LinkedIn Breaks Through the 9-Digit Barrier

2011 has been a great year for LinkedIn, especially given yesterday's news that the professional's social network surpassed 100 million users worldwide.

Here are a few more numbers that LinkedIn released about where the social network stands right now:

• Less than half (about 44%) of users are in the U.S.
• Both Brazil and Mexico more than doubled their LinkedIn usage rates, with Brazil seeing a 428% increase in 2010.
• The Hi-Tech, Finance, Manufacturing, Medical and Education industries all have at least 5 million users on LinkedIn.

But despite those impressive numbers, there is one issue in particular that LinkedIn still faces. Because although 100 million registered users is a lot, LinkedIn admits that the number of active users is much lower. According to ComScore, LinkedIn had about 71 million unique visitors in February. Getting more users to continue to come back and use the site needs to be an immediate goal for LinkedIn.

App Store Finally Lands on Amazon

At the beginning of the year, rumors were flying that Amazon was preparing to launch an Android app market to compete with Google. At the time I was hopeful that it would be a solid addition to Amazon's other services, but of course it was all guesswork since it hadn't launched yet.

But as of today, that has changed and the Amazon Appstore is live. It's a slimmed down, but more user-friendly, collection of about 3,800 apps (compared to the Android Market's 200,000+). Setting up your device to work with the Amazon Appstore takes a few minutes, but once you do you're good to go.

You can download apps from the Amazon Apps mobile app or from the Amazon website, and then install the downloaded app from the Amazon app. It sounds a little complicated, but it's not too bad considering these are third-party apps outside of the native Android Market.

Two other features have helped Amazon get some strong early buzz:

1. You can "Test Drive" apps before you buy them to see if they are really what you are looking for.
2. Amazon will offer a "Free App of the Day" where an app you would normally pay for is available for free for 24 hours.

Since it is very early in the launch, I'm sure there are still some updates that we will see in the next couple of days. However, at first glance this does seem to be a good start for the Amazon Appstore, although the real test will be whether or not it is still used a few months from now.

Final Four Top Stories from a Maddening March Weekend

Many of us spent the weekend glued to the TV while sweating out the health of our March Madness brackets. For me, it was about pulling ahead in the 2011 Emilio Estevez #Losing Bracket Challenge office pool.

Obviously this weekend's basketball obsession meant a lot of us couldn't keep up on what turned out to be an incredibly newsworthy few days. Keeping with the NCAA theme, here's the Final Four top social media stories from this past weekend:

• No. 1 Seed - AT&T-Mobile: Hands down, the biggest story of the weekend (if not the entire month) was Sunday's news of AT&T acquiring T-Mobile for $39 billion. This merger will catapult AT&T past the current top mobile carrier Verizon's 100 million U.S. subscribers with a combined 130 million subscribers. There are sure to be some major mobile shakeups in the coming months, including a possible T-Mobile iPhone in the future (although it's apparently not in the immediate plans).
• No. 2 Seed - Kevin Rose Ditches Digg: Kevin Rose's resignation from Digg shouldn't come as too much of a surprise considering I, like many social media pundits, wrote Digg off over a month ago. However, Rose had still established himself as the face of Digg and became bigger than just his startup like Mark Zuckerberg and Dennis Crowley, so it's still strange to see them part ways.
• No. 3 Seed - AP Stylebook Finally De-hyphenates Email: Okay, this may not seem like a huge deal, but any of us who use the AP Stylebook day in and day out can finally stop arguing with the big ol' book of grammatical rules everytime it told us to hyphenate 'email' when spelling it out.
• No. 4 Seed - Android-ifying Amazon: A New York Times post surfaced on Friday that points out the slew of recent Android programmer hirings by Amazon over the past few months, and ponders the likelihood of Amazon releasing a more tablet-style Amazon Kindle that would feature full color and multi-touch controls.

So there are your Final Four top social media and tech stories from a very busy weekend. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a March Madness bracket to double-check.

March Madness Hits The Axiom Office

With the weather getting nicer and nicer, you would think that spring fever would be running rampant through the Axiom office. And although we are all looking forward to sunnier days, what we've really all caught is March Madness.

We've started an office bracket pool with pride (a few bottles of wine) on the line, and we're calling it the 2011 Emilio Estevez #Losing Bracket Challenge. Curious about the name? Check out the video below, and follow along on Twitter with the hashtag #axbrack to see updates about how well we're doing.

Video Post: Teenage Wasteland for Brands on Facebook

It seems like a simple question: If brands like interacting with consumers online and teens spend a majority of their time on Facebook and other social media platforms, then brands marketing to teens should have the easiest time interacting with their target demographic, right? Unfortunately for those companies, a recent Forrester report points otherwise. I look into the numbers and what they mean on today's Daily Axiom's Video Blog post.