LinkedIn is creating world's first economic graph to digitally map the global economy, says Akshay Kothari

India is the second biggest market for professional networking platform LinkedIn, which is banking on it to drive innovation, while also creating localised and specific content for its 35 million Indian members.

ET got in touch with LinkedIn’s new country manager Akshay Kothari, who applauded the research and development team at their Bengaluru office for LinkedIn’s global offerings, like spam checks and email and mobile notifications.

Talking about the user base, he said that their vision is to create economic opportunities for all professionals, similar to what the country is trying to do. If that can be executed well, they would be able to impact the country both economically and socially.

As of now, LinkedIn is trying to create the world's first economic graph, so that the world economy can be digitally mapped. By connecting different skills in the form of nodes, people can be connected to opportunities.

Talking of the increasing graph of Indian users, which now stands 35 million strong, he said that they had 3.5 million Indian users in 2009, which means that they have grown 10 times in seven years, making it the second biggest market after the US.

Going further, LinkedIn India, from 2009 to 2012, worked more as a sales organisation selling to customers, but it was in 2012 that an R&D was built, and an amazing engineering group is now building platforms here. The Bengaluru office innovates on detecting and decreasing spam, sending email notifications etc.

He added that especially over the last four months, LinkedIn has been trying to build products and features and customise their work for Indians, like launching the new mobile app, moving from an email interface to a messaging interface.

This has also increased the number of jobs available on the platform over the last year.

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