WebProNews

Tag: LinkedIn

  • LinkedIn Gives Tips For Successful Gossiping

    When things are going well for a business, gossip can be a destructive force, damaging morale, creating cliques, and hampering productivity. In the worst of times, though, it’s best to have a network of informants to help stay on top of all the political maneuverings taking place off-the-record in the office. That’s why LinkedIn, the social network for professional networking, has chimed in with some tips on how to become an expert gossip in the workplace, while using LinkedIn to your advantage.

    Nicole Williams, Connection Director at LinkedIn, provided the tips in a blog post over at the official LinkedIn Blog. She acknowledges that gossip is generally frowned upon, but says that eliminating it outright isn’t “consistent with human nature.” From the blog post:

    Whether you like it or not, gossip is a part of the career landscape. While you should absolutely steer-clear of the malicious, bullying, back-stabbing, falsehood kind of word-on-the-street, there are times and places when getting and having the goods are going to be hugely advantageous to your career.

    Williams’ first tip is that to receive good, informative gossip, you’ve got to be ready to give it as well. She suggests being up-to-date on all of your social networks and your colleagues’ recent status updates to be ready to provide some pertinent info.

    Her second tip is to be prepared for whatever gossip may come your way. The LinkedIn Today newsfeed is suggested as a good place to keep up on all of the industry news that could affect your career, but there are plenty of other online sources where workers can obtain up-to-the-minute information.

    The third tip is to learn how to make rumors stop when they are about you. To do this, Williams suggests outing the truth without embarrassing yourself, confronting bully gossips, and getting out ahead of the rumor mill by providing plenty of good news about yourself on your social network profiles.

    Before you criticize LinkedIn too much for encouraging rumor mongering, realize that gossip is a part of the socializing that defines humanity. Whether or not you choose to participate, in a sufficiently large workplace you will still have to be prepared to deal with it, and its consequences, on a weekly basis.

  • LulzSec Releases 10,000 Twitter Accounts Complete With Passwords

    LulzSec announced their return just last week and they’re already causing a bit of a stir. The group used a security loophole in a third party Twitter application to gain access to about 10,000 Twitter accounts.

    LulzSec, now going under the name of LulzSec Reborn, announced on Saturday that they had leaked the accounts of people use the TweetGif application. It seems to be a relatively unknown application that allows users to easily Tweet out gifs.

    As you can see, LulzSec seems to have attacked this particular application just for the “lulz.” They claim it to be nothing serious and they probably don’t even intend to use this information for anything. That being said, you should change your password now if you have ever used TweetGif.

    So what did LulzSec manage to take from TweetGif? According to PC Magazine, the TweetGif data table contained usernames, passwords, real names, locations, bios, avatars, the token the application uses to pull Twitter data, and the last Tweet to come from that account. It’s a ridiculous amount of information that a third-party application is privy to. Twitter has always seemed to be pro-privacy, but handing over this much information to a questionable third-party app seems to be pretty hypocritical.

    Thankfully, this attack is nowhere near the scale of the recent password leaks that have affected LinkedIn, eHarmony and Last.fm that saw millions of passwords leaked online. The security loophole has been fixed, but you should change your password for those sites as well just to be safe. Fortunately, somebody has created a site that allows you to see if your password for LinkedIn was leaked. As for eHarmony and Last.fm, better safe than sorry.

  • LinkedIn Defends Its Password Leak Response

    Over 6.4 million LinkedIn member passwords were leaked to a hash-cracking forum last week, causing LinkedIn members to worry about the site’s security. As the week went on, the scope of the leak grew to encompass both eHarmony and Last.fm. Though LinkedIn Director Vicente Silveira has already outlined LinkedIn’s response to the leak, he took to the LinkedIn Blog again over the weekend to further clarify and explain how the company reacted to the incident. LinkedIn has understandably been receiving some very pointed questions from members, and Silveira uses his latest post to answer them. From the blog post:

    First, it’s important to know that compromised passwords were not published with corresponding email logins. At the time they were initially published, the vast majority of those passwords remained hashed, i.e. encoded, but unfortunately a subset of the passwords was decoded. Again, we are not aware of any member information being published at any time in connection with the list of stolen passwords. The only information published was the passwords themselves.

    Silveira announced that LinkedIn is now working closely with the FBI to catch those responsible for the password therft. He reiterated a point he made in a blog post on Friday, saying that the company has received no reports of any accounts being breached.

    When LinkedIn learned of the leaked passwords, it first sought to confirm that the passwords were actually from its members. Once it had, it immediately began to disable the accounts of those members whose passwords had already been cracked. After that, all member accounts that were part of the leak were disabled. Only after all of that was done were the emails sent out to users explaining how to reset their passwords.

    Silveira stated that an initiative has been underway at LinkedIn to implement greater password security by salting its database of hashed passwords. Evidently, this process had already completed by the time news broke of the leaked passwords. Silveira announced that LinkedIn will be releasing “additional enhancements” in the future.

  • LinkedIn Password Leak Caused No Unauthorized Access

    LinkedIn is trying hard to stay transparent in light of the LinkedIn password leak this week, in which more than 6.4 million passwords from the site were leaked to a online hash-cracking forum. The social network for professional networking responded to the leak within hours, locking down accounts associated with the leaked passwords and sending out emails to the affected members explaining how to reactivate their accounts.

    Today, Vicente Silveira, director at LinkedIn and point man for the company’s announcements regarding the leak, has posted another update about the situation over on the LinkedIn blog. The post aggregates all of the information LinkedIn has on the issue, the steps it has taken in response, and more individual password security tips. In addition, Silveira revealed that LinkedIn does not believe any member accounts have been accessed by unauthorized parties. From the blog post:

    To the best of our knowledge, no email logins associated with the passwords have been published, nor have we received any verified reports of unauthorized access to any member’s account as a result of this event.

    Another new piece of information Silveira revealed is that, though LinkedIn disabled the accounts associated with the leaked passwords that had already been cracked, it will now begin disabling other accounts they believe may have been compromised by the leak. Those members will also receive an email instructing them on how to reset their passwords. As a reminder, those emails will not contain links of any sort, and users should ignore unsolicited email requests to change their password or verify their email.

  • LinkedIn Password Leak Brings Email Spam

    LinkedIn Password Leak Brings Email Spam

    With more than 6.4 million LinkedIn passwords leaked onto a hash-cracking forum this week, there is no wonder that spammers will have a field day with the confusion it brought. Cameron Camp, a security researcher for the ESET cybersecurity software company, announced that ESET had been notified by “several” people that they had received spam emails purporting to be from LinkedIn. The emails asked users to confirm their email address with LinkedIn, and provided a link to do so. Camp reports that the link actually sent users to an online pharmacy. This spam email resembles others such as the Google+ spam email that was identified earlier this year.

    LinkedIn yesterday responded to the password leak within a few hours, announcing on its blog that affected accounts had been disabled and that members would be receiving instructions on how to reset their password. One point Vicente Silveira, director at LinkedIn, made clear in his blog post announcing the company’s response was that the emails sent out would not contain any links to reset passwords. From the post:

    …members will also receive an email from LinkedIn with instructions on how to reset their passwords. There will not be any links in this email. Once you follow this step and request password assistance, then you will receive an email from LinkedIn with a password reset link.

    This mirrors password advice Silveira gave in an earlier blog post yesterday where he stated that users should never change their password by following a link in an email they did not request. As Camp pointed out, these types of email spam are common, and these particular emails might not be related to the recent password leak. Still, users should be careful of these types of spam and other, more malicious phishing attacks which redirect users to websites spoofed to look exactly the same as the login page for a website they use.

    (Screenshot courtesy ESET)

  • MD5crypt Password Scrambler Not Safe, Says Creator

    One of the more interesting things revealed to the public during the LinkedIn password leak debacle is the fact that entire forums exist where black-hat hackers work together to crack hashes. The speed with which LinkedIn and eHarmony’s passwords were obtained from the leaked hash is also disconcerting, considering that these companies are both large and reputable. The fact is, a company can do everything right when it comes to password security and still have something like what happened this week occur.

    Poul-Henning Kamp, the creator of the Md5crypt password scrambler said as much today in a post on his personal blog. Kamp declared that the software he created back in 1995, and by extension other standard hashing techniques, are no longer by themselves viable as decent password protection. From the blog post:

    The MD5crypt password scrambler was created in 1995 by yours truly and was, back then, a sufficiently strong protection for passwords.

    New research has shown that it can be run at a rate close to 1 million checks per second on COTS GPU hardware, which means that it is as prone to brute-force attacks as the DES based UNIX crypt was back in 1995: Any 8 character password can be found in a couple of days.

    As the author of md5crypt, I implore everybody to migrate to a stronger password scrambler without undue delay.

    What this means is that as computing power and speed has rapidly risen, MD5 and similar hash functions have become vulnerable to “brute-force” attacks in which computers simply guess a hash at a rapid speed. Kamp suggests that any new standard algorithm take at least 0.1 seconds to run on a high-powered computer, making such attacks take far longer than they currently do.

    Of course, this declaration is a reaction to LinkedIn’s hashing methods being publicized. It has been known in the security community for around 8 years that MD5 is vulnerable. LinkedIn was not using Md5 to hash their passwords, but a different, similar function called SHA-1. Kamp suggests that any website storing more than 50,000 passwords design their own algorithm, making it more time consuming for hackers to crack their passwords.

    (via ZDNet)

  • LinkedIn Password Leak May Trigger Irish Investigation

    LinkedIn has already confirmed that more than 6.4 million of their members’ passwords were leaked to a hash-cracking forum earlier this week. And though the company has also taken reasonable steps to resolve the issue with its members, questions still remain about why the hash containing the passwords was unencrypted, and how the hacker got access to the passwords in the first place. Those questions may soon get answers if an Irish investigation into the leak goes forward.

    Reuters is reporting that the office of the Data Protection Commissioner in Ireland is in contact with LinkedIn over the matter, and may begin an investigation. The office feels the situation is within their jurisdiction, which includes data theft. Reuters is quoting both the deputy data-protection commissioner and a spokesperson for LinkedIn’s London office as having confirmed that LinkedIn is keeping the Data Protection Commissioners Office “abreast of the situation.”

    According to its website, the office of the Data Protection Commissioner was established under Ireland’s 1988 Data Protection act. The office upholds the principle that organizations that keep user data have a responsibility to keep the data private, safe, and secure. The Data Protection Amendment Act passed in 2003 updated Ireland’s data principles to include a European Union directive that declares individuals should “be in a position” to control their data. The Data Protection Commissioner upholds these rights and can enforce them by fining data holders who are malicious or irresponsible.

  • eHarmony Passwords Leaked Along With LinkedIn

    The story surrounding the LinkedIn password leak has focused on the professional networking social network because a majority of the more than 6.4 million passwords stolen were for LinkedIn. However, it has been discovered that a minority of the passwords were also from the dating website eHarmony. The company confirmed the situation in a post on the eHarmony blog:

    The security of our customers’ information is extremely important to us, and we do not take this situation lightly.

    After investigating reports of compromised passwords, we have found that a small fraction of our user base has been affected.

    eHarmony has taken steps similar to those taken by LinkedIn to remedy the situation. The company has reset the passwords to affected accounts and sent an email to those members detailing how to reactivate their accounts. eHarmony also threw out a few password security tips similar to the ones given by LinkedIn yesterday, including using long passwords with varying types of characters, changing passwords every few months, and using different passwords for each service used.

    The eHarmony passwords were the same type of unencrypted hash as the LinkedIn passwords. LinkedIn announced in its response to the matter that it has recently begun encrypting the hashes their passwords are kept in. eHarmony also emphasized its security measures, but did not go into detail. From the blog post:

    Please be assured that eHarmony uses robust security measures, including password hashing and data encryption, to protect our members’ personal information. We also protect our networks with state-of-the-art firewalls, load balancers, SSL and other sophisticated security approaches.

    eHarmony reiterated in the post that it “deeply regret[s]” any inconvenience the ordeal has caused users.

  • LinkedIn Tips For Freelancers and Contractors

    Yesterday’s LinkedIn password leak no doubt made the company’s public relations people very stressed. The LinkedIn Blog was used as the source of company announcements regarding the leak and password information, meaning other blog posts were pushed aside. Today it looks as if LinkedIn is back on schedule, posting a belated blog entry that is dated for Tuesday, June 5.

    The post is not from a LinkedIn employee, but a guest named Jodi Glickman. She is a consultant, public speaker, and author of the book Great on the Job. In the post, Glickman gives tips for how freelance and contract workers can use LinkedIn to help them find work. She gives three major tips for how independent workers can network using the site. From the post:

    At the end of the day, building and maintaining a strong freelance business boils down to building relationships, marketing yourself regularly and using your extended network to source opportunities. Stay in touch with former clients, classmates and colleagues, don’t be afraid to highlight your skills and talents and ask others to vouch for you. Opportunity is more likely to come knocking at your door when you proactively set yourself up for success.

    Glickman’s first tip is for freelancers to have their LinkedIn profile fully fleshed-out and up-to-date. She advises that it is okay to boast a little, and to make sure keyword skills make it into the profile description. Also, pictures are important, and she touts LinkedIn’s recently acquired SlideShare software as a great way to show off previous work.

    Her next two tips are to get recommendations and network. These seem straightforward, but for a freelancer or contractor these tasks can be more difficult. Glickman advises offering an exchange of recommendations, and contacting previous clients when looking for more work. She also stated that using LinkedIn to search out new potential employers is important, and encouraged using mutual connections on the social network for introductions. The last tip she gives is to put LinkedIn’s group feature to good use. There are hundreds of freelancer-based groups on the site, covering every niche imaginable.

  • LinkedIn Passwords: Find Out if Yours Was Leaked

    The LinkedIn password leak debacle yesterday made LinkedIn members question the site’s security measures as well as their own password security measures. LinkedIn responded to the issue within hours, disabling the leaked passwords and sending emails explaining the situation to those members affected by the ordeal.

    Though the situation is resolved for the moment, many are still curious as to whether their password was among the over 6.4 million passwords that were leaked to a hash cracking website this week. Though any members affected should have already received an email from LinkedIn, those who want to be extra-sure can check out a site called LeakedIn. The site hashes your password using the same method that the leaked hash used, and then searches for it in the leaked hash dump.

    LeakedIn was created by web designer Chris Shflett and some colleagues, partly to give LinkedIn users some peace of mind, and partly to further chastise LinkedIn for the leak. Sheflett introduced the site in a post on his blog:

    The app hashes your password using JavaScript, so your password never leaves your computer. You can verify this by viewing source, but if you prefer, you can also just provide your hash. We’ll let you know if your password is one of the 6.5 million that were leaked as well as if it has already been cracked.

    Keep in mind that there is no way to know whether the leaked hash was the full range of passwords that were (presumably) stolen from LinkedIn. The safest bet for every LinkedIn member at this point is to change their password, and the password for every service they were using that same password for.

  • LinkedIn Password Leak Confirmed and Remedied

    This morning it was reported that over 6.4 million LinkedIn passwords had been leaked onto the internet and were in the process of being decrypted by hackers. Now, LinkedIn has finally been able to confirm that the leaked hash did indeed contain LinkedIn passwords. Vicente Silveira, director at LinkedIn, made the announcement and outlined LinkedIn’s remedy for the situation in a post over at the LinkedIn Blog. From the post:

    We want to provide you with an update on this morning’s reports of stolen passwords. We can confirm that some of the passwords that were compromised correspond to LinkedIn accounts.

    Silveira stated that LinkedIn members whose passwords have been compromised have had their password invalidated and will not be able to access their accounts until they reset their password. Those members will receive two emails from LinkedIn. The first will outline the steps members must take to reset their passwords, but will not contain any links. This is in keeping with Silveira’s password advice posted earlier today that stated members should never change their password from an email link. The second email will be from LinkedIn customer service, and will explain the situation to members who are unaware of the password leak.

    “We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused our members,” said Silveira. “We take the security of our members very seriously.”

    This was a fairly quick and decisive response from LinkedIn. The most important piece of advice for users at this point is to change their password for any service that is using the same password they had been using for LinkedIn. Of course, questions still remain about how the passwords were obtained from LinkedIn in the first place.

  • LinkedIn Provides Password Protection Tips

    The news broke early this morning that millions of LinkedIn passwords may have been leaked online. Hackers are currently working to decrypt a hash of over 6.4 million passwords and have, at last count, succeeded in getting upwards of 250,000 of them. Many of the passwords already decrypted were undoubtedly passwords that were not strong to begin with.

    Though LinkedIn has not yet been able to confirm that its security has been breached, it has stated that an investigation is ongoing. In light of this news, the company has decided now might be a good time to refresh its users on the finer points of creating and protecting a good password. Vicente Silveria, director at LinkedIn, has provided some password security tips in a post over at the LinkedIn Blog. From the post:

    While our investigation continues, we thought it would be a good idea to remind our members that one of the best ways to protect your privacy and security online is to craft a strong password, to change it frequently (at least once a quarter or every few months) and to not use the same password on multiple sites. Use this as an opportunity to review all of your account settings on LinkedIn and on other sites too. Remember, no matter what website you’re on, it’s important for you to make sure that you protect your account security and privacy.

    The post also contains specific, common tips for password security such as signing out of accounts on public computers, never changing a password through an email link, and changing passwords every three months. When creating a password, Silveria suggests that users make it longer than 10 characters and fill it with random capitol letters, punctuation, or symbols. He warns against choosing a password out of a dictionary or using the same password for multiple websites.

    You can follow the ongoing developments in the LinkedIn password hacking story here. If the company does admit to a security breach, it will have many questions to answer about its server security measures.

  • LinkedIn Passwords Leaked Online

    LinkedIn Passwords Leaked Online

    [UPDATE 2]
    LinkedIn has confirmed the security breach and invalidated the affected passwords. Users can reset their password to regain access to their accounts. Read the full story.

    [UPDATE]
    LinkedIn has tweeted an update on the situation from their end. They state that they have not been able to confirm a security breach. This could mean that LinkedIn simply hasn’t found any evidence yet, or it could mean that the hackers on the forum were mistaken that the hashes were LinkedIn passwords. More updates will follow.

    LinkedIn
    @LinkedIn     Our team continues to investigate, but at this time, we’re still unable to confirm that any security breach has occurred. Stay tuned here.
    9 minutes ago via web · powered by @socialditto
     Reply  · Retweet  · Favorite

    [ORIGINAL ARTICLE]
    A hacker has leaked a massive 118 Mb hash file that contains the passwords of more than 6.4 million LinkedIn users. The file was posted to a Russian forum and fellow hackers have begun to decrypt the hash.

    The file was first leaked yesterday afternoon, and the first report of passwords being cracked came two hours later. The latest update on the forum, which is currently offline, brings the total number passwords that have been compromised to over 200,000. Weaker passwords are likely the ones that have already been compromised.

    LinkedIn has acknowledged the password theft in a tweet from its official Twitter account:

    LinkedIn
    @LinkedIn     Our team is currently looking into reports of stolen passwords. Stay tuned for more.
    49 minutes ago via TweetDeck · powered by @socialditto
     Reply  · Retweet  · Favorite

    Though 6 million is only a fraction of LinkedIn’s more than 150 million members, it is still disconcerting that the leak has occurred. To LinkedIn’s credit, though, the passwords were hashed, meaning the company was taking reasonable precautions with regards to password security. Server security, on the other hand, is another matter. There is still the question of how the hash file was obtained in the first place.

    We will continue to provide more information on the situation as it develops. There is no way to tell whether your password has been compromised short of searching through the passwords already leaked, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt users to change their password for LinkedIn, and for any other services using the same password.

  • LinkedIn Addresses Mobile Calendar Privacy Concerns

    Social networks have been struggling to find a balance on the issue of privacy for years, and LinkedIn is no different. Being the social network for professional networking means privacy is especially important to LinkedIn – careers can be dashed if highly personal information is shared haphazardly. In the past week the company has updated its privacy policy, and today it is addressing some privacy concerns that have been raised about its mobile calendar feature.

    With the LinkedIn app for mobile platforms, such as the iPad, users can enable the calendar feature of the app to sync with their mobile device’s calendar and pull in information about the meetings they have scheduled. With the feature enabled, users can view the LinkedIn profiles of the people listed as attending a meeting. While this may seem to be a simple way to remember names and prepare for a meeting, LinkedIn admits that there have been concerns about what the company does with the event information, particularly meeting notes, that it pulls from device calendars.

    To alleviate concerns, LinkedIn Mobile Product Head Joff Redfern outlined exactly what the company’s policies are with regards to calendar data. He provided clarity in a blog post over at the LinkedIn Blog:

    In order to provide our calendar service to those who choose to use it, we need to send information about your calendar events to our servers so we can match people with LinkedIn profiles. That information is sent securely over SSL and we never share or store your calendar information.

    In an effort to make that algorithm for matching people with profiles increasingly smarter we pull the complete calendar event, including email addresses of people you are meeting with, meeting subject, location and meeting notes.

    So, while LinkedIn does pull what could be considered sensitive meeting information, Redfern is adamant that the company does not store or share the information with third parties. He also reiterated several times in his post that the calendar sync feature is opt-in, meaning users must explicitly give LinkedIn permission to pull their device’s calendar information.

    Redfern stated that LinkedIn has taken immediate action to improve the mobile calendar’s privacy features. “We will no longer send data from the meeting notes section of your calendar event,” said Redfern. Also, a “learn more” link will be provided to better educate users on how the feature uses their calendar data. These changes have already rolled out for the Android version of the LinkedIn app, and the iOS version will be updating soon.

  • LinkedIn Updates its Privacy Policy

    LinkedIn Updates its Privacy Policy

    LinkedIn, the social network for professional networking, announced this weekend that it will be updating its privacy policy. Starting on Thursday June 7, the company’s Privacy Policy and User Agreement will be updated for clarity and to provide LinkedIn members more control over where their data can be viewed.

    Eric Heath, the director of legal for product at LinkedIn, announced the changes in a post over at the LinkedIn Blog. There are two major changes in policy. LinkedIn will now delete personally identifiable information obtained through their plug-ins and off-site advertising after 24 hours. This is likely a reaction to Facebook coming under pressure from European activists regarding its off-site advertising practices. LinkedIn has also “enhanced” its privacy controls by making public profile privacy settings for members also determine the information that can be accessed by search engines and third-party plugins.

    “Ensuring more privacy and control over your personal data remains our highest priority,” said Heath. That’s probably the best place for a social network to prioritize privacy. As Facebook has found out in the past few years, privacy is not something that can be overlooked, and social networks have a responsibility to their members to make privacy policy crystal-clear.

    The last time LinkedIn updated its privacy policy was almost exactly one year ago. At that time, the company allowed members to opt-out of being mentioned in ads for products they have recommended, and gave members the ability to opt-out of information sharing through LinkedIn’s browser plugins. LinkedIn’s privacy policy can be viewed on its website.

  • LinkedIn CEO Talks Social Network Success and the Future

    After warming up the crowd at D10 with a funny video making fun of modern brand marketing, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman sat down with All Things Digital’s Kara Swisher for an interview about where LinkedIn fits into the social landscape. Weiner responded in his normal way – by throwing out quotable slogans and business-speak faster than they can be comprehended. Weiner is a PR department’s dream CEO, and he would place well in a business-knowledge quiz tournament against other tech CEOs.

    “Today LinkedIn is about connecting talent with opportunity at a massive scale,” said Weiner. Both Weiner and Hoffman believe LinkedIn is still running on the same vision as when it started, and has simply scaled to massive proportions. Weiner boasted that the social network has over 161 million members who use the site. Oh, and don’t think LinkedIn began as simply the “Facebook for professionals,” as Swisher called it. Hoffman was quick to point out that his company started before Facebook.

    Even so, the comparison of LinkedIn and Facebook is one that is hard to overlook, and the topic of Facebook’s recent IPO inevitably came up. While Facebook is under fire for its IPO’s poor performance, LinkedIn saw their IPO as a huge success. Weiner did not gloat, though, and compared an IPO to a wedding. “A lot of people can remember what the weather was like on their wedding day. I don’t think it has a lot of bearing on the success or health of their marriage.” said Weiner. “For us, the IPO was a stepping stone.”

    Hoffman mentioned that he believes the high number of current tech startups creates a noise that means company valuations are going “up in a way that is probably unsustainable,” and Weiner said that business fundamentals, not a successful IPO are what produces success. The CEO certainly has results to back up his claims: LinkedIn’s first-quarter financial results for 2012 blew past analyst expectations by more than doubling the company’s revenue since the first quarter of 2011.

    Weiner also summarized what is in store for LinkedIn in the future. He stated that the company is working on simplifying its products and services, continuing to grow, and localizing its products using more languages. As an example of the company’s localization efforts, LinkedIn India has been slowly growing successful over a number of years and recently hit the milestone of 15 million members. Weiner also declared that LinkedIn will invest in monetization products and invest in “everyday value propositions,” which he explained to mean products such as the new LinkedIn iPad app.

    You can watch the highlights from the interview below. The D10 conference is a yearly conference organized by The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital website. The conference eschews presentations and marketing pitches in favor of one-on-one interviews with people at the forefront of technology.

    (via All Things D)

  • LinkedIn Parodies Commercials in its D10 Interview

    LinkedIn Parodies Commercials in its D10 Interview

    Kara Swisher’s interview with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman detailed LinkedIn’s very stable roadmap for building its social network while also making it profitable for investors. There were no surprises or big LinkedIn announcements, but the heads of LinkedIn did bring a parody video that shows the social network for professional networking actually has a pretty good sense of humor. In the video, television commercials for products such as cars and medications are parodied, while the most inane focus group ever imagined grades the ads. Oh, Weiner and Hoffman also make an appearance turning down an overzealous brand marketing executive. There’s a lot going on, but the dry humor contrasting the ridiculous parodies makes the whole thing worth watching.

    Perhaps Weiner could give Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg some tips on keeping things light and funny. Zuckerberg is going to need a good sense of humor if he hopes to take all of the current criticism of his company’s recent IPO, much of it personal, in stride. It’s too late for Zuckerberg to ask Weiner for advice on how to successfully launch an IPO the way LinkedIn did, but perhaps some advice about how to double revenue over the course of a year and greatly impress analysts could still be helpful.

    The D10 conference is a yearly conference organized by The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital website. The conference features interviews with influential media and technology figures. D10 tries to differentiate itself from other tech conferences by eschewing scripted presentations and marketing pitches.

    (via All Things D)

  • LinkedIn India Reaches 15 Million Members

    LinkedIn India Reaches 15 Million Members

    LinkedIn’s India division has reached a new milestone: 15 million Indian professionals now use the social network. Over on the LinkedIn Blog, Hari Krishnan, country manager at LinkedIn India, described the company’s excitement at how quickly India has embraced LinkedIn. He states that LinkedIn India’s member base has grown 300% since the beginning of its operations. According to Krishnan, LinkedIn India’s quick growth has been due to the large scaling in operations that LinkedIn has performed in the country over the last three years. From the blog post:

    Our growth hasn’t been in terms of just member numbers alone. India is now the 2nd largest market for LinkedIn after the US. Over the last three years, we have also scaled up operations significantly. In addition to our Mumbai headquarters and two other offices, we have also launched a Technology Centre in Bengaluru, our first such facility outside of Mountain View, California. LinkedIn’s member base in India encompasses professionals and students at different stages in their career. It is individuals like these who are utilizing the various tools that help them engage with other professionals, gain insights and in turn grow their businesses or chart out their career path. The success stories of some of our members, have been outstanding. From acquiring overseas business to securing that dream job, Indian professionals from various industries have leveraged LinkedIn to further their career.

    Of course, Krishnan also mentioned the new mobile offerings that LinkedIn has been focusing on lately. He believes that LinkedIn India can help the country’s economy and will improve the career progression of professional Indians.

    15 million people is a good start, but when you consider that India’s population is greater than 1.2 billion people, it’s easy to see that LinkedIn still has a long way to go, and plenty of room to grow.

  • LinkedIn Teaches Non-Profits How To Use LinkedIn

    Every month, LinkedIn has employees take one Friday off to volunteer their skills for charity, help their local community, or focus on improving themselves. In the past, LinkedIn employees have held a Hackday for veterans, put on a multicultural “Top Chef” competition, and hosted a “WimbledIn” tennis tournament. This month, employees have organized to teach non-profits how to use the LinkedIn website to help jobseekers land a gig.

    Jessica Lau, a relationship manager at LinkedIn, detailed the volunteer work in a post on the LinkedIn Blog. LinkedIn’s May inDay was the LinkedIn For Good Foundation’s first Pro Bono inDay – days during which members of the foundation volunteer their skills. From the blog post:

    We have always been encouraged to volunteer at different organizations during our InDays and these experiences inspired my colleague Ariana Younai and I to take this May inDay to the next level by organizing an event around non-profits. Along with the support of our coworkers, we created a series of trainings to help jobseekers leverage LinkedIn to manage their careers, recruited our colleagues to volunteer, and worked with a few local nonprofits to conduct the trainings at their offices.

    Four workshops were hosted worldwide in Dublin, London, New York, and Mountain View, California. The Mountain View event was attended by non-profits such as Upwardly Global and Goodwill of Silicon Valley. LinkedIn employees trained non-profit employees how to find jobs and manage careers using the LinkedIn website. Volunteers also taught lessons on how to best position themselves on LinkedIn, given the current job market. The goal was to familiarize the non-profits with LinkedIn enough for the non-profits themselves to teach job-seekers how to use the site.

    All of these workshops are part of a LinkedIn For Good Foundation initiative to expand volunteer trainings globally, and sessions are being organized for other cities such as Toronto and Chicago. And, while volunteering promote and teach LinkedIn to non-profits might not be the most selfless cause a LinkedIn employee could devote his or her inDay to, it is certainly true that LinkedIn can be a potent tool for helping the jobless find work.

  • LinkedIn: Where Engineers Want to Work [Infographic]

    LinkedIn’s CEO, Jeff Weiner, recently gave a speech in which he declared that the U.S. doesn’t have enough skilled workers to fill the 3.5 million U.S. jobs currently open. The other side of that coin is that the highly-skilled workers who can get hired often have many jobs to choose from. Some of these workers are looking toward fortune and the future by helping startups perfect their technology.

    Linked in has provided a handy infographic showing just what startups in the San Francisco Bay Area are attracting the industry’s top engineers. The chart ranks the companies, all with fewer than 500 employees, by the interest each garnered on LinkedIn from January to March of this year.

    From this list it’s easy to see what is currently interesting to engineers: cloud computing. Both Arista and Nicira, the most interesting companies according to LinkedIn, provide cloud networking solutions. Also, the sector of the industry LinkedIn calls “big data” is growing quickly and so is engineer interest in it. Cloudera, Palantir, Hortonworks, and Splunk all focus around creating software that helps businesses make sense of large data sets. Although Pinterest cracks the top 10, interest in the popular social sharing network might be waning since march, as its number of active users begins to plateau.

    LinkedIn's top 10 attractive Bay Area startups

    (infographic courtesy LinkedIn)

  • LinkedIn Today Gets a Redesigned Interface

    LinkedIn Today, LinkedIn’s social news feed, has just debuted a new, redesigned interface. The new, blocky style seems to take its cue from the new LinkedIn iPad app, and makes it easy to scan through stories and see who shared them.

    Joann Wu, the senior designer of user experience at LinkedIn, detailed the interface changes over on the LinkedIn Blog. Wu states that a major design principle for the new LinkedIn Today page was simplicity. She used words such as “elegant” and “delightful” to describe how the news reading experience should be for users. From the blog post:

    One of the core focus areas for LinkedIn Today has been to design a user interface that is engaging and simple to use. The default magazine theme layout creates a nice page hierarchy that allows users to quickly scan and identify the most interesting and relevant news and content.

    Below each article is the option to share it or save it for later, as well as a list of which of a user’s network connections have shared the article. It’s also easy for users to customize the types of stories they see on LinkedIn Today. The “Customize Your News” tab, seen below, allows users to chose from dozens of industries and categories to follow on the site.

    LinkedIn Today customization page

    The design of LinkedIn Today does seem “elegant,” at least when compared with the jumble of the Facebook News Feed. The redesign is a good move for the professional networking social network, along with its recent focus on mobile. It fits with what LinkedIn’s goal now seems to be: to keep users on the site even when they are not actively looking for a job or an employee.