Download the compromised list of accounts file combo_not.txt.gz here (it’s a large file) and save it into a directory. This is the file that you’ll compare your password and see if your password is part of this list.

Fire up a terminal (usually built in with the Mac operating system).

In the terminal, navigate to the directory where you downloaded the combo_not.txt.gz file

In the command line, type in:

zgrep `echo -n password | shasum | cut -c6-40` combo_not.txt.gz

(Replace “password” with your own password, case-sensitive, of course.)

If the output shows a numeric and/or alphanumeric string, your account has been one of the 6.5M that has been compromised. You should go change your Linkedin password immediately.

If there is no output, your account is not part of the hacked accounts. You may consider changing your password anyway.

(Came across a funny tweet by Hunter Walk: “Password leaks must be the new growth hacker strategy to juice 7-day-actives ” Heh.)

Update: I really don’t recommend this normally as it’s a bad habit to develop in telling people to type their passwords in to a third-party website, but if you’re a Windows user want a simple solution, you go to leakedin.org to see if your password was compromised. The people who made leakedin.org seem trustworthy and it’s a simple way for Windows users.

Increasingly, links on Facebook require you install an app to read an article, watch a video etc.

It reminded me of a rant I wrote in my Facebook six month’s ago regarding why I don’t want to use the Washington Post Social Reader app:

It’s partly psychological. It’s human nature: forced to do something, you rebel. Given the choice to do the same thing, you welcome it. Sharing is a strong, expressive action. It signifies recommendation, support, and intent. It’s personal.
The Social Reader does nothing that changes my behavior (I’ll read articles anywhere) but it’s slyly taking my social graph/network for their own desire (get more exposure or clicks to their page) without true consent from me. That’s taking advantage of me. I don’t like that.
So the cost (abusing my social graph) is far too high for me to want to read an article from them. ‘I’ll find other means.’

I still feel this way.

Betaworks Shareholder Letter

—


Your Role:
You’ll be helping the product team at Monitise, Inc in developing the next set of product features that will make an impact for our partner, Visa, Inc. You love working in teams with great engineers, designers, and other product team members. Teams may be remote, but that’s not a barrier to great products. You’re scrappy, very detailed oriented, works great under pressure, and care about delivering results. A positive attitude is an absolute must to conquer the opportunities ahead and have meaningful impact to the products you help build.

Why is this important to us and how will it contribute to our success?
We are looking for a young person with a passion for contributing to great products that will help us reach our lofty goals. Our global platform is the choice of many high profile financial institutions across the world. It’s also the reason we have a huge opportunity to build upon our game changing technology for advancing the way we all interact with money. We think we’re in the right position to help Visa bring immense value to millions of mobile users, reduce the cost of money movement, and discover new ways to move money while also making a profit along the way.

Job Responsibilities:

Job Skills:

What now?
To apply, send me your resume (steven.loi [at] monitisegroup [dot] com) and a quick note about why you’re excited about helping build mobile finance products at Monitise.

Take risks – I learned early about wanting and needing take risks. Many times, taking risks resulted in failure. But, from each experience, I always ask myself: why did the risk fail, what I should have done to better the result, and also recognize the circumstances leading up to the failure so I would know how to avoid it next time. More than anything, through these exercises, I learn to take smarter risks – evaluating the cost/benefit of each decision I make. Sounds pretty logical, right? The upside in risk taking? Risks presented new opportunities that I otherwise wouldn’t have ever experienced. You learn something new, you meet someone willing to help you, you discover opportunities, and/or you learn that you’re more capable than what you originally thought. The list goes on. Without risk, you truly don’t know your limits. Without limits, you don’t know what you can accomplish.

Ask questions, be curious, stay hungry – I’m still working on this. I’ve never had the problem to be curious and be passionate about my work. But, sometimes, I’m reluctant to ask questions if I feel they are too elementary and I may come off as incompetent. The more I give in effort, the more I realise how willing those are willing to teach and answer my questions.

Build your toolbox – I feel we sometimes lose sight of this necessary rule. that you can control (luck aside) is the ability to constantly add to your personal toolbox. Challenge the status quo is extremely tough when we’re taught to be stay within status quo. But, taking risks begets taking more risks. And if you are true to the two other lessons, risks and experience, in turn, will lead to success.

We have all the tools, resources, and freedom to become more than status quo. Sometimes, we just need to remind ourselves of it.

I’ll assert that market is the most important factor in a startup’s success or failure.

Why?

In a great market — a market with lots of real potential customers — the market pulls product out of the startup. The market needs to be fulfilled and the market will be fulfilled, by the first viable product that comes along. The product doesn’t need to be great; it just has to basically work. And, the market doesn’t care how good the team is, as long as the team can produce that viable product. – Marc Andreessen, The Only Thing That Matters

Changing consumer’s behavior is a hard thing to do. If the behavior is completely new (a new market), it’s even harder to do. Diving deep into a startup idea that requires a new behavior from users without the proper funding, resources, and timing will most likely result in failure.

Venture capitalists needs to be alligned/in agreement with the behavior change and be willing to commit a ton of capital into the change. Marketers, journalists, and bloggers will then have to pick up the trend and excitedly write about it on highly trafficked sites. Then, it’s green light for entrepreneurs to dive deep into their ideas, look for funding, and build great products.

In late 2007 (August), my startup worked on a micro-transaction gifting Facebook application for a client. We felt providing Facebook users with a way to micro-transact on a real gifts would be a fun way to give tangable gifts to our circle of friends. We felt so confident that we decided to charge a discounted consulting/development fee for a small stake in the business venture. Although popular Facebook apps at the time still consisted of simple user actions — pokes, virtual gifting, answer quizzes — we believed the value in giving real gifts would be a hit. We assumed leveraging a social networking site like Facebook would give us the distribution (users) and trust (social graph) that would make this the perfect application where all parties benefit.

While there weren’t any social network specific payment providers like ZONG, Spare Change, Boku, and Paymo available, we had experience with traditional payment providers like Authorize.net, Paypal, and Google Checkout — and we were confident with the big brands behind those methods that transactions wouldn’t be big friction feature.

We spent roughly four weeks, mostly 10-14 hour workdays, getting an alpha version out for our clients/business partners — three developers and me, working on gathering requirements, user flow, and QA. We spent the next two weeks revising the user flow, copy, inserting more gift items, and making sure out simple dashboard to log all the data worked properly. Our adrenaline were sky high when we launched! We were going to be the first (based on our research) Facebook app that can do real transactions!

Then, four weeks later, a merely 500 total users on the application. Two “real” transactions. The application bombed. No one wanted to spend money on a Facebook app. Afterall, the Facebook apps dominating the Facebook platform at the time were apps named “Superpoke,” “(fluff)Friends,” “Quizzes” but none of those apps direct transactions. The application topped out at 700 users w/ no additional transactions. We moved on to work on other application projects knowing we’ll need to keep the money coming in.

More than a year later RealGifts and GroupCard were funded by fb Fund that acted in a similiar way — real transactions in a Facebook app. That funding was miniscule compared to the other Facebook app companies like Zynga, SGN, Playfish (acquired by Electronic Arts), Playdom, Serious Business, and Slide. Heavily funded by heavyweight venture capital funding, they all implemented ways to buy virtual good and become (really) profitable for their social games.

People have become more comfortable with the idea of paying for games on Facebook, and we’re working to get as close to 100% in direct payments as we can. The reason why we still have offers is that a large portion of our international users don’t have credit cards or don’t have the capability to pay us directly, so offers are a way for them to be able to still buy virtual currency. — Jeremy Liew, LSVP Blog, Interview with Serious Business CEO

So what happened? How did social games change the behavior of users that were relundant to pay for anything to pay a ton for money for virtual goods? How did the real gifting applications convince fb Fund to fund their business idea? Why did our application fail? Why talk about it now — nearly two years since the project?

You’ll have to wait for my next post.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Focus on Virtual Goods Instead of Ads (techstartups.com)
• Send a real gift to your valentine on Facebook (downloadsquad.com)
• Announcing Inside Social Apps 2010 – Coming April 20th in San Francisco (insidefacebook.com)
• Mobile payments firm Boku gets $25M in spending money (mobile.venturebeat.com)
• The money engine behind social games (vator.tv)

This is about winning enough market share and a pay wall hasn’t helped with their apps selection. Run contests to entice developers (Paypal, Amazon) and offer awesome prizes for the best apps. Solicit feedback and iteriate on the feedback you get from developers on how to make your tools and development kit better. Win the time, wallets, and more importantly the trust of developers and your audience. Without them, you have nothing but a soon-to-be-obsolete brick and lines of code — a device and technology capable for so much, yet no magic key to unlock that power.

I spoke to a person at Palm recently on the phone. He gave me a synopsis about Palm and their modile device/webOS strategy. He even bragged about how great their platform is and how it’ll be great for the future of modile devices. He mentioned how awesome their newest phone is (Pixi). But, I think Palm has it all wrong. Even if they believe their technology makes the most sense, it doesn’t mean the mass audience cares. Sure, I took a look at their website to learn more, but the problem is, I have an iPhone and there hasn’t been enough rave, mass adoption, or reason to even consider going to the store to check it out.

The mass audience doesn’t give a crap that uses webOS uses web technology such as HTML 5, JavaScript, or CSS. Nor do they care that the web browser uses WebKit layout engine. Those are things developers care about. The mass audience care about what cool apps they can download, what games they can play, what their friends are up to on Facebook, how reliable the network/phone is in their area, and so forth. Oh wait. That’s what Apple promotes on their advertisements.

Time is ticking. Elevation Partners already put in $325M for 25% stake in Palm (current market cap: 1.56B @ price: $10.96) in the beginning of 2007 plus another $100M in late 2008. And what do they have to show for that? Another straight quarterly loss (10th) and a decline of 5% in # of units in its fiscal second quarter. This past quarter, S&M expenses rose 64% and operating cost rose 21%. The stock price has increased 3x since the beginning of this year because of the hype and anticipation that Palm will become relevant again. But, that’s all it is. Hype and anticiptation. Time is running out — In the AM many shares will be sold because of poor execution and results. Will they ever get the equation of success, right? Before they burn through all their money? Before reality kicks in and investors realize Palm is nothing more than a technology company that can’t figure out how to turn a profitable business?

Here’s the presentation below:

Startup Building 101 –