Don’t mention LinkedIn to Talkbiznow’s CEO and co-founder Martin Warner. Though the headlines comparing the new start-up with the more mature professional networking site seem inevitable given the apparent similarity, the ex-JP Morgan techie thinks it was just a lazy way for journalists to make a wrong comparison. Warner says: “Everyone’s been talking about LinkedIn… they’re really just jumping on an easy story. But we are not competing with them.”

—So if Talkbiznow, which is based in both London and San Francisco, is not competing with LinkedIn, what are they offering that’s different? There’s much more in terms of features, says Warner, especially when it comes to allowing people to “do business online,” rather than simply making contact. Users, for example, will be able to set up webinars, or online conferences, in “three clicks”, as well as send each other attachments while using instant messaging. They will also be able to create ads, which they can send out to their network. An iPhone application is also imminent.

—Talkbiznow is a free service, so how will it make money? The service will eventually be ad-funded, and for “heavy power users” (those who exceed the 50Mb of free storage) a possible charge, though that hasn’t been worked out yet. Warner says he would like to keep the service completely free and wants to avoid any “direct pricing”. He especially doesn’t like the idea of incremental pricing, such as on Ning and LinkedIn, where users must pay more for a deeper service. Warner’s idea is to build up the traffic of Talkbiznow, just like a lot of other start-ups, but believes that the site can capitalize on the specialised networks that users create. For example, if a PR agency creates a network of technology journalists, and there are 10 PR agencies in total on the site doing this, they can offer this up to advertisers as a specialised audience.

—Isn’t the goal of three million users in six months a bit ambitious? After all, European business network Xing has grown to nearly six million mostly through acquisitions, while LinkedIn has the momentum with 23 million. This is another subject that makes Warner say people aren’t looking at things “intellectually”: “LinkedIn took five whole years to get to their current 23 million user base.” And no, Talkbiznow is certainly not too late to the party, he says.

Warner points out that the working population today is 2.1 billion, while the working population of the U.S. is about 190 million. He reckons LinkedIn has 16 million US users, or less than 10 percent of the working population, while in the UK, its share of the market is even tinier.  Warner says: “The point is to keep people on the platform, to give them tools that make them more productive in their business life.” For each user who is sold on Talkbiznow, he adds, they bring in six more users by word of mouth.

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