News about en-us BranchOut, the company that develops a professional social network that runs on top of Facebook, has made a key hire today, poaching a Yahoo exec for its leadership team. Ebbe Altberg, the former senior vice president, media engineering at Yahoo is joining BranchOut chief operating officer.]]> Love it or hate it, your job is a big part of your life. But you probably don't go to LinkedIn everyday. Maybe you only visit a few times a year. BranchOut thinks your professional network should be more like a home than a tool. So five months ago it stopped updating its app in preparation for today. What's emerged is a more vivid way to tell the story of how you bring home the bacon.]]> Facebook moves pretty fast. If you don't attend the Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp, you could misunderstand it. To give us the lowdown on how well Facebook's ad business is doing and what it's like to ride the Facebook traffic roller coaster, we've got two big new additions to the day's panels. Rick Marini- founder and CEO of BranchOut, the most popular Facebook-based professional networking tool. Tom Bedecarré - CEO of AKQA one of the world's leading ad agencies that helps brands spend millions on Facebook. Get your tickets to see them and Facebook's heads of product, platform, and engineering  outline the company's philosophy of the answer the tough questions about Facebook's future.]]> "People crave feedback on their professional lives," say Brendan Wallace and Adeyemi Ajao, co-founders and co-CEOs of Identified, a young San Francisco-based startup that has been hard at work at gamifying the job search. Today, while millions of resumes live in the cloud on sites like LinkedIn, job seekers still aren't providing all the relevant details on their online and social profiles that would help recruiters identify them as standout candidates. To encourage people to do more with their professional profiles, the startup created its so-called "Identified Score" to measure how in-demand a user's background is to prospective employers in realtime. Yet, knowing that users want more direct feedback on how they can improve their career tracks, the startup wants to go further and is setting its sights on becoming a recommendation engine. To do so, the startup is announcing today that it has closed on $21 million in new funding, bringing its total venture capital investment to $26.5 million.]]> BranchOut is officially going for the big time. The company, which makes a professional social network that runs on top of Facebook, is announcing today it has closed on $25 million in new funding, bringing its total venture capital investment to $49 million. This latest batch of money, which serves as BranchOut's Series C round, was led by the Mayfield Fund with the participation of previous investors Accel Partners, Norwest Venture Partners and Redpoint Ventures. The money will be used mainly for hiring more employees to add to BranchOut's current full-time staff of 45, founder and CEO Rick Marini said in an interview, which you can watch in full in the video embedded above. At less than two years old, BranchOut certainly seems to be on a fast track when it comes to funding. But according to Marini, the money is only following the company's very real growth. BranchOut now has more than 25 million registered users, more than half of which -- 13.5 million -- are active on the app each month. To put those numbers into context, more than three new users are joining BranchOut every second. When BranchOut first debuted in July 2010, it was often characterized as a "LinkedIn for Facebook" -- but it's becoming apparent that BranchOut is carving out a very clear identity of its own.]]> ]]> At the start of 2012 BranchOut had just 1 million monthly active users. Then the professional networking app hired a dedicated growth team, launched a mobile web app, and hit the network effect tipping point. According to AppData, by February it had 2.7 million MAU. Now the Facebook-based BranchOut is blowing up, riding the employment needs of blue-collar workers past the 10 million registration mark to reach 5.5 million MAU, half from overseas. Take heed entrepreneurs, this is how you concoct a startup growth formula...]]> BranchOut, a professional social network for Facebook, is announcing the launch of RecruiterConnect, a tool for recruiters and hiring managers to source job candidates on Facebook and build private talent networks. BranchOut says that RecruiterConnect is also the first enterprise software product available on the Facebook platform. Launched in July 2010, BranchOut is sort of like a LinkedIn for Facebook because it allows you to network and find jobs through your friends on the social network. BranchOut's Facebook app lets you search for companies and then shows you all your friends who either work there or know somebody who does. The application basically unlocks the massive amounts of career data about your social graph on the world's largest social network.]]> BranchOut, a professional social network for Facebook, is announcing a partnership with jobs and resume site CareerBuilder to help users bring social networking into the job search experience. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Launched in July 2010, BranchOut is sort of like a LinkedIn for Facebook because it allows you to network and find jobs through your friends on the social network. BranchOut's Facebook app lets you search for companies and then shows you all your friends who either work there or know somebody who does. The application basically unlocks the massive amounts of career data about your social graph on the world's largest social network.]]> Editor’s note: Guest contributor Jon Bischke is a founder of RG Labs and is an advisor to Altius Education, Fatminds and Udemy. You can follow him @jonbischke. For people who spend most of their days within a few blocks of tech start-up epicenters such as South Park in San Francisco, University Avenue in Palo Alto or the Flatiron district in New York, last week’s jobs report must have created some cognitive dissonance. After all, we’re in a boom/bubble right? It’s really hard to hire good people isn’t it? But take a moment to step outside the world of high technology and a dramatically different picture emerges of what’s going on in America.]]> Exclusive: Professional social network LinkedIn has shut down API access to a number of developers for terms of service violations, according to the company. The six developers whose access to LinkedIn's API include Facebook-focused professional network BranchOut, Monster's social recruiting app Beknown, brand management app Visible.me, resume service Daxtra, professional reputation manager Mixtent and CRM-Gadget. The shut down of access for BranchOut and Monster's similar (and recently launched) app BeKnown are particularly surprising. According to LinkedIn, BranchOut, which has been compared to a LinkedIn for Facebook, violated the network's API TOS with its plans for a premium enterprise recruiting search tool. Charging fees for access to LinkedIn's content, is a no-no, says the network.]]> Exclusive: BranchOut, a professional social network for Facebook, has raised $18 million in Series B funding led by Redpoint Ventures with Accel Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, and Floodgate also participating the the round. This investment brings BranchOut's total funding to $24 million. Geoff Yang, founding partner of Redpoint Ventures, will join Accel Partner Kevin Efrusy on BranchOut’s board. Launched in July 2010, BranchOut has often been compared to a LinkedIn for Facebook because it allows you to network and find jobs through your friends on the social network. BranchOut's Facebook app lets you search for companies and then shows you all your friends who either work there or know somebody who does. The application does what LinkedIn hasn't done with Facebook— it unlocks the massive amounts of career data about your social graph on the world's largest social network that was just impossible to get to before.]]> ]]> If you're like me you've been seeing Newsfeed Facebook notifications from something called Branchout more frequently lately. The status updates don't lie Branchout, a LinkedIn for Facebook, has seen explosive growth in January growing from 10K to 250K monthly users, with a total usership now in the hundreds of thousands. We brought CEO Rick Marini into the TCTV studio to talk to him about why exactly the Facebook app was growing exponentially, namely because of the network effect after "super connectors" like Mike Arrington and LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman joined. ]]> ]]> ]]> When you want to hang out with your friends online, you go to Facebook. When you want to look for a job, you go to LinkedIn. Well, maybe not for long. BranchOut, a startup that is essentially building a LinkedIn for Facebook, raised $6 million in a series A round. Several news sites reported the funding yesterday when the SEC filing came out, but other than Accel Partners, none of the investors were known. Here they are: In addition to Accel, which led the round (partner Kevin Efrusy sits on the board), the other two VCs were Mike Maples of Floodgate and Tim Chang of Norwest Venture Partners. But the round also attracted a lot of high-profile super angels, including Napster founder Shawn Fanning, former Facebook platform manager Dave Morin (Fanning and Morin are now co-founders of Path), Bebo founder Michael Birch, Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg, Tickle founder James Currier, Blippy founder Philip Kaplan, Googler Ben Ling, Naval Ravikant, and Josh Elman (former Facebook, now Twitter).]]> ]]> Everyone you know is on Facebook, and most people have added their resume information. But you can't search by companies and even searching within your friends for company names is virtually impossible. So if you want to research which of your friends work at a specific company, or which friends of friends do, you head on over to LinkedIn. Well, not anymore. BranchOut launched this evening, a new Facebook application that makes career networking a snap. The application unlocks massive amounts of career data about my friends and friends of friends that was just impossible to get to before.]]>