You'd think LinkedIn management, which has made no secret of its plans to take its automated schmoozefest public, would be trying to avoid trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Not so. They're aggressively marketing the company's latest moneymaking scheme, LinkedIn Research, to hedge fund managers. The premise: Traders can use LinkedIn to find "experts" with "unique input" on public companies in their portfolio. What LinkedIn marketers delicately phrase as "input," SEC investigators might well call "inside information." And the only thing actionable about the whole affair might be the insider-trading charges that result.

Recent reports from local real estate trackers put the amount of office space relinquished by local companies in the last quarter at the highest it has been since the third quarter of 2002 — 436,933 sq. ft, according to commercial broker CB Richard Ellis, or the equivalent of nearly all the space in the Transamerica pyramid. The East Bay and the South Bay also saw an uptick in vacancies. The bankruptcies of Sharper Image, Pay By Touch, and RedEnvelope helped push up San Francisco's vacancy rate, but South of Market remained an untouched bubble of business leases, thanks to expansion by Monster.com, Advent Software, and Splunk. (Photo by Thierry)