Over the last decade, we have seen a dramatic shift into digital as a way of conducting business. Now it’s time for businesses to take the final leap. In response to the changing demands of business owners and executives, Powerlinx was created to provide a quicker and more efficient way for business people to discover and filter potential opportunities.

Pioneered by Ebay and followed by Amazon, online dating sites, MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn, each platform enables people to open themselves a bit more to the world of infinite opportunity made possible by the Internet. Powerlinx is the next step in this digital progression.

 So Many Options, So Little Time

There are a near infinite number of possible combinations of introductions between two people in this world. However, only a tiny fraction of these meetings have the potential to actually result in new value being created in some meaningful way. The challenge of discovering and recognizing these opportunities is one we all face.

With the advent of the Internet it became theoretically possible to search every personal connection instantaneously, which, while opening up the door to tremendous opportunity, also created the risk for an incredible amount of noise, wasted time, and interrupted privacy. There wasn’t much in terms of complex online social interaction, at least not the way we think of it today and the high-value parts of a person’s life were still kept offline (e.g. purchasing, banking, dating, job searching and business opportunity searching, etc.).

Sharing Ourselves with the World

Slowly, this began to change. EBay got the ball rolling, encouraging people to bring one relatively low-risk part of their lives onto the Internet —auctioning off of old and used items. The concept was low-risk and provided an obvious upside: it provided a framework to simplify the match discovering process within one specific area of a person’s life.

Next up: low-risk one-time purchases. The arrival of e-commerce turned the Internet into the world’s largest shopping mall, but until Amazon and other sites made the search process simple and intuitive, people were slow to adopt regular online purchasing. First books, then music, then other household goods, etc… until finally we arrive at today, with same day delivery not unheard of and millions of people ordering their groceries online daily.

Slowly we began to bring the rest of ourselves online as well. MySpace broke ground when it created a platform for us to bring our social life online and the ability to cyber-connect with people we know in the real world too! The MySpace to Facebook exodus taught us a valuable lesson: a platform’s value can be measured in its ability to simplify a given area of our lives, such that we can share that part of ourselves with the world (and receive all the resultant benefits), while avoiding overwhelming us with so much information that we lose control.

Connecting With Other Business Professionals

LinkedIn introduced another element to the mix. Convincing us that it was safe to put our resumes online—and more importantly, that it’s worth it—was no easy task. For the first few years Reid Hoffman refused to allow people to post pictures of themselves, just so that people wouldn’t confuse it for another dating website.

Today’s professionals understand the real benefit of having your resume and working profile online. If it were only useful for finding a job, then we’d only update our profiles when we are ready to start looking for our next role. The real benefit is that by putting yourself out there, you never know who might find you or what opportunities might come your way!

LinkedIn provided the framework for more than 200 million professionals to share their professional ambitions and experience with the world, enabling them to discover valuable professional connections and letting others discover them.

Next up: Businesses

For business leaders, LinkedIn’s stated mission of helping individuals advance their professional lives only solves a part of their needs.

Business owners seek a platform that will help them open up their businesses to the world of opportunity. Just as an individual has unique interests, assets, and limited time resources, so does a company. Business leaders will usually know their strategic objectives for a business at any point in time (whether geographic expansion, succession planning or anything else), but they are also always open to hearing about other opportunities that they aren’t yet aware of. The key, once again, is how to connect with these opportunities in a manageable, practical way.

Unsurprisingly, business owners are particularly hesitant to do anything that could result private and high value information leaking in an uncontrollable manner. Only now that LinkedIn and other professional networks have proven the need, business owners can begin to start trusting their information to an external platform.

All of this progression has led up to why Powerlinx is the inevitable next step for the Internet as well as the business owner. Only once we started to do our purchasing, find love and discover professional opportunities online, could we even consider opening up in regards to our valuable businesses. Now that we’ve seen just how much benefit could result from doing so in all of these other avenues, no major leap would be required to envision all the possibilities, if only we could show the world what business opportunities we would be interested in, and explore what others have to offer.