LinkedIn confirmed recent rumors today when it announced that it had purchased the newsreader app Pulse. The purchase is a significant acquisition for the company, with the purchase costing LinkedIn $90 million.
Pulse is a newsreader for iOS and Android that aggregates news and presents it in a slick and easy to consume style. In the past couple years, it has grown in popularity, climbing to the top of the App Store’s charts, and now claiming to serve over 30 million users worldwide as well as receiving more than 10 million article clicks per day.
LinkedIn is trying to expand itself past a simple resume building app, and this acquisition is intended to help it with this plan. LinkedIn Vice-President of Product and User Experience, Deep Nishar, released a company blog post discussing the company’s big purchase.
Pulse’s core value proposition is to help foster informed discussions that spark the decisions shaping the world around us through news and information. This shared view that the power of professional information and knowledge can transform lives and the world makes LinkedIn and Pulse a particularly great fit. We couldn’t be more thrilled to be working side by side with the Pulse team to create new and better ways to help professionals contribute to and leverage this collective body of business knowledge to help them be great at what they do and from wherever they work.
It will be interesting to see how exactly LinkedIn plans to use Pulse over the course of the next several months. In the meantime, however, LinkedIn promises that Pulse users need not worry, as the app will continue to deliver news and operate the same way it always has.
