged from how to motivate your employees, to tips on setting up a successful day for yourself.

The top shared stories by its 130M users show that the site is all business, no play. Here are the top ten most shared stories on LinkedIn from 2011:

1. 9 Things That Motivate Employees More Than Money (Inc.) Nov. 28
2. Steve Jobs and the Seven Rules of Success (Entrepreneur) Oct. 14
3. Steve Jobs: How To Live Before You Die (TED Talks) October
4. The World at Seven Billion (BBC) Oct. 26
5. Four Destructive Myths Most Companies Still Live By (Harvard Business Review) Nov. 1
6. 5 Things to Do Every Day for Success (Fast Company) March 1
7. Tech Firm Implements Employee ‘Zero Email’ Policy (Yahoo News) Nov. 29
8. The Org Charts of all the Major Tech Companies (Humor) (Business Insider) June 29
9. Here’s How People Look at Your Facebook Profile — Literally (Mashable) Nov. 30
10. 5 Ways To Keep Your Rockstar Employees Happy (GigaOM) Oct. 15

Steve Jobs clearly had an incredible impact on LinkedIn professionals, especially ones focused on Technology, as the top ten list shows. No stories about his passing specifically are on this list, but as the months have gone by, never before seen videos have trickled out to the media, complete with new meaning.

His name is Snow E. Mann, an “Independent Snow Management Consultant” from the North Pole:

When you click on the user, you come to find out that this is a well-placed Holiday easter egg from the team at LinkedIn.

Very well done, and here I thought that the North Pole wanted to recruit me for a new gig.