Internet related News · 2015-06-17

30 million user base yet LinkedIn relaunches Pulse as a brand new app

This is a story of a rare development – of a company re-building its app groundsup, almost 5 years down the line, & after tasting major success. After all, 30 million users is a hallmark of success, right?

Social network for professionals LinkedIn today announced it had redesigned & relaunched its Pulse news app for iOS & Android. The app will now be more “personalized” for its users. But what was even more trend-setting is that the company was treating it like a brand new app — the old versions have been pulled out completely from the App Store & Google Play. For those who already have it installed, it will continue to work until the end of the year, LinkedIn said on its official blog.

“Instead of slapping features on to the old reader app, we decided to completely redesign the new Pulse experience from the ground up,” explained Pulse founder Akshay Kothari. “The new Pulse app focuses on delivering you personalized news — news that is powered by your professional world.”

Both Akshay & cofounder, Ankit had designed, built & launched the 1st version of the app on the App Store in 6 weeks in 2010. In the next 3 years as an independent company, the Pulse user base grew to 30 million users & the team to 25 people.

“In 2013, as we started thinking about the future of Pulse, we realized that to truly become the authoritative source of daily news, we’d have to get significantly better with our content recommendations. We had done an amazing job giving our users the ability to visually see news from hundreds of sources in one place. But users were increasingly getting lost in this stream of information. Pulse needed to sift through the millions of articles published every day and pick the ones that are essential for each user”, wrote Akshay.

“In this whole puzzle, we missed one key component: Identity. We knew 30 million users had used the Pulse app, but we didn’t know who they were or who they knew. That is precisely why we joined LinkedIn, the largest professional network. In the past two years, we’ve been hard at work to marry the best content that Pulse has with the deep identity and network data that LinkedIn has, to create the world’s first personalized business news digest.”

When users start using the new app, they will experience an “effortless” onboarding process, claimed LinkedIn. They no longer need to follow publishers or topics or anything to get started—just log in with the LinkedIn account, & Pulse will instantly give you today’s news based on the industry you work in, who you’re connected to & what you follow on LinkedIn,

The new cards-based interface has also been designed to enable users to skim through lots of Content quickly. Don’t like a story? Dismiss it. Want to read a story later? Save it. Like the author of the article? Follow them. All these interactions will continuously refine your Content recommendations.

 

Image Credit: LinkedIn blog

 

 

 

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