I use Linkedin frequently and have found the professional applications of this site useful when making, sharing and recording contacts where Facebook isn’t suitable. I have recently added my Linkedin profile to the footer of the Bio page of this blog so that colleagues can add me to their network and share my contacts. I feel New Zealander’s are only slowly catching on to this Professional Networking Application as many of the people I deal with are still yet to register. Many of my older (and often more valuable) contacts don’t even check their own email so would battle with the concept of joining an online professional network.

“If LinkedIn is able to achieve its goals and objectives in the coming years, this valuation of a billion dollars will be looked upon as very cheap,” stated Mark Kvamme, Sequoia Capital partner/LinkedIn Board of Director.

I believe that Linkedin will continue to be successful as they have managed to obtain a strong first mover advantage with no known competitors. Although people may have several social networking profiles in order to fit in with different sets of friends, everyone will only require one professional profile, and that will be with Linkedin.

I have been fortunate to work with both Norman Evans (CEO) and Murray Downes (GM) on business ideas that partners and I have had. The team at UPSTART are very good at what they do because they too are entrepreneurs so know exactly what needs to be done with any developing business. I have just finished speaking with Norman about a business I am developing at the moment called NetPosition. After I gave a fairly average pitch, Norman was quickly able to establish the strengths of my business and some potential areas of difficulty.

“Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users (also known as twits) to send updates (otherwise known as tweets) which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.”

Twitter is very easy to use and is following the growing movement of blogging in general. Until I get an iPhone, and can remotely use Wordpress, I will use Twitter to make micro posts which can be read by followers on Twitter or on my Facebook page through FeedFinder. As technology develops so does the need to change ones current habits, instead of writing a new idea down you can send a ‘tweet’ to Twitter to hear what your followers think…

I was first introduced to Rod at the University of Otago, School of Business, when he came to speak to the Master of Entrepreneurship and Otago MBA classes. I was inspired by Rod’s successes with Aftermail and with his current global, online accounting software Xero. After listening to his lecture I started following his blog where I enjoyed reading about his opinions and learning from his developments. As an enthusiastic young entrepreneur myself I am keen to follow in his footsteps with some of my web based ideas.

Rod Drury will continue posting occasionally at http://blog.xero.com