 Well hello there, Mark Riz and Hopkins, founding editor of SiliconANGLE, coming back to you at Google I O 2013 with our ongoing coverage, extracting the signal from the noise. I am here with Ian McDonald, who is the CEO of Skillpages, a way to find skilled folks to hire and put the work or to find work yourself. So he's going to tell us a little bit about that. Ian, thanks for taking the time. Yeah, I'm very delighted to have the opportunity to chat to you. So Skillpages, as you quite rightly said, we're a social platform for finding skilled people, getting your own skill found, and finding new people to collaborate with. So say, you know, as part of your life, you need to find skilled people a couple of times a month. You might need somebody to paint your home. You might need a graphic designer to design something for you. On Skillpages you can go, you can find people who have the skills that you're looking for, see who they are, what they do, see examples of what they do, and then you can see your real life connections to them. So maybe you've got a friend in common, maybe you went to school together in the past. And the whole concept is that when you're looking for, say, a babysitter to come into your home, you like to find people with whom you can trust or with whom you have a real life connection because people like to do business with people they know or people they have a connection with. So Skillpages helps you do that in a much, much faster way and across a much wider network of people. So I want to ask you more skillpages related questions, but first let's talk about why we're talking because we're here at Google I.O., we're in the Google Plus sandbox area. So what do you, what's your deal? Why are you here with Google? Yeah, so G+. is like a really exciting integration for us. So with 16 million members on the platform, we identify that an awful lot of them are already members of G+. So now that you can sign in with G+, what it does is it immediately means that you can find people on Skillpages with the skills you need and you can see your connections to them as a result of your circles. So you can see you've got a mutual friend or you can see that your friend has added somebody to their circles. So it's a very easy way to find skill people and then get instant recommendations from people whom you know who have already had a relationship with the person you're considering using. So that's one kind of basic integration of G+. But other things that we're excited about is that on Skillpages you can, for example, post a task. I'm looking for a graphic designer to make a menu for me. When you post that task, it can get shared into your G+. stream. So your contacts on G+, all of the people who have added you to their circles can see that you're looking for a graphic designer. They can comment on that and suggest somebody. They can apply there and then or they can share it onto their networks. So you're accessing all of the contacts of the people whom have added you to their circles on G+, with one simple click. So talk about that a little bit. So first of all, you've Googled the sign-on with Google+, is new for you guys. You've just added this on. But how much referral traffic drives new hires? I mean, I know from my own personal experience, most of my jobs have not come through like a monster.com or something like that. It's come through the people that I know. So how much of like, I'm assuming you're tracking successful matches, how much does that comes from a referral and how much does that just comes from people browsing the site? So we see when somebody does a search for, I don't know, an Android developer, what we're seeing is that the likelihood of them clicking on and subsequently messaging somebody with whom they share a social connections is four times the likelihood of them clicking on somebody with whom they don't have a social connection. So almost immediately, almost more important than content is the fact that, hey, this is a friend of a friend. So your challenge of trying to hire people through your network is that you've got to contact your network all the time. You've got to tell them I need this, I need that. But that's quite a difficult thing to do. We've met today, but you probably won't call me tomorrow and say I need to find a new researcher. But if you saw, oh, there's a researcher, they look very interesting, and they're a buddy of Ian's. Maybe you'll just ping me a message and skill page and say, hey, I met you at the G+, Google I.O. And I see that you're a friend of this. Is this person any good? So it's a very fast way of finding social connections to people with whom you want to have a commercial relationship. So you've got a foot in both pools, so to speak. You've been with Facebook, you use Facebook single sign-on and you've recently, not switched, but added Google+. So tell me a little bit about the differences in the ecosystems that you've noticed so far. So from a retrospective on skill pages, we've used Facebook because G+, single sign-on just wasn't available. When it became available, we saw how many of our users were already on G+, because they can add that to their profile and we said, this is a no-brainer. This makes sense for our members. We didn't expect it would be too quick to catch on, but what we're seeing is that almost 50% of social sign-ons, two skill pages, are now through G+. See, it's fascinating, because you know, you keep hearing in the press, Google+, such a ghost town. Not the case. Absolutely 100% not. And what we're seeing is that not only is it the single sign-on is used by our users, but then the sharing of their interactive posts when they're looking for skilled people or when they're creating a new profile on skill pages, the engagement on those posts out of G+, from the news feed is extremely high. So we're seeing that almost on a par with Facebook, despite the fact that we've only been integrating for three weeks. So, what's next for skill pages? We're like five years, where's this going to go? I mean, because there's a lot of new social technology, especially coming out of the Google ecosystem. So what's next? Well, we're growing extremely quickly at the moment. So we launched in January, 2011. We've now 16 million people have joined us. They've had a 22 million skills. Over a million people a month are now joining skill pages. And what we want to be is the go-to place for finding skilled people. So just like 10 years ago, there was a thousand online book retailers. Now, Amazon is the go-to place. We feel it's an opportunity to just deliver a really easy experience for finding skilled people. We see our business growing to deliver value for hundreds of millions of people around the world, because you, me, everybody in this room needs to find skilled people as part of your daily life. If we can make that easier, then we'll deliver value for our members, create new life enhancing opportunities, and therefore deliver a scale of organization that is capable of delivering value across the globe. Well, I thank you for your time, Ian. It's been a pleasure. And we'll be back with more interviews and more demonstrations from Google Iow 2013. So keep it tuned right here.