According to a number of reports from insiders close to the company -- including some who have talked to Om and some who have talked to All Things Digital -- LinkedIn (s lnkd) is considering an acquisition of Pulse, the news-reading app, for as much as $100 million. At first glance it might seem like an odd pairing: why would a site that is focused on corporate networking want to buy a content-recommendation app?
So a LinkedIn-Pulse combination might start as a version of the app that functions almost exactly like the current version, but also tracks content shared by a user’s business-related graph from LinkedIn, and then grows into a larger service incorporated into the site itself. And data from such a service would likely also be very interesting to Pulse partners like the Wall Street Journal, who use the app as a secondary method of distribution and subscription revenue.
