Recently, there have been various acquisitions made, some of them surprising, some of them feared and some of them just make sense. This one falls into the last category.
In June last year SlideShare announced a deeper integration with LinkedIn and TechCrunch writer Leena Rao already advised LinkedIn to use some of the extra cash to buy SlideShare. And now with yet another surprisingly better net results for 1Q 2012 we can see it happened.
I like both sites more than you might think – LinkedIn brought me many interesting partnerships, business and job offers. And I use it daily to see who is connected to whom tracking the digital footprints in the cyberspace jungle I get invitations to connect daily (though I still keep the approach that I only connect with people I know or people I expect to meet very soon and get to know) and I watch new industries to jump on the platform (e.g. banking). Btw. if you want to see interesting statistics about LinkedIn usage in Czech Republic, Jana Filova has them (in both Czech and English)!
Slideshare is at the same time a never ending source of inspiration (I wish to have the talent to create great presentations!), it informs me about my friends’ and colleagues’ new stuff, and of course to some extent, it’s also my showcase (on which I yet have a lot of work to do).
With the acquisition of a neat tool Rapportive (a plugin for Gmail that shows you social network profiles of people you exchange mails with) that took place in February, I see LinkedIn’s acquisitions as a good fit for all parties involved. (Their yet previous one was a rather unknown company IndexTank and the motivation was most probably to get a bunch of talented engineers on board – while the code was open sourced.)
One interesting aspect of Slideshare is its strong and special user base – there are more business owners than anywhere else. I also like the fact that it’s to a large extent an Indian company, with a remarkable CEO – Rashmi Sinha is an Indian lady living in SF who has a PhD in Cognitive NeuroPsychology! That is quite something. And now check this great infographics by Column five
To wrap up – you can enjoy the Slideshare presentation about the whole thing (if you embed it to your domain, you join 1.4 M unique domains) and I also recommend a slightly more personal recap from Dave McClure, who has been one of the investors. Well done! I keep my fingers crossed and I hope we’ll see some nice new features out of this deal.