LinkedIn launches LinkedIn Lite, opens Placements service for students in India

Tech companies are increasingly realizing that if they want to make their services more accessible to Indians, they need to adapt to India's slow internet speeds. After Facebook, Google and Twitter, LinkedIn is the latest to launch a "Lite" version of its service, specifically for India.

The light version of LinkedIn's mobile website, called LinkedIn Lite, is aimed at users with slow internet connections or those on metered internet connections with low download limits.

The Microsoft-owned company says its home page on the light website only consumes 150KB, and other pages weigh about 70KB. India is LinkedIn's second largest market with over 37 million users and the company hopes that LinkedIn Lite would help it grow its user base as well as user engagement in the country.

The move follows similar releases by Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Last year Facebook released Facebook Lite for Android in developing regions including India. "We built Facebook Lite to be faster, more reliable and very data efficient even when internet bandwidth is at a minimum," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had said at the time.

Google's efforts led to Accelerated Mobile Pages, wherein it serves people on slow networks with a lighter version of web pages. Apart from launching a lighter version of their service, Facebook and Twitter have also experimented with text messages to reach out to users in India.

LinkedIn also announced that it is opening up its Placements program in the country to help students find the right job. For this, it has partnered with HackerRank, Aspiring Minds, Co-cubes and Wheebox to develop an online test for students, which will recommend jobs based on how they score.

The Placements page currently lists around 50 jobs from companies including Amazon, HCL, Samsung, Airtel, Cognizant, and Tech Mahindra in areas such as software development and marketing.