I found out about ResearchGATE a while ago.  It was a me-too LinkedIn type of site verticalized for academia.  They are innovating like mad and making the site useful.  Any hiccups I've had have been immediately addressed (particularly wrong authorships and others).  They are right on for all of their correlations and data mining, even better than Google Scholar.  They've made huge progress in the past 6 months and I can't see anything stopping them going forward as an essential academic tool.   Awesome job and kudos to their team for being so proactive and insightful. 

The latest from their feed:

Big news: our latest investor Bill Gates visited our headquarters yesterday to meet the team! Check out our blog for the full report: Nov 14, 2013

Bill Gates @ ResearchGate - ResearchGate News

And some wise words:  http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/29/researchgate/Forget about revenue until the Network is valuable enough to command it.  I think they're on the cusp. 

Amazing that neither Google nor LinkedIn built this. 

Convinces me there's plenty of verticalization and innovation left in this world.