The company has so far demonstrated that its combination of subscriptions and advertising revenue can work, although whether it can keep engagement up and continue to grow its international base remains to be seen.

“We exited 2011 having successfully revamped our underlying development infrastructure,” said CEO Jeff Weiner in a released statement. ”Based on that investment, we said that 2012 would be a year of accelerated product innovation, and it was. The products we delivered throughout the year drove member engagement and financial results to record levels in the fourth quarter.”

The company has made a strong international push this year, although 62 percent of fourth quarter revenue still comes from the U.S. The company ended the year with 202 million registered users and strong growth on mobile, along with everyone else.

Mike Isaac for AllThingsD wrote about the issues the company will have to overcome: “The biggest question going forward, however, is if LinkedIn can keep those 200 million-plus users on its platform actively engaged on a regular basis. As I argued previously, one of LinkedIn’s major challenges is to convince its users that it’s a daily destination site to return to for business insights, updates and opinion, not just a repository for one’s online resume.”

Tim Bradshaw for the Financial Times wrote that the company’s influencer program could play into future bets: “Changes included a revamp of its profile pages and a new blogging platform called “LinkedIn Influencers,” which is used by prominent members such as President Barack Obama and Sir Richard Branson, the prominent UK businessman, which boosted traffic.”

Bloomberg’s Ari Levy noted that the company’s stock rose as high as 12 percent in late trading on Thursday, and a Bloomberg analyst spoke to the reasons LinkedIn posted such strong earnings: “Investors clearly like LinkedIn’s mix of advertising and fee revenue, both of which are experiencing exceptional growth,” said Paul Sweeney, a Bloomberg Industries analyst.

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But doctors – who must comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (or HIPAA) – are in an especially sensitive situation.  For them, security slip-ups can lead to hefty fines. And, over the past few years, as more health information has gone digital, the government has tightened privacy laws by, for example, increasing maximum fines, cracking down on more violations and penalizing organizations for smaller breaches.

That’s creating a high-pressure environment for doctors – but also growing opportunity for physician-only social networks that promise doctors a secure way to collaborate and communicate with peers.  Back in September, Doximity, a kind of “LinkedIn for doctors,” said that it had crossed the 100,000-member mark less than two years after launching. On Monday, the San Mateo, Calif.-based company announced that it had reached another milestone, attracting 125,000 doctors, or one out of every five doctors in the U.S. Registered users include those who have created a profile and, on average, share more than a dozen professional milestones (including their residencies, awards and articles). Of its 125,000 users, the company said, about one-third are active on the site each month.

Jeff Tangney, the company’s CEO, said Doximity’s growth is even double that of Epocrates, the popular mobile health company he co-founded in the late 1990s (and that was recently acquired by athenahealth). He attributes part of its rise to the quality of the network and the content – the company made a point of launching with thought leaders from top hospitals like Columbia, Stanford, UCSF and the Univ. of Pennsylvania.  But he said that the tightening privacy laws are also giving the site a boost.

“Privacy and HIPAA seem to be a real tailwind for us,” Tangney said. “The law, while having more teeth, has become part of the doctors’ consciousness that they need to be more careful about sending that message or email.”

Earlier this month, the Department of Health and Human Services said it made the most “sweeping changes” to HIPAA, raising the maximum penalty for negligence, strengthening data breach notification requirements and expanding the pool of parties who must comply with the law.

But even before that, Tangney said, doctors were becoming more aware of rising penalties for security violations. In 2011, an emergency room doctor in Rhode Island was fired for posting information about a patient on Facebook. (Even though the doctor never mentioned the patient’s name, the hospital board decided her post was too revealing.) This month, a hospice in Idaho became the first health care organization to be fined ($50,000) for a breach affecting fewer than 500 individuals.

As doctors look for secure social networking options, Doximity, however, isn’t their only option. For example, QuantiaMD, founded in 2008, says 160,000 doctors (or a quarter of the country’s physicians) use its site; Sermo, launched in 2005, says 20 percent of doctors are part of its community; and forMD, a new site backed by accelerator Blueprint Health, is throwing its hat into the ring.

But not only does Doximity provide a secure and real-name network of doctors (all members are authenticated), it opened up an API in October to let developers and medical services plug into its platform. Tangney said 15 companies are using the API and, going forward, it will be interesting to see what kinds of tools and services can be built on top of the network.

To date, company has raised just under $28 million from investors including Morganthaler Ventures, Emergence Capital Partners and Interwest Partners.

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Over the past several months, LinkedIn says it has rebuilt CardMunch from the ground up to tie it in more wholly with the professional social network. Now, once a person’s business cards are scanned, the CardMunch app will map that information and tie it to his or her LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn puts it this way: “Now you know the person behind the card — the who, what, where and when for every business card you scan.” Indeed, the new app could make first impressions more well-informed than ever.

The company says the rehaul has also made the app simpler and quicker to use. Its user experience now is composed of just three screens: card capture, contact list, contact details and LinkedIn profiles.

CardMunch has always been a cool app, and it made lots of sense as an acquisition for LinkedIn. In addition, LinkedIn says its mobile page views have grown 400 percent year-over-year, so mobile is a hugely strategic place for the company going forward. The new upgrades seem solid, but people can be quite touchy about apps they love, especially ones they use professionally, so it will be interesting to see how people react to the CardMunch facelift.

Here are a couple of screenshots of the new CardMunch for iPhone (click to enlarge):

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Enter Konnects. Konnects wants to fill in the gap between LinkedIn and Facebook, providing social tools for a younger professional who may not quite have enough contacts to make LinkedIn really work for them but want to focus on business more than Facebook promotes. Konnects wants to be not only the place where business professionals can find one another but also the place where they can transact business on the site, exchanging all of the information and documentation needed to solidify a working relationship.

Konnects focuses less on email and much more on chat, instant messaging, video conferencing and Twitter integration. The site has the usual social networking features such as Your Network News which is similar to the status updates of you and your contacts on many other networks.

You also get recommended communities on your Konnects home page although I’m not sure why some are being recommended to me. The “Women’s Resources” made sense since I’m a woman. But “Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber”? I live in Alaska. And “Accounting?” I hate accounting.

What Konnects has that LinkedIn doesn’t have is an integration of Communities – not Groups – that are essentially white label networks a la Ning. Maybe I’ll create my own community.

Also on your home page, you are fed videos from your communities but if you don’t belong to a community yet, you get a plain icon that says “Join More Communities. Get More News.” And you can blog.

While Konnects claims to have over 350,000 members so far, my interactions on the site have felt a little lonely even though I am connected to the CEO of Konnects and one of their publicists. I’ve poked around at some of the communities and put out a few invitations to connect (with a free account you are limited to three). I’ve put out a bulletin to my contact list of two. I’ve updated my profile. I’ve tried to connect with people I know who are supposed on Konnects (as per the site culling through my Gmail address book) but never heard from anyone. And I’ve watched the paint dry.

Konnects is still in beta but it is more visible now so perhaps the community will start buzzing. Additional features are for premier users only such as unlimited messages, profile advertising (so you can market yourself to others), and free Internet calls to members. Monthly membership is $14.99 or $89.99 for a year.

With paid membership, you can also view the profiles of the people who have viewed your profile. Despite the creepy aspect of this, it does give you an advantage to see who is curious about you although getting in touch with them after they viewed your profile could also seem pretty creepy.

A nice feature of Konnects is aggregation of your community content. If you join a number of communities, you can actually get an aggregated view of, say, the classifieds from all communities, and you can access all you communities with one login, one password (unlike Ning). Another useful feature is that you can list certain people in your contact list but make others private – a smart way to protect your higher profile contacts.

More features, productivity tools and other third party tools are in the works.

As an avid user of many social networks, I know that especially with professional ones, you get out of them what you put into them so I am reserving judgment for now and will keep plugging away at upping my Konnects connectivity.

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Noujaim first presented her idea to Al Gore at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival; in 2006, she was awarded a TED Prize to fulfill her wish of bringing the world together for one day a year through the power of film. It’ll be like a multicultural celebration of the human spirit, akin to Al Gore’s decadent Live Earth concert series, but with fewer self-absorbed rock stars.

Now Nokia and Gore’s own Current have come on board to help collect and disseminate stories. Noujaim spoke to NewTeeVee in New York this week amid last-minute preparations.

Noujaim said TED organizer Chris Anderson provided the seed funding for what has grown into an event with over 1,300 screenings in over 100 countries. “It’s not one singular vision; it’s a lot of different visions coming together,” Noujaim explained. She also said that sifting through the more than 2,500 films that were submitted has been a significant challenge.

The event is being made widely available, through every medium possible. “We offered it
to all the networks for free,” Noujaim said of the television plans. “I was hoping Fox and Al Jazeera would carry it at the same time, but that’s a hope for next year.” Instead, Current’s television station will carry it in the States while it is telecast around the world subtitled in seven different languages.

On the mobile front, video-enabled mobile phones can tune in for the entire 4-hour affair at mobile.pangeaday.org. Additionally, you can upload your own Pangea Day video and pictures and chat live from your mobile at www.ovi.com/pangeaday.

While she’s excited about cutting-edge technology allowing more people to participate, Noujaim, a Harvard-trained visual artist, still sees unanswered questions as online video grows.

“How do you use these cameras to get as much varied content in through these [web sites]? How do you gather people together online to make for a live, communal experience? Me personally, I’d love to see this collect and gather people and then set up real-life screenings together with real people. I do think there is an experience people won’t want to lose of sitting in the dark and watching it together and communicating together face-to-face afterwards.”

NewTeeVee feels the same way. Remember our Pier Screenings?

Pangea Day will present the international community with a variety of questions. What did Tiananmen Square look like from inside the tank? What do Americans singing the Mexican national anthem on the border sound like? Can film unite a world? Find out this Saturday at a screening event near you or catch it online.

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I’ve never regretted my Booq bag purchase for a second, but this review of the Targus TCG350AP bag was very favorable. My bag is really a backpack with a small loop on the top so I can carry for brief periods to give my shoulders a break. You know how tiresome it gets to carry a two-pound UMPC and folding Bluetooth keyboard….oh and an extra stylus too; that’s the back-breaker right there. ;)

This Targus bag is geared for notebooks in the 14-inch range, so maybe James could use it if he decides to drop his P1610 for an X61. I really liked the different carry configurations: backpack, messenger bag for shoulder, or briefcase style in one hand. Add a multitude of pockets for different gadgets and some heat dispersion material on the back and you’ve got a compelling bag. This may be a bag that’s available in Japan only; I was unable to find it on the Targus store for the U.S., but check for your country if interested.

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There is a hidden cost to this. I pay around $100 a year for the dotMac service, which gets me a puny 250 MB of storage, for email and iDisk. For most of us heavy email users, the syncing and all is going to need a lot more storage that currently being offered. I get about a gigabyte worth of email in a week, and this includes PDF files, photos, and of course the all important “tips.” If I have to sync these between my two PowerBooks, well I would need four times the storage, just for email alone. In other words, another $50 a year (according to current Mac prices!) In recent days, Apple has been pushing its dot Mac service hard, and is trying to sign-up as many as possible … perhaps in preparation of the Tiger launch. Storage should not cost this much, as Yahoo and Google have shown us.

Stephen Castellano in his post about the Moore’s Law and Storage points out that with Google trying to replace our hard drives with online storage, there will be disruptive implications far “beyond the technology sector.” $129 for the OS, $150 for this … well no wonder Steve’s company is in dollars! Atleast this will ensure that I don’t have to use Windows!

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