LinkedIn is a useful tool for small-business people too and this Open Forum post discusses 10 ways your business can benefit.

A BusinessWeek article reports that LinkedIn successfully raised $53 million in additional funding from VCs. This effectively values the professional networking site at more than $1-billion.

LinkedIn is one of the few social sites that has figured out how to profit consistently from user-generated content. It is expected to generate $100-million in revenue this year and its user base is still growing aggressively. Compared to the other social sites, its average user is also older and richer.

LinkedIn expects to use the extra cash to develop new communication and collaboration tools for its members and to fund expansion into new markets in Europe and China. While its current membership base is heavily US-skewed, the site does already have a significant global footprint. Singapore-based members are estimated to number well over 50,000 – making LinkedIn a useful networking and research tool for smart local businesses.

LinkedIn has unveiled a mobile version of its social network. Point your mobile browser to http://m.linkedin.com/ to check it out.

Only basic functionality is currently available in the mobile version, but LinkedIn promises that more fully-featured, phone-specific features will be coming online soon. It is also accessible in six languages, including Mandarin.

A video introduction to the mobile LinkedIn app by Branden Duncan (LinkedIn’s director of engineering) is available on YouTube.

LinkedIn, with approximately 20 million members, is far smaller than MySpace or Facebook. However, its focus on the professional networking niche seems to have kept LinkedIn immune from the social networking fatigue that has beset its more popular rivals recently. LinkedIn has nearly tripled its unique visitor statistic over the past year, hitting a high of 3.6 million unique visitors in January 2008.