Social Networking on the Radar

Tonight's Rafe Needleman: Under the Radar social networking for business use event was a good one. I'm dead tired, so I'll post on the headline and panel participants today and get into the issues raised tomorrow.

LinkedIn announced they secured funding from Sequoia ($4.7m).

The structure of the event was great. Each of the presenters was differentiated, but chasing similar underlying dollars. LinkedIn's bottom-up model serving individuals. Spoke's top-down model providing business intelligence for sales. VisiblePath's infrastructure model of OEMing to traditional enterprise software categories. 0degrees' model of both a bottom-up and top-down model. Rafe and panelists (Esther Dyson, David Hornik (August Cap) and Pradeep Tagare (Intel Cap) shined, knew the topic and asked the right questions. LinkedIn won the panelist's choice, Spoke won the audience's choice (easy to do when you stack almost half of it with your employees, in case you were wondering why you couldn't get a ticket). As usual with social networking events there was a contrast of styles from the presenters, each representative to the respective service and business.