Last year, LinkedIn acquired Rapportive, an email company that I co-founded. Since then, we have been furiously working together to build a groundbreaking mobile product: LinkedIn Intro.

The growth of mobile email is simply staggering. Four years ago, less than 4% of emails were read on mobile. Today, half of all emails are read on a mobile device!

So we set ourselves the challenge: bring the power of LinkedIn, and the technology of Rapportive, straight to the Apple Mail app on your iPhone.

We call it… LinkedIn Intro.

Intro shows you LinkedIn profiles in your iPhone Mail app. Let’s see the difference this makes. You've just got an email from David Buchanan, but you don't yet know who he is:

David says Crosswise would love to work with you. Is this spam, or the real deal?

With Intro, you can immediately see what David looks like, where he's based, and what he does. You can see that he's the CEO of Crosswise. This is the real deal.

Getting this far was just the first step. Check out what happens when you tap the bar:

This is a rich, interactive, application-like experience — right in your iPhone Mail app. You can see a summary of David and your strongest mutual connections. Scrolling down, you can see his occupations, past and current, and their full descriptions. You can even see where David went to school.

With Intro, you can craft the perfect response.

Intro gives you everything you need to put faces to names, establish rapport, write the most effective emails — and ultimately — be brilliant with people, and better at at what you do.

Starting today, Intro is available in English for members worldwide. We support Gmail, Google Apps, Yahoo! Mail, AOL Mail, and iCloud — all in the iPhone Mail app you already use everyday.

To get Intro for iPhone, head to intro.linkedin.com.