LinkedIn's New Acquisition: Newsle - A News Alert Buying Service

Linkedin, world's largest professional network, has acquired Newsle, a news alert buying service. Newsle is a three year old start up based in San Francisco which has over 2 million users. It  issues alerts when a news article or a blog post mention users’ friends or contacts.  Newsle relies on natural-language processing and machine-learning algorithms to weed out relevant information. 

The reason behind this acquisition is that Linkedin wants to broaden its efforts to build out a range of publishing tools and content offerings for professional networks. On the same lines Linkedin had bought Pulse, a moblie news leading startup and Slideshare, an online content sharing platform.

Also another reason can be that for quite some time Linkedin has been trying to dominate the online customer relationship management processes. So it can be said that this is Linkedin's first step forward in that direction.

Terms of the acquisitions were not disclosed.

For LinkedIn the clear attraction for acquiring Newsle lies is their algorithms. This is because users using Newsle can instantly look up mentions of people they follow on social networking platforms within news articles and blogs on the site. This helps keep track of contacts in form of colleagues, bosses, industry thought leaders etc. Linkedin is living up to its tag of being a highly professional network and expanding in that domain.  

In this deal, Jonah Varon and Axel Hansen, co-founders of Newsle will join Linkedin along with four engineers of their team. Currently Newsle will stay an independent platform while the two work out possibilities of integrating their technology and synergies.