LinkedIn buys SlideShare
Suits want all their stuff in one place
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LinkedIn will spend US$118.75m to upload SlideShare into its portfolio of offerings.
CEO Jeff Weiner says, in a press release, that the reason for the buy is that “Presentations are one of the main ways in which professionals capture and share their experiences and knowledge, which in turn helps shape their professional identity.”
Declaring himself “very excited to welcome the SlideShare team to LinkedIn,” Weiner expanded on the importance of presentations, saying they “ … also enable professionals to discover new connections and gain the insights they need to become more productive and successful in their careers, aligning perfectly with LinkedIn’s mission and helping us deliver even more value for our members.”
Sadly our PR-to-English translator isn't working this morning, leaving us to guess that the above could mean “this is our cloud storage play” or “our members were spending a fair bit of time using Google Docs and Office 365 and we wanted that time-on-site”. We're pretty sure it doesn't mean “Pastebin is eating our lunch" and that "suits want all their stuff in one place and we'll help them to do that" could be closer to the mark.
Feel free to let us know your take on the deal. ®
COMMENTS
Pfft...
$118.75m ?
Obviously LinkedIn has no idea how to negotiate these kind of buy-out deals.
Otherwise they'd have paid $1BILLION.
Re: They should have bought Prezi.com
The bloom is already off that rose. For the past couple of years I've heard frequent complaints about Prezi at conferences - people complaining that it adds too much noise (in the form of pan/zoom/rotate visual effects) to presentations, that it's too much trouble coaxing it to work in the often rather hostile IT environments of conference hotels and the like, that its main purpose is to put lipstick on the pigs of poorly-written and -designed presentations. I've even seen a number of people complain in print that Prezi presentations make them dizzy or nauseated.
On the other hand, I don't know what, if anything, makes Slide Share any more valuable than any other site where you can store presentations, aside from its (claimed) relatively large user base. It always struck me as pretty boring.
Is Linkedin still going, what have I missed? I haven't been on there for ages.
Reminds me I got some spam the other day about Myspace.
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