When a user clicks on the News heading in their LinkedIn toolbar, they now get a splash screen that outlines the different categories or channels of news they can subscribe to. There are some fairly obvious examples such as Economy, Entrepreneurship and Leadership, as well as broader categories such as Healthcare, Technology and Social Media — and a few somewhat more unusual channels too, like “Things I Carry” and “My Best Career Mistake.”

Once you pick your categories, the site shows you a redesigned LinkedIn Today page that looks very much like the front page of a magazine website: there is one larger story with a big image at the top, and then smaller stories by category. But the biggest difference between a traditional magazine and LinkedIn’s offering is that the stories on LinkedIn Today come from everywhere — hundreds of different sites and publications, from Wired to the New York Times. In other words, the site is acting more like a Flipboard-style aggregator, which probably isn’t surprising since it recently bought Flipboard competitor Pulse.

Whether or not this is just another attempt by LinkedIn to make the site more “sticky” and get users to spend more time there, it has the potential to become a real competitor to other news aggregators and providers. As I mentioned in a recent post about why it would make sense for LinkedIn to buy Pulse, one of the tools the site has going for it is an understanding of a user’s “interest graph” as it pertains to their business and/or professional life. That’s a valuable commodity.

Under former Fortune magazine editor Dan Roth — who talked about LinkedIn’s media ambitions on a panel at our recent paidContent Live conference in New York — the company has been expanding its reach for some time, including the launch of the Influencer program. That involves bringing in prominent personalities like Sir Richard Branson and giving them a place to host their writing, something that is similar to what Evan Williams is trying to do with his new company Medium (although it is focused more on literary content).

LinkedIn may not have created a “massive media empire” — as one rather breathless piece posted (on LinkedIn Today, of course) described it — but there is no question the site has media-related ambitions, and it is following through on them. And its ability to target specific users based on their interest graph gives it a potentially powerful weapon that other media entities lack.

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LinkedIn posted its first quarter earnings on Thursday, reporting revenue of $324.7 million, which beat analyst expectations of $317.08 million. The company saw first-quarter earnings of $0.45 per share excluding one-time charges, compared to analyst expectations of $0.31 per share. The first quarter revenue of $324.7 million is up 72 percent over the $188.5 million in revenue from the same quarter of 2012.

As we’ve written before, the company’s corporate recruiting efforts, called the “Talent Solutions” portion of the business, has become the primary money-maker for LinkedIn, and that remained true for this quarter. The Talent Solutions section grew to become 57 percent of the company’s revenue this quarter with $184.3 million in revenue, up from 53 percent of the company’s revenue last quarter. It allows companies and professional recruiters to pay for access to the product that lets them track candidates, post job openings, and manage submissions.

The company reported $22.6 million in net income and non-GAAP net income of $52.4 million, which translated to earnings per share excluding one-time charges of $0.45.

The company noted earlier this year that a good deal of its new user acquisitions were coming from overseas, and in fact nearly 40 percent of the company’s revenue this quarter came from international markets. The company also noted Thursday that they’ve seen huge growth from students on LinkedIn as well. LinkedIn’s SVP of engineering, Kevin Scott, will be talking about the challenges in leading engineering for the growing business this summer at our Structure conference in San Francisco.

LinkedIn has emerged as one of the most profitable social web companies on the public market right now, consistently posting strong numbers and coming off particularly strong fourth quarter earnings. Since February, the company has launched a variety of products and new features, having recently re-designed its consumer-facing mobile app as well as its Recruiter page for corporate recruiters. The company also launched the brand-new LinkedIn Contacts product, which is a separate mobile app that serves as an integrated contacts app for super-networkers. LinkedIn also acquired the social news reader Pulse, and is clearly looking to make the main feed on the site more of a hub for business-related news and media.

CEO Jeff Weiner also noted that LinkedIn will be selling sponsored content in the main LinkedIn feed, which fits with the company’s goal to populate the feed with more business-related news, photos and videos. Once LinkedIn becomes a destination for people to find current news, it gives the company more chances to sell ads. But even as the number of users on LinkedIn appears to be growing, it’s all relative: LinkedIn is only at 225 million registered users, up from 200 million in January, and those are just registered, not active. So take that for whatever it’s worth.

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The LinkedIn Contacts app, which will launch just on iOS for U.S. users on an invite-only basis at first, allows you to pull together your Google, Outlook, Yahoo, and phone contacts into one contact database hosted on the app. (It also supports integration with some apps like Tripit or Cardmunch.) Contacts then lets you sort and filter people based on how often you contact them and lets you add details about your relationship to serve as personal reminders.

For instance, I can mark when and where I first met one of my LinkedIn conections, see when I last emailed that person in Gmail, call them on the phone (if they list their number), and see when I last met with them according to my Outlook calendar (if I used one of those).

These seem like useful features that could help you sort and categorize professional contacts, and it’s cool to see how LinkedIn has used algorithims and data to put together individual relationship histories for each contact without much work required from the user. However, it’s unclear why LinkedIn felt that these features should exist in a standalone app.

Will people really download a second LinkedIn app if they already have one that works just fine? These features seem like they’d be more useful if they were integrated into the existing app rather than launched in a second one. The company did indicate that it will evaluate how the product does on mobile in deciding whether to add features into the existing app, and users who gain access to the new Contacts app will have this data integrated into their contacts section of LinkedIn.com, which is smart.

Sachin Rekhi, the former CEO of the address book company Connected, which LinkedIn acquired in 2011, is now heading up the Contacts app, and he explained that LinkedIn wanted to keep the contact info in a separate app to better target the specific audience that would find it useful. Namely, professionals who want networking info on mobile. But it’s unclear which of LinkedIn’s existing members wouldn’t fit that description.

“We’re taking a multi-app strategy across different use cases and target audiences,” Rekhi said.

The other major downside to the app is that it doesn’t integrate with Facebook or Twitter, so it’s fairly limited in the types of information it can actually import. The company would not indicate whether this was because Facebook and Twitter refused to provide access to those social graphs, or whether LinkedIn wasn’t interested in adding them. Rekhi said it’s because the Contacts app just focuses on professional contacts rather than more social features, so starting with apps like Gmail and Outlook made sense.

However, the increasing reality is that a lot of people do make professional contacts over Facebook and Twitter, and as Facebook improves its messaging and contacts products, it seems like a major downside that the LinkedIn app wouldn’t include those. Presumably, LinkedIn wants you connect with people over its own social network, wishing them happy birthday, calling them, and catching up with them on the Contacts app rather than through Facebook. But by not including Facebook’s social graph, it makes the app a lot less complete for younger users like myself.

So what’s the benefit for LinkedIn in producing this app? Of course, more eyeballs focused on LinkedIn and more screentime with the company’s products are always good for the company, and messaging and calling apps have become popular recently as companies try to hook users into communicating through their services. Importing all of your contacts and email information gives LinkedIn much more data to use as it turns your information into value for professional recruiters, who drive most of the company’s revenue.

Plus, as LinkedIn focuses its site on producing more news and media content, as evidenced by the Pulse acquisition, it’s possible it wants to make the main LinkedIn app more of a news reader and the Contacts app where you communicate with other individuals. But the company has a long way to go before it builds the equivalent of Facebook and Facebook Messenger.

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As my colleague Mathew Ingram wrote, LinkedIn’s media ambitions began back before the company went public in 2011, but the full scope of what the company had in mind is evident in this redesign launched Thursday for iPhone and Android.

The new feed looks a heck of a lot more like Facebook’s News Feed than a digital resume service. Gone are the weird folders a user used to see on logging in, which are now replaced with a stream of information that combines both professional updates (which of your friends have new LinkedIn connections or jobs), and news stories, as well as a top bar that shows “top stories for you,” and other customizable features. Users can like or comment on stories directly from the feed, which again, provides the service with more data on user interests.

While its stock price is doing well and it’s well on its way to becoming the digital resume of choice for a lot of professionals, LinkedIn still only has 200 million registered users, which isn’t all that significant when you consider that those aren’t active users — just people with accounts. (For a point of comparison, Twitter, which is a much newer company, has 200 million users — active ones.)

LinkedIn’s business model hinges on the “talent solutions,” or the corporate recruiting arm of the company, which brought in more than 50 percent of the revenue last quarter. But that business needs users to continue uploading information to LinkedIn. When users note when they get new jobs or list their skills, they’re providing more data for recruiters and companies to evaluate, making that section of the business more valuable. And if users never visit LinkedIn, that’s a problem, as we’ve written before.

Scrolling through this feed, it’s easy to see why adding news stories and content to the LinkedIn site makes it far more engaging for users. After all, people don’t change jobs and update their LinkedIn profiles often enough to populate a timely news feed, but if I checked the LinkedIn app to find an interesting mix of technology and media news, I might be more likely to come back for a visit — not just to accept a connection.

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Enlighted says its customers include Google, LinkedIn, Bank of New York, Turner Broadcasting and the City of San Jose. New investors RockPort Capital and DFJ JAIC joined the round, along with existing investors Kleiner Perkins, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Intel Capital.

The startup’s lighting control tech can individually measure and manage lighting at each light fixture and can cut energy consumption from lighting in office and commercial buildings by 50 to 75 percent. The sensors can detect light level, occupancy, temperature and power consumption in the 100 square feet under each light. The company says it’s saved some 15 gigawatts of electricity since it began installations two years ago.

Enlighted’s first customer was green carpet company Interface Global, which used the lighting management system on its 35,000 square foot facility located in Acworth, Ga. Interface says it was able to cut its lighting power by 70 percent, and achieved a return on investment in 18 months.

Big data analytics and sensor tech — IT — is appearing as one of the bright spots in cleantech startups these days. Some investors call this the so-called Clean Web, or using digital tech to manage resources from energy to water to food. Check out our 20-page premium research report on Building Energy Management Systems: Overview and Forecast, on GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

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At a paidContent Live session hosted by Slate chairman Jacob Weisberg, three media companies described a new breed of creators who are equally at ease with content and technology. This has led to the emergence of non-traditional media influencers such as comment communities at Reddit, and at Vox Media sites The Verge and SB Nation.

“In the day, if you wanted to create media, you had to start as an intern making coffee,” said Vox CEO Jim Bankoff, adding that now anyone with $100 can make a movie. He explained that this democratization of content creation has resulted, in some cases, of Vox hiring people on the basis of their comment contributions.

This has led to a culture of empowerment in which everyday people are as fluent in media as many traditional journalists. More and more, they are taking to public platforms to not just report, but to take part in the news.

Erik Martin, GM of Reddit, cited “random acts of pizza” — a community on the site that sends pizza as a gesture of support, most recently to emergency workers in Boston.

But does this new culture of public participation also has a dark side? Slate’s Weisberg pointed to Reddit’s current efforts to identify the Boston bomber, including posting a suspect’s photo on the site, as approaching vigilante justice.

“Reddit may be creating the next Richard Jewell,” said Weisberg, referring to a police officer who foiled an Atlanta Olympics bombing plot only to be falsely accused as a suspect in a traumatizing “trial by media.”

Martin said he regarded the role of Reddit employees as “groundskeepers” who helped discrete communities determine their own standards.

Dan Roth, a former Fortune editor who now oversees news on LinkedIn Today, offered a further example of how non-journalists are creating media. He described how executives like Virgin Airlines CEO Richard Branson are now writing regular columns in their own voices. While such contributions in traditional media typically amounted to no more than press releases, Roth said that readers’ ire at inauthenticity has forced even corporate executives to reevaluate how they write.

Check out the rest of our paidContent Live 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

A transcription of the video follows on the next page

Go to page 2 (of 2) on GigaOM .

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LinkedIn explained the acquisition in a press release, noting that the demand for content on the site that relates to people’s professions is growing, and that the Pulse team can help LinkedIn improve the types of news people are seeing:

“We believe LinkedIn can be the definitive professional publishing platform – where all professionals come to consume content and where publishers come to share their content. Millions of professionals are already starting their day on LinkedIn to glean the professional insights and knowledge they need to make them great at their jobs. We believe we can help all professionals make smarter and more informed business decisions leveraging all the great business knowledge flowing through LinkedIn in the form of news, Influencer posts, industry updates, discussions, comments and more.”

Around the time of the acquisition reports back in March, my colleague Mathew Ingram wrote for paidContent why it would make perfect sense, as the company grows into more of a dual recruiting and media business, with users who are interested in business news. In fact, LinkedIn’s executive editor Daniel Roth will be speaking on our panel about the rise of new media entities next week at our PaidContent Live conference in New York.

Pulse wrote in a blog post why it’s joining the company, pointing again to LinkedIn’s demand for knowledge on its site:

“LinkedIn is the perfect partner as we continue our journey. The company shares our passions and values, our belief in the power of knowledge and elevated discussion, particularly for professionals looking for insights to help make them better at what they do. We believe this important step is the key to an even better experience for our community, and we’re excited for what’s to come.”

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We see it clearly in companies such as Google or Facebook, where the cost of computing has a direct impact on the cost of goods sold. But it’s also becoming the case in banks, retail shops and other sectors of the economy where mobile,  digital or cloud strategies all are facets of the same issue: an attempt to wed the business to technology and an understanding that technology is the business.

We get it. That’s why this year’s Structure conference, on June 19 and 20 in San Francisco, will have speakers like Kevin Scott of LinkedIn. He’s going to share what he learned throughout the process of re-architecting the social networking site to brings its costs in line with its growing scale. Scott is part of a new generation of IT professionals who aren’t just trying to solve business problems with technology but are building architectures that are integral parts of the business.

Jeff Dean at Google is doing something similar — although he’s thinking at a much larger scale. The computer scientist who co-wrote the search giant’s MapReduce paper is responsible for rethinking Google’s architecture for the new era of the web, where the hardware and software must support real-time distributed systems, capable of interacting naturally with people. It’s a tall order, but he’ll talk about where IT is going and how to build systems that can handle that future.

Finally, we have a familiar face in a new role. Bob Muglia, who is the executive vice president of Juniper’s Software Solutions, will talk about how he plans to shift one of the innovators of the switching era as its business is disrupted by both the new OpenFlow protocol and the development of software-defined networking. Already, Muglia has forced the $9.65 billion company to change its business model and how it sells some of its hardware. He’ll discuss software-defined networks and what it means to be able to program the hardware infrastructure on demand and without having to physically touch the hardware.

The entire IT industry is poised between the promise of awesome opportunities as computing becomes cheaper and our ability to capture data expands, and the fear of disruption as open source hardware and new layers of abstraction threaten to tear down the barriers to entry. It’s a crazy time in IT and Structure speakers will help you capitalize on it, either from the business side or with deep dives into the future of technology. Register today so you can join us in San Francisco on June 19 and 20.

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But even without a cute name, the distributed infrastructure that underlies the web services that we turn to day in and out is just as important. And this year as we gear up for our sixth Structure event (June 19 and 20), dedicated to the infrastructure that serves both the internet and the cloud, we’re thinking about what’s changed in the last year and what’s ahead.

Last year, we spent a lot of time discussing software-defined everything — broadly, the abstraction of the physical hardware from the applications and even operating systems running on top of them. We had tiffs and debates over different platforms and whose APIs are really open. We even had a group hug.

Structure 2012: Marten Mickos – CEO, Eucalyptus Systems, Chris C. Kemp – CEO, Nebula and Co-Founder, OpenStack, Sameer Dholakia – Group VP and GM, Cloud Platforms Group, Citrix

This year’s focus: The physical cloud

Looking ahead, we’re peeling back some of the software-defined abstraction to focus on the physicality of the cloud. Like how do we build special-purpose architectures for our apps? What happens when we scale beyond the confines of the data center with dark fiber or other distributed resources?

We’ve got some amazing speakers signed up already: from Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of VMware who will undoubtedly hit upon the business side of the cloud, to Adrian Cockroft of Netflix, who will talk about some of the practical issues associated with supporting a giant movie streaming service on Amazon’s cloud. And of course, we’ll have Amazon’s Werner Vogels back for his sixth appearance onstage, where he’ll defend the online retailer’s title as the king of the cloud. Just kidding, this isn’t a boxing match, it’s an infrastructure conference. So please, no wagering.

Structure 2012: Christofer Hoff – Chief Architect, Security, Juniper Networks, Simon Crosby – Co-Founder and CTO, Bromium, Stacey Higginbotham – Senior Writer, GigaOM

Meet the people getting their hands dirty with deployments

And for those who have moved beyond the public and private cloud debates, or the “Is the cloud secure enough?” worries, we’ll have several practitioners discuss how they operate their businesses in the cloud. The CIOs of The Clorox Co., Revlon and Pabst Brewing Co. will all be onstage. We’ll also have tips for making sure your software is built to scale without breaking the bank, and processes for building out IT infrastructure in a more flexible manner.

One of the emerging trends we’re seeing in applications is that their architecture is no longer this static set of code, but is actually evolving not just with little tweaks, but with wholesale architectural rewrites. Speakers including Kevin Scott, an SVP of engineering at LinkedIn and Sam Schillace, a VP of engineering at Box will share their experiences building new application architectures to meet both scale and business needs. It’s not enough to keep your application from breaking. It needs to run efficiently for the business too.

So join us on June 19 and 20 in San Francisco at our Structure conference. We’re going to have something for everyone, from the business team to the developer community. Register now and get $500 off the regular ticket price with our earlybird discount. See you in San Francisco.

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(L to R): Ashok Srivastava, Venture Advisor for Trident Capital and Chief Data Scientist, Verizon; Silvius Rus, Director, Big Data Platforms, Quantcast; Todd Papaioannou, Founder and CEO, Continuuity; Bhaskar Ghosh, Senior Director of Engineering, Data Infrastructure, LinkedIn; Michael Driscoll. CEO, Metamarkets Structure Data 2013 Albert Chau itsmebert.com

Last week it was Sawzall‘s time to shine. The language, named after the popular saw that cuts through anything (and I mean anything), comes out of Google.

Silvius Rus, director of big data platforms for Quantcast, gave Sawzall a shout-out during a Structure Data Guru panel last week. ”It’s a lightweight language developed by Google that ridges procedural and interpretive languages,” Rus said.

Michael Driscoll, CEO of Metamarkets and moderator of the panel, later explained why that’s important. With a declarative language, the programmer tells the computer what to do in almost English-language-like sentences. To tell the computer to draw a circle, a declarative or imperative programmer might say “draw.circle with a size attached,” Driscoll said.

Procedural languages, on the other hand, are much more detailed step-by-step instructions — they sound more like math. A procedural approach would “define the actual pointer and tell it to move one degree to the left and one degree up and the square root of 2 up to the diagonal and repeat X times,” Driscoll said.

Sawzall is a nice blend between a declarative language that might be too high level to do all of what the programmer really wants and procedural, “which is way too in the weeds” to be fully productive, Driscoll said. More broadly, Sawzall is a powerful and compact language for log data aggregation and transformation. And, he added, it plays well with Hadoop MapReduce.

New toolsets for webscale computing

Another tool ranking high on the hit list was YARN (or Yet Another Resource Manager) aka MapReduce 2.0, cited by Todd Papaioannou, founder and CEO of Continuuity is a fan.

Yarn was built to “just think about mass-produced jobs.” Continuity is building a real-time streaming engine called Big Flow and using Yarn for all the resource deployment and management.

He also gave kudos to Weave, a higher-level framework. Weave “allows you to build a much wider class of applications on top of Yarn. So,t Yarn is  … something that we will be going forward with for at least the next half a decade [and] Weave allows you to actually build more wide scale applications on top of that.”

Bhaskar Ghosh,  senior director of engineering at LinkedIn, touted Helix, a generic distribution cluster manager developed at LinkedIn and which is now an Apache incubator project.  Helix simplifies distributed system development by separating cluster management from the primary component tasks of a distributed system, according to LinkedIn.

Kafka, Storm slake the thirst for real-time frameworks

Driscoll also sees traction for Kafka, a real-time framework for ingesting and managing data streams and Storm, out of Twitter, for processing those streams. “Think of Kafka and Storm as the HDFS and MapReduce analogs but for real time — Kafka for storage and Storm for compute,” Driscoll said.

On its blog, LinkedIn describes Kafka as a distributed publish-subscribe messaging system — also now an Apache project. Kafka is used by Twitter and Square for log aggregation, queeuing, and real-time monitoring and event processing.

This list is by no means complete. When I spoke with Github co-founder Tom Preston-Werner a few weeks ago, he said Clojure, heretofore a rather obscure dynamic programming language, is gaining momentum. “It’s getting a lot of buzz round on the enterprise side,” Preston-Werner said.

The continued popularity of the Java Virtual Machine has breathed new life into languages like Clojure and Scala, he added. Indeed, the JVM remains nearly ubiquitous and that is a huge advantage for languages that support it. If you’re a developer, you want the widest possible audience.

“The JVM is still the modern foundation that lets you run everywhere and Clojure has benefited from that,” Driscoll agreed. “It’s certainly gained steam among an elite set of programmers in Silicon Valley.”

Sawzall photo courtesy of Flickr user Charles & Hudson

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