It’s not just Fortune 500s, contractors, financial institutions, retailers, President Obama, governments, education, military, airliners or enterprise: startups big and small alike are finding it increasingly difficult to resits the allure of tablet computing. The latest example: LinkedIn, a social networking web site for people in professional occupations, gave Apple’s iPad mini to every one of its 3,500 employees…
According to a tweet LinkedIn’s PR person sent out earlier today, CEO Jeff Weiner pulled an Oprah and decided to give each and every one of its 3,500 employees an iPad mini.
That awesome moment when your CEO dishes out iPad minis to EVERY employee @linkedin @jeffweiner
— Darain Faraz (@darainfaraz) February 13, 2013
TechCrunch was able to confirm the news with LinkedIn’s PR.
A spokesperson wrote in a prepared statement:
We wanted to acknowledge the hard work and accomplishments of all of our employees in 2012. During today’s bi-weekly All Hands meeting, we surprised our employees with iPad Minis as a small gesture of the company’s gratitude for their contributions.
By the way, when will PR people learn that iPad mini is spelled out with “mini” in lowercase, not “Mini”?
Here’s Weiner next to a stack of freshly purchased iPad minis.
LinkedIn posted quarterly revenues of $303.6 million, an 81 percent annual growth, beating Wall Street expectations by $25 million.
One employee told BusinessInsider that Weiner didn’t cheap out: each employee got an iPad mini with 32 gigabytes of storage, which retails for $429.
That’s what I call a token of appreciation!
Quickly do the math in your head: that amounts to a cool $1.5 million worth of iPads.
Expect $AAPL results next quarter to include a couple million in #iPad revenue for all the Minis @linkedin just bought for every employee!
— Brandon Duncan (@duncanbrandon) February 13, 2013
Of course, Weiner likely took advantage of Apple’s corporate purchasing policy which exercises certain discounts on volume purchases so grand total should be less then $1.5 million.
Still, that’s a lot of money to burn to thank your employees for their contributions.
By the way, LinkedIn has a nice free iOS app that looks great on the iPad.