All Things D is reporting that professional social network powerhouse, LinkedIn, will be buying contact start-up Rapportive. The deal isn’t official (yet) and there’s nothing on either Rapportive or LinkedIn’s blog, but seems there are sources saying that it will happen. Not wanting to comment on the validity of this rumor, I wanted to instead focus on the fact that this would be a great deal in the making for both companies – should this actually happen, that is.

In case you’re not familiar with Rapportive, it’s a service that integrates inside Gmail to provide you helpful information about your contacts right inside your inbox. So if you’re crafting an email to a business colleague, that contact’s information and social graph (as long as it’s public) will be displayed right on the screen where you might normally see Google ads being displayed. This is especially helpful since you’re going to get to apply some more context to your emails to help make it more personal. Since its founding in 2010 by Rahul Vohra, Martin Kleppmann and Sam Stokes, the goal of the service was to allow people to immediately see what people look like (using social media avatars), where they’re based, and they do. And just like the name implies, the service is meant to help people establish a rapport that can lead to more conversations, relationships, and success. There’s no doubt that Rapportive has been successful in this area as over 20 million lookups are being done through their system every month!

So why the sudden interest by LinkedIn? Since LinkedIn is the 800 pound gorilla in the professional social network scene, it makes sense that creating some sort of rapport is essential to getting any business done. Whether you want to connect with a potential business partner, looking to hire someone, or even want to be the one that’s hired, a Rapportive-LinkedIn marriage would be beneficial for the end user. Since Rapportive is right now available on Gmail, one might wonder about it’s limited nature and how good it will be in the long-term. In a report by Return Path, at the end of 2010, Gmail had over 193 million users – granted it’s way less than Yahoo! and Hotmail, but it’s picking up steam at a much faster rate than the other two. In 2011, Comscore estimated it at 260 million users, meaning that it’s drastically catching up to the email leaders. So eventually in the near future, Gmail will be the dominate leader in email service and with Rapportive’s integration, LinkedIn will have a great opportunity to extend professional profiles further out there.

Even ReadWriteWeb agrees that LinkedIn and Rapportive would be a match made in heaven. And with LinkedIn’s last acquisition of business card scanning technology Cardmunch, LinkedIn would be able to bolster its offering and create a warehouse of professional contact information. I’ve always wanted to find a way to take all the business cards that I get from conferences and events and mesh them into a contact relationship management system and have it all linked to a professional bio that is updated and associated with my email address book so all I have to do is type in that email address: john@johndoe.com and find out how I know him, how things have been since we last talked, and make the email more meaningful. No longer will I need to waste unnecessary emails chit-chatting…it can all be personal again.

Jon Mitchell from ReadWriteWeb probably puts its best:

LinkedIn is already the go-to network for work contacts. It’s the most comprehensive professional profile most people have. Plus, it’s already openly making moves to be a more extensible service, bringing its human resources know-how to other sites that need it.

Ideally, it would be a great move for both teams and the hope is that this isn’t one of Silicon Valley’s most famous “acqui-hires” where they go for just the talent and not the technology. It is definitely a compatible service and will be a boon for people using LinkedIn.

Photo Credit: “Don’t you come a step closer” by Ed Yourdon/Flickr

by Julie Blaustein

What is a start up company to do that is on a limited marketing budget or perhaps even overseas planning to launch? Why not enter to win the Web 2.0 Expo’s Launch Pad where they will receive instant and incredible amounts of exposure of their products or services to the Web 2.0 market. That is exactly what over 80 companies did but only 6 finalists were chosen to present before a panel of judges and were voted by the audience to be the winner. On Wednesday, May 5th. at the Web 2.0 Expo, the six finalist had just five minutes to present their company and if they went over that time they were gonged. Three judges included Ellen Park, VP of Marketing at Elance, Brian Singerman is a Principal at Founders Fund and Marshall Kirkpatrick is the lead writer at ReadWriteWeb.com and previously with Tech Crunch provided instant feedback and questions on the spot. Brady Forrest, Web 2.0 Expo Co-Chair, hosted the program.

Based on the people’s choice as determined by the audience’s clapping volume, the winner was Rhomobile. They create cross-platform native applications for all major smartphones with Rhodes, the open-source smartphone app framework. Along with RhoHub, the first hosted development as a service for mobile and RhoSync, a standalone server that keeps enterprise application data current and available on users’ smartphones, Rhomobile’s suite of products provide a complete mobility solution for businesses of all sizes.

The Finalists:
AskYourTargetMarket.com is the web’s first self-service online survey tool that includes a built-in consumer panel to fulfill all your market research studies on demand. No phone calls no delays, this pay-as-you-go service starts at only $29.95 and takes just a few hours to get delivered. This is an an offer that will save you or your company major money and will gather you serious market research.

Pearltrees came all the way from France to compete, is a social curation and discovery tool and that gives users a social way to organize, discover and share stuff they like on the Web.

Strings is an online service that empowers users to effortlessly discover interesting and relevant content. Users of strings.com automatically track their interests, share their tastes with friends, and discover new content based on their expressed personality. The Strings platform enables a new generation of discovery applications that can leverage the power of Strings to help users discover content both on and off the web.

Stupeflix is an automated video creation web service. It is unique in its ability to create highly produced video in real-time, at high volumes, with a highly programmable R/W API. With the Play Platform, Stupeflix makes it easy for any website to instantly transform its content into broadcast quality videos.

EnglEasy is the winner of StartUp Weekend which impressively only came into existence a few days before the contest. This is an Online Game solution that helps teach children English. Through advanced analytics and Fun games, they hope to Improve Learning through Play. With a little bit more time to develop their strategy they may have gone further in the contest.

More Pictures of Launch Pad here!

The Winner of Launch Pad: Adam Blum of Rhomobile

Mike Courtney of AskYourTargetMarket.com

Francois Rocaboy of Pearltrees

Edward Balassanian of Strings

Jeff Boudier of Stupeflix

Ahmed Siddiqui of Engleasy

by Jacob Morgan

Tired of reading about all the company layoffs and depressing news? If so, then you’re probably going to love JobWire, which is a new project launched by RWW. Jobwire is a site that is going to be dedicated to:

“Covering news about NEW jobs that people have been hired for in tech, new media and related industries. At a time of global economic downturn we all know there’s plenty of bad news right now. Other tech news sites are doing a great job covering those stories – on the Jobwire we’re going to cover good news, people getting new jobs.”

In other words somebody is finally stepping up to look at the positive side of things. I think what RWW is going to be a morale booster for individuals and companies in the tech space. In a time when you can’t visit a site without hearing about some sort of mass layoff, we need to hear some positive news, and now we can. RWW is going to do what they can to promote jobs and individuals seeking those jobs. The new site is going to be a great resource for companies and individuals alike.

The site is going to feature around 10-30 new posts a day…yes, that’s a lot! But, it’s a good thing. RWW is also going to feature one of the new hires as a “hire of the day” and they will be providing a blurb explaining why that hire is so important.

The guest editors for the Jobwire include some well known folks in the tech/media space; Financial Times reporter Tom Foremski of SiliconValleyWatcher and media analyst Sam Whitmore of Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey.

Here is the Jobwire crew:

Marshall Kirkpatrick, Doug Coleman, Nate DiNiro and Dionne Fox.

Congrats to RWW!!

thanks for reading

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by Michelle Lentz

I discovered PixelPipe this morning via ReadWriteWeb, which is also where I acquired a beta invite (so, thanks RWW!). I love the idea of being able to post photos to multiple sites at once. I tend to use Flickr for all my photos, which makes it hard to share things via Facebook. I only have so much patience for uploading.

PixelPipe lets you pick as many places, or “pipes”, as you want and it will upload your photos to all of those locations. It’s rather speedy as well. I tried it with one photo and it quickly posted it to Twitpic, Flickr, Facebook, 4 Typepad blogs, and bub.blicio.us, which runs on WordPress. (I deleted it from most of those locations however.)

It uploads to your blogs and immediately creates a new post (XYZ via PixelPipe). My preference would be to upload the photo as a draft post to my blogs. I would also like to select which of my pipes the photo will go to – in other words, I might not want to upload the same photos to bub.blicio.us that I do to my Wine Blog.

However, I can certainly see, for now, setting up a couple different Pixelpipe accounts. One that uploads to Flickr and Facebook, for example, and another that uploads to my technology blogs.

Pixelpipe currently supports 33 different photo and video sharing sites. You can upload via a custom email address, directly through Pixelpipe, or use one of their desktop-based tools. These include Mac (including an iPhoto plug-in), Windows, and Linux tools. I downloaded the full Mac application and found it easy to use. In fact, if you’ve ever used the Flickr uploading tool, you’ll find this one remarkably familiar. An iPhone app and a Firefox plug-in are forthcoming.

PixelPipe is a free service that solves a problem most of us now have – how to share our photos with everyone we know.

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Contact Michelle with your news, apps, and events via email, Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology.