LinkedIn, the biggest professional social network with over 259 Million users, has today released a new standalone app named Lookup, which will help you research about your coworkers easier than ever. The app is currently available for iOS, desktop, and mobile web. An Android variant of the app is said to be underway, though no timeline has been given.
The company envisions this new app to help any employee of a medium to large scale business, searching for someone in their company, find them without much effort. You might presume that this was a function that LinkedIn’s core app already featured, but you are gravely mistaken as this new search directory will only be applicable inside your company (something like the Intranet approach with more features). The idea for this standalone app was born after a study that showed users were trying to use LinkedIn’s search just to find information about their coworkers.
The app will enable users to search for anyone within their company using data like their name, using a photo, or by a particular skill, title, or place of employment.
The differences between this new standalone app and LinkedIn’s core app are evident from the get-go. For instance, if you search for an employee in your company using the core app, you will get a large number of results through which you will have to manually sift through to find the person you are looking for.
But when it comes down to the new Lookup approach, the service automatically filters your search results to get you to the person you are looking for, much more efficiently. Also, as already stated, LinkedIn’s core app allows you to search for people even outside your firm whereas the Lookup service works only inside your company.
This new wannabe employee directory is quite easy to setup and use. You just need to download the app, register and verify your email address. And you’re done!
After that is done, you will be presented with a directory of all the current employees working at your company (as listed on your LinkedIn profile).
After searching for someone, you could call, text or email them using the data that is visible on their profile. You could also send them a message via LinkedIn even if they do not have a LookUp account.
The new app, LinkedIn’s Senior Product Manager (Pulse co-founder), Ankit Gupta tells VentureBeat, will try and eradicate all the issues regarding Intranet, but it will not, under any circumstances, be replacing the older service. He also adds that the app is meant for a specific sector of companies and that not every business could actually benefit from the service.
It’s pretty clear that this app thrives in a large company. When Pulse was smaller, we used a Google Sites page as an Intranet for 25 people. As the team grew, and when there were different departments, it became very clear that people weren’t sitting together and connecting by coincidence. We felt a need for something like this to help us…it’s for the companies that are growing very fast…
Lookup could be useful in times where you need to find someone in your business but do not have enough essential information about them like their name, etc. You could just pull up a search from the info you have (like their designation or the place or subdivision of the company they are currently working for) and Lookup will do its magic.
Gupta also added that the app could “evolve into a much bigger player in the [enterprise] space and be a much bigger connective tissue across your employee base,” and that there’s “lots of opportunity in the future.”
