LinkedIn Introduces New Dedicated Service for Hiring Freelancers

Platforms for connecting freelancers with clients are not all that uncommon nowadays with Elance, Freelancer, Fiverr and many more. LinkedIn, the business-oriented social networking site, was behind in this aspect.

Now it looks like they’ve also decided to get in on the freelancing action.

LinkedIn has created a new freelance marketplace called ProFinder. The new marketplace is designed to help freelance professionals find clients both big and small that need their services.

With the new service, all you would have to do is fill out a brief description of the type of work you want done and you are matched with qualified professionals who are a best fit for your project.

How Does LinkedIn ProFinder Work?

In order to hire a freelancer, you will have to search for the service that you need. Currently there are over 140 areas of expertise listed at Linkedin that you can choose from.

After that, you will be required to fill in the form, detailing your specific needs, your location , the time frame, budget and job requirements.

LinkedIn says that within a few hours, you can receive up to 5 proposals from freelancers based on your request and LinkedIn profile.

You will then be contacted by the freelancers with a message, a price quote and also a link to their LinkedIn profiles.

What Makes ProFinder Different than Others?

Vaibhav Goel, the Product Lead for LinkedIn ProFinder, said in an interview that the ProFinder features deep integration with the LinkedIn network, something that makes it attractive when compared with other online freelancer services.

Quality of freelancers is also an issue. ProFinder takes care of this by letting you view the profile of the freelancers, including their work history, references and their connections. People can verify how genuine freelancers are from sources they can trust. This is a big factor in deciding who to hire and it certainly helps.

ProFinder is certainly great tool from a freelancer’s perspective. It’s an improved experience because instead of spending valuable time looking for services, you can hear directly from potential clients.

Some Concerns

But not everything is in favor for the freelancers, there are a couple of disadvantages to this too. One of those is that if the client’s projects on ProFinder don’t come as detailed project outlines. This means that there’s no way to find out the actual amount of work that is needed to be done.

With this problem, the freelancer has no way of setting an appropriate asking price for his/her project. There is also no way to ask questions from the client in regards to this matter either before applying for the project. You can only discuss the matter in detail once the client has accepted you and already confirmed a price.

Secondly, freelancers only have about 5 minutes to set up a proposal and have it sent to the client. So you have to act quickly or face getting locked out from presenting a proposal.

LinkedIn has to make a ton of improvements before ProFinder can become the de-facto leader for freelancers. However, it is good to see the world’s most well-known professional social network getting into the freelancing game. Hopefully, it will listen to concerns of all stakeholders if it wants to make ProFinder useful for the freelancing community.

Whatsapp to Share User Data with Facebook for ad Targeting

Its now official. WhatsApp just stated that they’re sharing user data with Facebook.

In a blogpost updated moments ago, Whatsapp noted:

And by connecting your phone number with Facebook‘s systems, Facebook can offer better friend suggestions and show you more relevant ads if you have an account with them.

In addition to this, Whatsapp has said that it won’t share Whatsapp conversations or content of messages with anyone. That’s something not everyone is going to trust, especially when you consider Facebook’s new ball game.

Let’s not forget that Facebook had bought Whatsapp for a whooping 19 billion dollars. Clearly they didn’t invest this amount of money for a service that doesn’t even generate more than 1$ per customer per year, or in some cases not even a single penny for a lifetime.

What Does This Mean For Us?

Whatsapp had more than a billion active users as of February 2016, which means one in every seven individuals on earth has a Whatsapp account. Resultantly, Facebook — through this acquisition — will have access to major part of communication that we do, and just if you don’t know: more information means more money.

What’s more alarming for some customers would be the fact that Whatsapp could also give access to your communication to governments world over, especially the notorious NSA.

While its still early to say more on how this shared data is going to impact our lives, given the track record, we can predict that its not going to be very beautiful.

No More Snooping: HP’s New Laptops Come with Private Screens

HP has come up with a new integrated privacy screen designed in partnership with the company 3M. It will help stop what HP calls, “visual hacking” or in other words, people looking over on to your laptop’s screen. Dubbed the “Sure View screen”, it will be available with HP’s Elitebook 840 and Elitebook 1040 notebooks.

For Those who Value Their Privacy in Public

Privacy filters are what people mostly use on their laptops to avoid unapproved peeks on their work. The filters are often cumbersome and annoying. They cost about $30-$80 per filter and damaging one requires a complete replacement.

For people who like to watch “videos” privately, HP’s Sure View will be very useful.

The privacy filter is also pretty easy to activate. You only need to press Fn+F2 to turn it on or off.

If you look at the screen from any other angle except for straight on, the screen dims progressively depending on what angle you look it from.

You can see it for yourself below:

Potential Usage Scenarios

This can help when you are at an airport, coffee shop or a restaurant and don’t want others to peek at what you’re doing. Especially, if its sensitive financial information of your company or presentations you don’t want leaked.

This can be a problem often times as generally people just look at anyone’s laptop nonchalantly as there is nothing wrong with what they’re doing.

Sure View won’t prevent people from looking but at least its better than nothing and others can’t view your screen unless they are standing right over your head.

Prices are still not announced, but we expect the price of Sure View screen privacy tech to come bundled for higher end configurations of the Elitebook 840 and 1040, which cost $1,249 and $1,499. For the lower end notebooks, it could cost an extra $60-$80 from the base price.

The touchscreen versions will receive the new tech in September while non-touch versions will get it in October

Lenovo Announces its Latest Generation Gaming PC - All in One

Gaming PCs have been one of the best-looking things you can buy right now and Lenovo has only carried that notion forward. Its newest gaming PCs then, no surprises, look other-worldly and have enough power too.

IdeaCentre Y710 Cube

The IdeaCentre Y710 Cube, following the philosophy of Mac G4 Cube, is a system which is easy-to-carry and has a handle on top. It weighs just 7.4 kilograms and has multiple LEDs on the front.

Under the hood, you get a 6th-generation Intel Core i7 processor, up to a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080, and up to 32 GB of RAM. You also get a storage of up to a 256 GB SSD, or a 2 TB hard drive. Lenovo says this should be enough for 4K gaming, VR and high-quality streaming.

You also get Dolby Audio, 4 USB ports and Killer DoubleShot Pro Wi-Fi. There is also an option to buy it together with Lenovo’s mechanical keyboard and precision mouse. Pricing starts at $1299 for the version with GTX 1070 though we know where most of the cost in going.

IdeaCentre AIO Y910

The second machine Lenovo announced was the all-in-one IdeaCentre AIO Y910. This one comes with a 27-inch borderless display on the front with QHD (2560 x 1440) resolution.

The hardware is the same at a 6th generation Intel Core i7, up to a GTX 1080 GPU and 32 GB of RAM.

Pricing starts at $1799. Both these systems will be available in October.

INTEL's view on USB Type-C : Future Industry Standard

If you need convincing on why you should give up on that nostalgic headphone jack, Intel may have something under its bag to convince you.

While Apple is likely to nix the audio jack in favor of Lightning port, Intel is providing reasons why you should embrace the Type-C standard instead which you’ll see in way more phones than Lightning.

To be clear, the most surprising thing I find is how quickly people tend to forgot when the headphone jack came in your run-of-the-mill smartphone.

It wasn’t always there. It wasn’t there when Apple first outed its revolutionary touchscreen phone in 2007. Yes, that’s right, it only came next year. The first mainstream phone to get it was the venerable Nokia N95 after which we got an explosion of these devices, all with the 3.5mm jack.

After that, everyone simply started taking these tools for granted and more than a billion and a half phones later, they are everywhere. And arguably, it is that mainstream acceptance which is coming to bite makers now.

In the beginning it seemed like a simple standard. But a decade later it is no way near as sophisticated as the rest of the phone. That is certainly not an unexpected phenomenon, as we’ve seen elsewhere with Windows 7 and the 30-pin connector.

Consumers hate change, especially when it makes you spend more. We always do, particularly when the gains are minimal. But at least in this case, they are not.

Why USB Type-C

For once, the Type-C standard brings much more sophistication in audio. Features like noise-cancelling and bass boosting will be more accessible, making accessories even cheaper.

It also helps with power management, allowing the phone to shut off the connector if the user isn’t using it for a period of time, saving useful amounts of battery. It will also be used for authenticating a user’s device.

Going Type-C won’t require analog-to-digital circuitry in phones any longer, meaning even more slim designs. Finally, Intel is also unveiling a new video format for the Type-C connection, which is not really meant to be a replacement for HDMI but will be good enough for movies or productivity (though, not for gaming).

Lastly, there is the hard fact that the headphone jack is plain dumb and ill-suited for a smartphone as high-end as, say, the Galaxy Note7. Manufacturers have been trying to shrink components (like the SIM card) or replace them with newer technology in this digital age to bring much more efficiency and innovation.

Yet the audio jack stands out as the lone single-purpose device which, if not for its mass usage, could’ve likely been among the first components to get the axe.

Of course, you can argue that you will require a new dongle (which is somewhat absurd as you can simply leave it plugged to your headphones) and can only either charge the phone or get your media at the once (you can always go wireless).

But at this point, for someone like Apple or Intel, points like these don’t matter because that technology is simply archaic and is hindering the arrival of more sophisticated technology. The only point of slight contention are the various standards for Type-C connections, meaning the port on your phone may not be as capable as the one on your laptop.