LinkedIn rides on India

Liz O’Donnell, Director, International, LinkedIn swung by India recently and she was gushing about the success of the professional networking site in the country. “There are over one million members of the site with India given as their country of residence”, she said. That is the site’s second-largest international user base after the United Kingdom, and O’Donnell predicts that within the year, India will exceed the UK and be second only to the US, which still accounts for half of LinkedIn’s approximately 25 million user base.Explaining why she was in India, O’Donnell spoke about how the site was looking at expanding its reach in India and also looking at ways of leveraging advertising opportunities here. “We offer advertisers an extremely targeted demographic”, she said. Unlike other networking sites, LinkedIn does know about the industry that its members work in. “So if say, a car company wants to advertise to lawyers and dentists and we can deliver those demographics to them.” In fact, O’Donnell spoke about how the site is looking for new opportunities in India for both tie-ups and advertising.

“I would like to think that we are a different sort of networking site, we don’t crowd our pages with applications”, she says, but added that LinkedIn would soon start offering some applications to its users. And she also says that the site does not encourage ‘number games’, “If you look closely you will see that once people cross 500 connections we just put 500+”, she mentions, “Not that we don’t encourage connections, but making contacts for numbers is plain silly.”

'Brutal attack by the enemies'

Hours after the suicide blast near the Indian embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan on Thursday morning (October 8) that killed at least 9 local Afghanis and injured scores, world reactions are coming in thick and fast.

While the Afghan President Hamid Karzai called the explosion a 'heinous act of terror', US envoy to India, Timothy Roemer also condemned the attack and said America supports India against terror.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai strongly condemned the bomb blast outside the Indian Embassy, saying it was "heinous act of terror" planned to kill innocent civilians. Karzai said the perpetrators of the attack were vicious terrorists who were killing innocents to gain their malicious goals.

"This heinous act of terror was an obvious attack on civilians and the perpetrators of this attack and those who planned it are vicious terrorists who kill innocent people for their malicious goals."

Officials from the Afghan government have confirmed the attack was aimed at the Indian embassy. The latest suicide blast comes one year and 3 months after a blast of the same intensity rocked the Indian embassy premises on July 7.

In July 2008 a suicide car bomber had rammed the front wall of the Indian Embassy killing 41 people and wounding 147 in one of the deadliest attacks in the Afghan capital.

In August 2009 four civilians were killed in a suicide bomb attack near the American embassy in the Afghan capital Kabul. About 20 others were injured when a man driving a car blew himself up.

A month later in September a suicide car bomber struck near the front gate of NATO headquarters in Kabul, killing seven people and wounding nearly 100 in a brazen daylight attack.