LinkedIn iPad app wants to have coffee with you
New mobile app gives you info about the people you'll be meeting with during the day, in addition to news of their job changes.
LinkedIn suffers, a bit, from dating site syndrome. The service is highly useful when you're looking for someone, or something from someone, but a bit less so when you're not. To get users back to the service more frequently, LinkedIn has been updating the site and the mobile apps to show its users information they can use even when they're not looking for a new job or to make a sale.
An iPhone app launched last year shows you what your contacts tell LinkedIn they're reading. Today the company is launching an iPad app (and updating its other mobile apps) that does even more. In particular, it displays calendar data, which it gets from your mobile device, and merges it with information about the people you're meeting with, which it gets from LinkedIn and Twitter, to give you useful information about them ahead of time.
The idea is to make the iPad app useful as a morning read, the app you bring up when you're having your coffee. In addition to getting you geared up for your meetings, the app also shows you news of people in your network (job changes) as well as a small Flipboard-like Window of stories people in your network are flagging or commenting on; these last two features are held over from the previous versions of the iPhone app.
Sadly, LinkedIn's competition with Facebook (I presume) means that the app doesn't include intelligence from that service on what your contacts are up to. That's a shame. Otherwise, it looks like a good app to check out while the coffee is dripping.