LinkedIn, the business networking site, on Monday gave the world the most detailed glimpse yet of its forthcoming application platform, which will be rolled out over the next few months.

Seeking to capitalise on the success of Facebook’s platform strategy, LinkedIn’s platform will do two things: First, like Facebook, it will allow outside developers to build applications that live inside the LinkedIn site. Second, it will allow outside companies to embed LinkedIn data in their own applications. The results could be interesting, as Eric Eldon of VentureBeat writes:

With this platform, it’s easy to imagine LinkedIn data appearing within Salesforce and Oracle business software, along with these [companies] creating modules that feature information from their software within LinkedIn. The result of this sort of integration: You’d automatically see valuable business connections as you’re working.

Because of its exclusive business focus, successful applications on LinkedIn may have difficulty gaining traction on other social networks where users place a greater emphasis on games and entertainment. Still with 16m business users, LinkedIn is already a big and potentially lucrative market in its own right. With Facebook rumoured to be working on ways for users to distinguish between social and work relationships, and with individual companies examining ways to take advantage of social networking technologies to encourage better communication between their own employees, further distribution opportunities may not be far behind.

(Maija Palmer in London writes:)

Indian IT services companies have been trying to break into the European market for years. Despite their patient pitching for contracts, and small strategic acquisitions, potential customers in countries like France and Germany have been reluctant to embrace their offshoring models. Many industry observers have been expecting the Indian companies to make a big acquisition - like buying Atos Origin - to establish themselves. Now however, it looks like there could be another way - football.

Satyam, one of India’s five largest IT outsourcing companies, has signed a multimillion dollar contract to sponsor the FIFA World Cups in 2010 and 2014. It is the first time the company has sponsored any sports event on this scale.

Rama Raju, co-founder and chief executive, says the World Cup gets a better audience than the Olympics and could be particularly powerful in building awareness in Europe, which accounts for around 23 per cent of Satyam’s revenues.

The company is even considering drafting in Zinedine Zidane to help woo the recalcitrant French.

It’s seems worth a shot. Even at multiple millions of dollars, the FIFA strategy is a lot less risky than buying and - more to the point - trying to integrate Atos Origin.

Last year’s fight in Washington over "net neutrality" will probably go down as just an early skirmish in a much longer battle between the network operators and the internet services companies.

The next front: which side reaps the lion’s share of the money for serving up targetted advertising to internet users. This has been the preserve of companies like DoubleClick, whose cookies track behaviour on the Web and use this to serve up relevant advertising, but there’s no technical reason why the network operators shouldn’t insert themselves into the process. Using gear designed for "deep packet analysis" (the same equipment that makes censorship on the internet possible), they could easily "listen in" on the traffic flowing across their networks to develop a far more precise picture of an internet user’s behaviour than the one available to DoubleClick.

Internet companies don’t seem to realise what could hit them. Bill Gurley, a partner at Benchmark Capital, issued this warning today at the Always On venture capital conference (see note below):

I don’t think people in the Valley believe this. I used to doubt it - but I’m 100 per cent convinced [the network companies] are going to do it, and they’re going to get away with it.

The implications for privacy seem huge. But according to this story in the Wall Street Journal, some smaller US telecoms companies are already trying out the idea.

Last year’s fight in Washington over "net neutrality" will probably go down as just an early skirmish in a much longer battle between the network operators and the internet services companies.

The next front: which side reaps the lion’s share of the money for serving up targetted advertising to internet users. This has been the preserve of companies like DoubleClick, whose cookies track behaviour on the Web and use this to serve up relevant advertising, but there’s no technical reason why the network operators shouldn’t insert themselves into the process. Using gear designed for "deep packet analysis" (the same equipment that makes censorship on the internet possible), they could easily "listen in" on the traffic flowing across their networks to develop a far more precise picture of an internet user’s behaviour than the one available to DoubleClick.

Internet companies don’t seem to realise what could hit them. Bill Gurley, a partner at Benchmark Capital, issued this warning today at the Always On venture capital conference (see note below):

I don’t think people in the Valley believe this. I used to doubt it - but I’m 100 per cent convinced [the network companies] are going to do it, and they’re going to get away with it.

The implications for privacy seem huge. But according to this story in the Wall Street Journal, some smaller US telecoms companies are already trying out the idea.

Over on the Left Coast, the turmoil in the New York markets certainly feels a long way away.

In fact, given what’s happening elsewhere, the mood today at one of Silicon Valley’s top financial conferences seems almost complacent (no doubt it owes something to the location, on a remote bluff overlooking the foggy Pacific Ocean.)

And why not? Venture capital worldwide is likely to top $40bn this year for the first time since 2001, and IPO stocks in the US are up 20 per cent since June, compared with a 1 per cent  rise in the Nasdaq. That lubricates a lot of new deals for the financiers and entrepreneurs mingling here.

So it’s a good thing that Paul Wick of J&W Seligman, one of the biggest specialist tech mutual fund investors, was on hand today to cast a cold eye over the good and bad of what’s been happening in the IPO market.

Asked whether he thought any investment banks led better IPO deals than others, he certainly did not shirk the question:

"UBS has underwritten a lot of clunkers," he said, starting with but not limited to Vonage. Then there’s Needham, which "has underwritten lots of crummy companies - [though] they have also on occasion had something everyone has overlooked that has been a diamond in the rough."

Even Goldman Sachs, which he generally credits with backing good companies, does not escape the scorn. "Glu Mobile was a real clunker," he said of the mobile games company whose shares were priced by Goldman at $11.50 in an IPO earlier this year and now change hands for around $5. But then, that should have been an easy one for investors to spot: "The Glu Mobile CEO previously rode 3dfx [Interactive] into the ground."

Then there are the sell-side analysts, who were meant to have cleaned up their act after the scandals of the dotcom bubble.

"The sell-side has gotten worse and worse over the years in sucking up to the VCs and sucking up to the public companies," according to Wick. "It’s really quite disturing." He points to coverage of companies like Data Domain, whose rising stock prices seem to be an excuse for analysts to simply raise their price targets higher.

"As you get close to the 6 month lock-up date [for Data Domain], suddently everyone’s target prices have crept up," he complains. "It’s really bothersome for those of us trying to navigate the public markets. What we see happening, the sell-side totally ignores the fact that there’s a ton of competition coming at them in 2008, a lock-up expiration is coming. We’re supposed to just hang on to these things - and buy more."

For good measure, Lise Buyer, a former sell-side analyst who masterminded Google’s IPO, had this to say about the latest crop of new internet companies: "Putting a double vowel in the name of a company doesnt actually guarantee a better valuation." You have been warned.

Gangs of professional cyber criminals may be targeting a computer near you. That is just one of the messages contained in this week’s year-end wrap-up from F-Secure, the IT security specialists. F-Secure says their virus lab detected more than 500,000 pieces of malicious code this year, up from 250,000 last year.

But the trade in viruses, trojan horses and other sneaky programmes isn’t just getting bigger - it’s also getting more sinister as gangs of organised computer criminals have come to dominate the trade in viruses, worms, and other computer bugs. As F-Secure writes:

There was a great deal of volume seen during 2007. Malware authors are producing variants in bulk. Genuine innovation appears to be on the decline and is currently being replaced with volume and mass-produced kit malware. But while new techniques weren’t developed — the existing techniques were refined and adapted for much greater effectiveness. There are some very dangerous faces in the big crowd.

Like their cousins, the spammers, this new breed of cyber-criminal is drawn not so much to the technical challenges of writing malware, but to the financial returns. Hence their newfound interest in Apple, whose growing market share this year has made it a target of professional hackers. With the launch of Apple’s iPhone, one can only expect the shenanigans to continue as hackers look for ways to target it and other internet-enabled mobile phones.

All this is set to add up to a lot more work for the virus researchers whose job is to keep on top of the hackers’ latest exploits. "The situation is getting worse for sure," says Patrik Runald, an F-Secure researcher. "I see the next couple of years being a test of endurance."

Count me a cynic, but I’m still having trouble accepting that Verizon Wireless has really changed its spots (this was the surprise news last week that it will "open up" its network to any device or internet application, within reason.) The latest development: CEO Lowell McAdam, having got the taste for this new religion, now says he’s even going to build mobile devices using Google’s Android technology (see this interview with Business Week.)

Common sense suggests that Verizon Wireless is not simply going to throw it’s business model out with the bathwater. For now, that model involves luring customers to company stores with cheap subsidised handsets, selling them large volumes of airtime at flat rates, and packaging this with company-backed entertainment services like V Cast. Why, then, would it let "open" handsets and any old application (think Skype) onto its network?

The key here is the terms. When I spoke to McAdam about this last week, he said he was going to apply a pay-by-the-packet charge to allow these non-Verizon devices to connect. This comes at just the moment the wireless industry is moving en masse to flat-rate pricing, having realised (as the fixed-line internet guys did years ago) that this is the only way to get consumers to stop worrying about costs and start surfing in earnest.

In the Business Week piece mentioned above, where McAdam gets warm and fuzzy about Android, it’s also noteworthy that he doesn’t say that these devices will be open to any application. That’s Google’s hope, but living in the real world, it has accepted that some companies may want to use its software to build "locked-down" handsets. On top of these considerations, Verizon Wireless has also said it needs to vet outside hardware for security and network stability reasons.

OK, so maybe this is starting to sound a little cynical. Let’s assume that McAdam should be taken more at his word and Verizon Wireless will not go out of its way to thwart the openness it has so publicly espoused, and may actually even do some things to promote it. Even then, it still isn’t facing a mass change in customer behaviour. Given the choice of a cheap flat-rate phone or an expensive new gadget that will rack up bigger bills the more they use it, which do you think most Verizon customers will choose?

But if greater "openness" does bring a new wave of innovation in handsets, and if Verizon Wireless’s customers do eventually see value in these things, then it will be well-positioned to ride the wave of changing consumer demands. What’s more, it would have achieved this without having to go the route of rival AT&T, which surrendered an arm and leg to Steve Jobs (in the form of a revenue-sharing agreement) to win the iPhone contract. So full marks to McAdam for positioning Verizon Wireless for what comes next - only, don’t imagine he is about to give up the old way of doing things without a fight.