Something like a MySpace for business would be interesting. Make it super easy to build a landing page for yourself, with a CV, portfolio, links to your profile

Something like a MySpace for business would be interesting. Make it super easy to build a landing page for yourself, with a CV, portfolio, links to your profiles like GitHub. Give the user a lot of control over the appearance. And then people can add contacts to their network, but I'm not sure how much weight you should give to the social network part. The profiles should be in the foreground. Though it is interesting to see who is connected to whom. You could have the "vouching for skills" thing LinkedIn used to have. If you are looking to differentiate from other platforms, maybe you could add discussion groups / mailing lists, that alumni groups, or shared interest groups would use (e.g. Electronics Hackers in Berlin). There are also several ways to monetize it without being obnoxious. You can offer to host the profile on custom domains for a fee, and you can sell custom themes for profile and CV. Also you could make money selling physical business cards in a matching theme, and other nicely printed accessories. What I would not do is to sell the users data, or sell premium accounts which see more data. Everything people put in the site is public anyway, and should be easily accessible - that's the whole point of getting a landing page. Also stay away from social media. Nobody wants another feed of reshared news articles or artificial inspirational posts.