The Munich- and London-based venture capital firm invests in the technology and life science industries. Eric Ly will be working with General Partner Eric Archambeau, who previously worked at Benchmark Capital and Atlas Venture.

For the two days a month that Ly is committed to Wellington he will be focusing on social media and social networking.

Ly’s professional portfolio includes Presdo, a simple online scheduling assistant that Lee began back in April 2006, and LinkedIn, the professional networking site that was recently valued at $1 billion.

It’s one of the highest valuations for a Silicon Valley start-up since Facebook’s $15 billion dollar valuation by Microsoft last year.

With 23 million members in 150 countries, more than half overseas, LinkedIn has said it could generate as much as $100 million in revenue this year from premium subscriptions, blue-chip advertisers, job listings and corporate services.

The company has yet to address rumors of a possible buyout by Microsoft and News Corp.

“With the infusion of capital, LinkedIn is poised to roll out corporate services and explore potential acquisitions as it swiftly adds users, customers and employees,” Chief Executive Dan Nye said.

CEO Nye, who has been aggressively growing LinkedIn since he was hired in 2007, expanded the employee base from 60 to 300 in a little more than a year.
In May, LinkedIn was the fourth most popular social network with over 7 million U.S. users. The demographic of the average user is late 30s, early 40s, with an annual income of around $100,000.

Companies can sift through a network of more than 140 alumni and professional groups, including 15 million degreed professionals. About 700,000 of those professionals are registered users who could be potential job targets.

InCircle Recruiting, in beta since September, is a subscription-based service that features targeted media campaigns aimed at reaching candidates who are already employed but are open to being approached by employers. Subscriptions, which begin at around $40,000, arm recruiters with customizable tools to target members by region, occupation, academic degree, industry, current and previous employer, job functions, and more.

Chuck Taylor, VP of Marketing, spoke about the main function that sets Affinity Circles apart from competitor LinkedIn. “We encourage a lot of communication within the platform. I can send a message to anyone even if I’m not connected to them, which is one of the key differences between Affinity Circles and LinkedIn. There’s no requirement to go build out your network with a whole bunch of people before you can start communicating. Because we have these closed networks, we give every member of the community access to every other member for communication purposes.”

New features to the recruiting platform include:

1) The ability to run targeted media campaigns that promote employer’s opportunities to users meeting pre-specified criteria. Campaigns now extend beyond the inCircle community platform, in the form of emails that highlight opportunities waiting for users in the community. The system remembers the campaign criteria as long as the campaign remains active, and automatically promotes the corresponding opportunities to new users who join the network after the campaign is created.

2) The inCircle Recruiting candidate management system that enables employers to create talent pipelines for each of their job roles and to communicate with qualified candidates who have expressed interest in being contacted by a recruiter about those opportunities.

“Another big difference between Affinity Circles and LinkedIn is that we allow recruiters to specify what types of characteristics they are looking for,” Taylor said. “We have eleven different targeted parameters like current job role, current function, academic degree, and current employer. Candidates that meet those qualifications get a response from the employer for specific job opportunities. So we are defining a relevant audience for the employer, and then we’re measuring the degree to which we connected with that audience.”

Prospective interviewees can still name their own price – often between $200 and $500 per interview – and now they have an even easier time linking their customized profiles to employers.

More than 1,000 users have registered since NotchUp was started in January, according to founders Jim Ambras and Rob Ellis. The Silicon Valley startup veterans were banking on the fact that the site would be successful after many recruiters and companies voiced frustration over talented candidates already crunched for time who would refuse interview prospects.

The job site not only connects companies with high-level candidates but also makes sitting down for an interview a much more painless process due to a nice chunk of cash that sweetens the deal.

PeopleAhead.com, founded in 2006 by Babson College MBAs, uses an intelligent search platform that delivers multidimensional career profiles from qualified candidates.

Carlos Larracilla, co-founder, PeopleAhead: “Millions of jobs are posted online, but professionals and hiring companies continue to rely solely on static resumes and job descriptions to evaluate each other. Members of our community use PeopleAhead for continuous career advancement rather than one-time job search. In doing so, they establish multidimensional career profiles which contain rich information, such as 360° competency evaluations. Because our TrueMatch technology identifies alignment between member profiles and hiring companies’ available career opportunities, we streamline the arduous task of recruitment by delivering only pre-qualified, interested candidates.”

Professionals can also import their existing LinkedIn profiles into PeopleAhead to begin test-driving the TrueMatch technology.