LinkedIn hopes to reach 'mobile moment' soon

Professional networking website gets 43% traffic from mobile devices now, expects it to touch 50% soon

In line with the global trend of mobility catching pace, professional networking website LinkedIn is seeing a major surge in user traffic from mobile devices, and expects the same to touch 50% of its total traffic soon as against 43% now. The same was less than 2% in 2008.

"We are expecting to soon reach the 'mobile moment', when over 50% of the traffic that accesses LinkedIn is through mobile devices," said Ganesan Venkatasubramanian, head of engineering at LinkedIn Technology Center in India.

The website, which aims to 'connect world's professionals', had launched operations in India in 2009 and set up a technology center in Bangalore in 2011. This is LinkedIn's only technology center outside the US, where the company is headquartered.

India is the second largest user base for LinkedIn, with 26 million of its global 300 million users based here. LinkedIn employs over 350 professionals in India, of which around 50 are engineers working on research and development (R&D) at the technology center in Bangalore. Besides the Bangalore technology center, LinkedIn has offices in Mumbai and Bangalore, where most of its sales staff is based.

"We started operations in India basically to create a follow-the-sun model, so that we can run our operations 24X7," Venkatasubramanian said. "However, over time, recogonising the talent available here, we decided to open the technology center and have R&D operations here."

Follow-the-sun is a kind of global workflow, where tasks are passed around daily between work sites that are many time zones apart. Such a workflow reduces project duration and increase responsiveness.

Globally, LinkedIn has presence in 200 countries with 300,000 job postings, and 24,000 schools listed. The website was visited by at least 187 million unique users every month until 2013, which is the latest data available.