• Forbes, Wednesday, August 4, 2010 1:28 PM

Marking its first acquisition, LinkedIn on Wednesday said it bought a start-up called Mspoke. According to Forbes, Mspoke "has some valuable software and engineering talent in the field of real-time pattern spotting." LinkedIn officials, meanwhile, said the technology would be used to recommend content, such as news, messages and what executives in similar jobs are reading and doing.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but LinkedIn probably paid well under $5 million, reports Fortune. Based in Pittsburgh and associated with engineers from Carnegie Mellon University, Mspoke tried to offer real-time analysis for both news and Internet data, but has reportedly been inactive for a year. LinkedIn also said it has now registered over 75 million members, over half of them outside the U.S. Last December, the social net raised $76 million. Accordig to Forbes, the Mspoke purchase is likely the first of several, and part of a strategy to get consumers to spend more time inside LinkedIn.

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