Last night we received news of what today is now official: After three years in Spain, the European business social network Xing is waving goodbye and puling operations back to its German headquarters, which now becomes its sole base. The same applies in regard to Turkey. While at first glance the news may come as a surprise, many say that they saw it coming, with little activity generated by Spanish users. All of this while competitor LinkedIn is growing its European presence. → Read More
Germany-based business social networking site XING is acquiring also Germany-based online event management and ticketing services company Amiando, we’ve just learned.
XING is paying 5.1 million euros initially, and an additional payment of up to 5.25 million euros will be made on March 31, 2013, provided various conditions are met (such as the current management team remaining within the company and the achievement of specific financial performance targets). → Read More
Germany-based business social networking site XING is acquiring also Germany-based online event management and ticketing services company Amiando, we’ve just learned.
XING is paying 5.1 million euros initially, and an additional payment of up to 5.25 million euros will be made on March 31, 2013, provided various conditions are met (such as the current management team remaining within the company and the achievement of specific financial performance targets). → Read More
XING, the European social network for business professionals, has recently passed the ten million registered user mark (even if it still advertises 9 million members on its main website).
The publicly-listed company says the second quarter of this year proved to be XING’s most successful period of member growth in the last 15 months. → Read More
XING, the European social network for business professionals, has recently passed the ten million registered user mark (even if it still advertises 9 million members on its main website).
The publicly-listed company says the second quarter of this year proved to be XING’s most successful period of member growth in the last 15 months. → Read More
LinkedIn has announced that its reached 1 million users in Spain. That’s 1 million out of 16 million users in Europe, a market that clearly important to the company, having opened offices in the UK in 2008 and a follow-up office in Holland for Continental Europe. The company claims that 15% of Spanish professionals are now using LinkedIn, with the majority coming from Madrid and Barcelona, followed by Valencia Bilbao and Seville. On a global scale, they’re gaining 1 million users nearly every 2 weeks.
In Europe we have two clear competitors, Xing and Viadeo, each leading in their respective home countries of Germany and France. And while I’m personally a LinkedIn junkie, this is a good time to take stock of all three.
LinkedIn is, like it or not, US-centric despite their European offices. → Read More
Xobni, the popular Outlook plug-in for searching and managing contacts in Microsoft Outlook, is launching a German verion. It makes sense. German speakers are their second biggest set of users according to the company.
The move is the first in a wave of internationalization the startu is planning in the near future. → Read More
Europe’s main LinkedIn competitor XING, has released a financial update which is overall positive.
In the first quarter, the publicly floated XING AG posted net income of €1.3 million. The start of 2010′s financial year has seen the site generate revenues of €12.60 million in Q1, a 17 percent increase over figures for the same period last year (€10.75 million). This equated to equating to €1.3 million profit. EBITDA was €3.3 million. There was a 23 percent increase in member numbers compared to the previous year and it had 420,000 new members in Q1. It now has 3.9 million registered members in total. → Read More
Viadeo, the social network for professionals, has reached somewhat of a milestone today, claiming 30 million members. It competes directly with the likes of Germany’s Xing and Silicon Valley heavyweight LinkedIn, which claims 65 million users.
To put Viadeo’s growth into context, however, when we reported on the company’s latest funding round in July 2009, it could only boast 8.5 million users, leaving us to question its ‘break out’ strategy. How was the Paris-based company planning to differentiate itself and win mind share over such a well established competitor as LinkedIn? → Read More
[Germany] Hamburg based business social network Xing, similar to LinkedIn in Europe, continued to grow revenue and EBIDTA in the first nine months of 2009 while profits were smaller than last year.
Total revenues from January to September amounted to €33.2 million – or $49 million – up 32 percent from the same period last year (€25.1 million). But the cumulative group profits were lower than those for the same period last year (€2.5 million for 2009 vs. €4.7 million for 2008), due to “investment costs and the assignment of €1 million in one-off tax reserves for Q3″. → Read More
LinkedIn has bolstered its position as America’s leading business social network by the month lately, with Germany-based Xing as the only company regarding itself a worthy competitor in the last few years. But now those days seem to be over – in the US and China, at least.
Today German newspaper Hamburger Abendblatt published an interview [GER] with Xing CEO Stefan Groß-Selbeck (who recently replaced founder Lars Hinrichs), and he revealed a couple of interesting tidbits of information about the future direction of his company (find a horrible, Google-translated version of the full interview in English here).
Talking in broad strokes, Groß-Selbeck said 3.5 million of the 7.5 million Xing members are based out of Germany, Austria and German-speaking Switzerland. This isn’t really that surprising, given the background of the company. But the interview also marks the first time a Xing representative publicly (albeit indirectly) admitted losing in the USA and China. → Read More
We recently covered socialmedian, which late last year was acquired by European business social network XING, when they introduced a nifty application on the Facebook platform that allowed its users to share personalized news from across the web with their social graph.
As of today, XING users can install the first two applications on its OpenSocial-driven platform: one (Xing News) takes the entire concept of socialmedian – personalized news filtering and sharing – and transforms it into a straightforward XING feature, the other one (Ask Xing) is a tool users can install to easily ask questions to the XING community and get responses without ever needing to leave the service. → Read More
Socialmedian just made an interesting announcement about connecting its services to Facebook in a big way. As of about an hour ago, you can log in and participate on socialmedian with Facebook Connect, which is a noteworthy move considering the fact that socialmedian was recently acquired by European business social networking service Xing, news we broke in December last year.
Socialmedian is essentially a personalized news filter that integrates well with social networking platforms. It aggregates news articles from around the web, blogosphere and social services like Digg, Delicious, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Google Reader, FriendFeed, etc. which are then filtered by topic. Users can pre-define which keywords and topics they’d like to receive news on, and they can also submit articles to the site with the help of a bookmarklet. Stories can be viewed either in chronological order or according to popularity on the network. → Read More
Hamburg, Germany based XING, a global professional social network that’s strong in Europe, has acquired New York based socialmedian for an undisclosed amount approximately $7.5 million in total, a mix of $4 million in cash up front and an earn-out valued at between $700,000 to $3.5 million (€0.5 million-€2.5 million) payable over three years. Socialmedian’s founding CEO Jason Goldberg is relocating to Germany and will be joining XING as Vice President Applications Platform, and the entire socialmedian team will be integrated into the company. → Read More
Germany-based business networking service Xing today announced its CEO Lars Hinrichs will step down and be replaced by Ebay Germany head Stefan Gross-Selbeck effective January 15, 2009.
Hinrichs founded the company in 2003 and led it to an IPO three years later at the Frankfurt Stock Exchange where the market cap is currently hovering at around $182 million. He will join Xing’s supervisory board as a consultant.
We asked about the reasons for his withdrawal, mainly bringing up Xing’s recent performance and the increasing encroachment of LinkedIn in Europe (especially in non-German speaking countries). Hinrichs responds: → Read More
Xing has acquired leading Turkish business networking site Cember.net. Cember.net is said to be the biggest business networking site in Turkey with over 280,000 members. The site is ranked at 117 in Turkey according to Alexa. Xing said it would use the acquisition to strength its penetration into Turkey, “one of Europe’s fastest growing economies.” Çağlar Erol and Nihan Colak Erol, the founders of Cember.net, will stay on with Xing to support the Turkish-speaking Xing community with a small team based in Istanbul. The price of the acquisition was not disclosed. → Read More
Plaxo, the Sequoia-backed start that transformed itself from a hated spam monster into a mild mannered and interesting business social network, has started a sale process according to a source. They’ve hired an investment bank, Revolution Partners, who are spearheading the sale effort. We do not know what price Plaxo is looking for. The company has raised $28.3 million to date over four rounds, including $9 million last February. The company had over 15 million users as of September 2006, and their recent integration into Google Open Social has led to a further growth spike. There were rumors in mid 2007 that Plaxo was being acquired by European competitor Xing. Those rumors were either inaccurate or the deal was never completed. I have an email in to Plaxo CEO Ben Golub for comment. If I were him, I wouldn’t respond. Update: User data from John McCrea, VP Marketing at Plaxo: For our networked address book service, we’re right around 20 million users, plus another 15 million address book accounts hosted through partnerships. Increasingly, though, we are focused on Pulse as the key driver of active users (and pageviews), and although we are still in beta (and haven’t yet broadly promoted to the address book user base), we’re seeing good month-over-month growth in all the key indicators. With Pulse, we’re at 1 million unique monthly users, up from 250K at the beginning of November. In terms of page views and time spent on the site, our per-visit numbers appear to be comparable to Facebook (based on data from Compete.com), even though our demographic is much more like LinkedIn’s (professional, 25-50 y/o). CrunchBase Information Plaxo Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Corporate social networking application Visible Path is set for an acquisition soon. The term sheet has been signed and the acquirer, says the company, is a “multi-billion dollar international company with established sales and technology operations.” No word on the terms of the deal, but a worthwhile exit price would be high considering the $22.7 million already invested in the firm. Visible Path differs from other business social networks like LinkedIn or Xing, by creating your social network out of your email inbox. The service is based on an Outlook plug-in that impressed us earlier because your connections are based on the frequency of your real interactions and not random friending or pokes. These relationships are mapped online and make up a directory of people you can search through by skill or relationship. It’s a useful feature that I imagine a service like the “email utility” Xobni implementing. Visible Path never saw as great a level of adoption as LinkedIn, which launched around the same time and has effectively cinched the U.S. corporate social networking scene. Maybe their new partner will give them some much needed exposure. CrunchBase Information Visible Path LinkedIn Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Update: I spoke with Plaxo CEO Ben Golub and a spokesperson from Xing this weekend. Both deny the deal, although Xing has other news later this week, they say. We are hearing a LOT of chatter about a possible Xing-Plaxo merger in the $250 million range. The deal makes some sense – newly public Xing is headquartered in Germany and hasn’t gotten much traction in the U.S. where it competes directly with LinkedIn. Plaxo, with a very strong U.S. presence, could give them the opportunity they need to attack this market. But people who would be very likely to have knowledge of the deal are saying they’ve heard absolutely nothing. One thing we are hearing from everyone, though: Plaxo is definitely in play. The company’s fair valuation is another matter. Last year they crossed 10 million members, claimed they were getting 50,000 new members per day, and had just become profitable. But it has been more than a year since Plaxo released those stats. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
