In March of 2007 Xing acquired eConozco, which was then Spain’s leading business social network. This was followed by the acquisition of Neurona in June of the same year, also to in preparation for the company’s entrance into the Spanish market. Xing then opened a Barcelona-based office in March of 2008, shortly after integrating the two networks.

Today, 3 years later, Xing Spain is reporting 1.5 million users. The question of course is how stagnant is user growth and how many of these are actually active, paying users.  The other issue is that a large share of the initial users from Neurona and eConozco were thought to be from Latin America and not Spain, though there are no official numbers.

Xing’s official line is that they’re pulling the 7 person team (mainly commercial and communication) out of Spain in order to reorganize and put more focus on evolving the product. Sources tell us that an administrative contact will remain in the country as Xing will continue to work with their Barcelona-based development team, managed directly from its German headquarters.

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).

It’s likely not a stellar exit for Amiando – they’ve raised an undisclosed amount of financing over two rounds, from firms such as Wellington Partners and AdInvest and a host of angel investors like Stefan Glaenzer and Lukasz Gadowski.

FYI: XING was also a Wellington Partners portfolio company (they went public in late 2006).

Amiando currently has a staff of 35 – all of whom will retain their jobs – and says it has supported some 100,000 events in 2009 alone. It’s unclear how much revenue it was generating, as only part of its solutions are premium, paid services.

With the acquisition, XING aims to offer its 10 million+ members integrated business event services, ranging from organization to marketing, billing and execution. According to the press release, their users have organized and promoted roughly 150,000 events via the XING platform last year, so it is a straightforward strategic deal for them.

Amiando founder and CEO Felix Haas will continue in his current position.

(Full disclosure: I’m a small investor in Oxynade / MyUpcoming, which competes with Amiando to a degree).

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.

XING, which was founded back in 2003, adds that it also yielded the best operating results in the history of the company in that same quarter.

XING is, perhaps unsurprisingly considering its German roots, particularly hot in German-speaking countries, where 4.2 million of its now 10 million users hail from.

XING’s core international markets, Turkey and Spain, are also experiencing accelerating member growth with the former reaching nearly 1 million users and Spain recently passing the 1.5 million users mark. XING has set up key strategic offices in Barcelona and Istanbul to support its growth in those regions.

The company recently announced that it will launch a major new product initiative this fall, featuring a revamped design along with a host of enhancements to the user navigation and brand new features such as the mobile Handshake.

For the sake of comparison: Europe’s Viadeo claims to have signed up 30 million business professionals to date, while LinkedIn boasts more than 75 million members.

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.

Xing, based out of Hamburg has a clear German-speaking fan-base but because they take on a more proactive, personal approach to “infiltrating” new markets, they’ve grown quite well in Spain. Xing also organizes local networking events and has a very strong online ambassador community so they’re able to spread virally. This March the company was at 1.2 million Spanish users, reaching 31% growth in the last 12 months.

So where Xing’s approach is community, LinkedIn’s is utility. It would seem though that rather than stealing users from each other in the Spanish market, both companies’ user growth indicates that more Spaniards are quickly taking to online business networking. Will there be a tipping point for one or the other on the old continent?

I say one or the other because Viadeo, the other professional social network heavy weight, although based out of France has an expansion plan that appears to focus more on non-European territories. They are gunning specifically for Asia and Latin America. In Spain, Viadeo is far from successful compared to it’s counterparts.

The move is the first in a wave of internationalization the startu is planning in the near future.

The first localized version of its desktop product in German (http://xobni.de) is accompanies by a partnership with XING, Germany’s most popular business network in the German-speaking market, and LinkedIN rival.

Xobni users will now also be able to see XING contact profiles and updates in the Xobni sidebar in Outlook.

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.

It now has 708,000 Premium Members registered on the platform, again, a 17 percent increase on the same period last year (606,000 as of March 31, 2009).

The number of members worldwide increased by 23 percent from 7.5 to 9.2 million in the last year and in the first quarter of 2010, 420,000 people registered on the site.

CEO Dr. Stefan Gross-Selbeck pointed out that XING is consolidating its position in German-speaking countries.

Job ads are 20 percent up on last year, hitting revenues of €1.44 million (they were €1.20 million on March 31, 2009).

Advertising has posted revenues of €774,000, roughly 34 percent higher than last year’s figure (€578,000).

These new sources of revenue now make up almost 18 percent of XING’s total revenue.

XING added 1.2 million members in Spain, a 31 percent increase over the figures for Q1 2009, while Turkey saw member growth of 61 percent (to 810,000 members). XING acquired a Turkish business networking site a couple of years ago.

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?

The answer appears to lie in what Viadeo is calling its “multi-local” approach, which has seen major growth in China, Asia and Latin America. Overall, the social network is available in 226 countries, spanning five continents and with members working in 322 separate industries.

Viadeo’s multi-local strategy goes “beyond simple localisation”, says the company’s CEO Dan Serfaty. “From the right languages, to understanding the business and cultural needs of each territory.”

In comparison, LinkedIn covers over 200 countries and boasts executives from all Fortune 500 companies are members, while Viadeo says that one in six members are “either a business owner or entrepreneur”, with 70% of members holding middle or senior management positions.

China and India are cited as specific areas of growth, with more than a million members joining from the former in the last six months. India has seen over half a million members join since October 2009. South American membership is also on a nice growth curve, adding two million members in sixth months.

Viadeo is described as “highly-profitable”, and works on a freemium basis similar to LinkedIn. The site claims 200 million pages views per-month.

Serfaty adds: “Our growth and success in China, shows exactly what it takes to do business in territories that are often seen as ‘challenging’. It takes a deep understanding of the ‘local’ market, and does not mean exporting a particular attitude, experience or set of values.”

That’s a lesson many startups would be wise to take note.

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″.

Q3 revenues were also up 27% from the previous year to €11.7 million (Q3/2008: €9.18 million), and 8% over the last quarter (Q2/2009: €10.79 million). The EBITDA margin was increased over the last quarter from 23% to 25%. Operating six-month EBITDA also improved slightly, from €8.7 million in 2008 to €8.8 in 2009.

As of September 30, Xing had 8.3 million members. Most of them (43.4%) are still living Germany, Austria or Switzerland, where Xing is the market leader. But lately the social network is boosting its member growth in Turkey and Spain. The Company reported its strongest quarterly results to date in these countries, gaining market share from its competitors.

This September’s buyout rumours on TechCrunch, which were based on a small €3 jump in Xing’s shares but caused a much higher spike after analysts refered to them, don’t seem to materialize. LinkedIn founder Konstantin Guericke has given a good explanation why the long awaited takover offer from his company doesn’t come: It’s just not necessary. LinkedIn grows “by the size of one Xing in every three months”.

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.

Groß-Selbeck said he rather sees Xing’s future in those countries where the company has opened offices: Spain, Italy and the rapidly growing web market of Turkey. This statement was followed by him dodging a question about Xing’s previous plans to enter the US and China (he specifically responded that the focus lies on said countries and Xing plans to double its German user base in the next years). In other words, Xing seems to have stopped thinking about expanding into those regions for the time being.

My guess is LinkedIn never really feared the Germans entering their home market anyway, as a) almost no American really knows Xing, b) about half of LinkedIn’s 42 million members live in the US, c) coffers are filled to the rim and d) a $1 billion valuation is sure to let all key employees sleep soundly (Xing’s current market cap at the Frankfurt Stock Exchange: $220 million).

Google Trends shows that LinkedIn outclasses Xing in global traffic, too:

But Xing backing up in the US and China isn’t necessarily good news for LinkedIn. Their strategic decision won’t make it easier for LinkedIn to gain market share in said European countries where Xing already boasts a strong brand name and position. Here, LinkedIn is in for an uphill battle, which may take years to win (especially as Groß-Selbeck also said in the interview he intends to boost the number of employees from 240 to 360). And China has no shortage of business social networks either (Tianji, Wealink [CN] or Alibaba‘s Ren Mai Tong to name just a few).

LinkedIn is currently available in four languages (English, Spanish, French and German), with more to come soon. The only office outside the US is located in London. In Europe, LinkedIn is particularly strong in Belgium, Holland, France, Great Britain and Denmark). Traffic in China is negligible for both LinkedIn and Xing.

Quick note:
German is my mother tongue, which means I didn’t have to rely on the Google translation linked to above when writing this posting.

At the time, I thought it was a bit of a strange move to support Facebook before powering the platform of its new owner, but former socialmedian CEO Jason Goldberg – who now has the position of Chief Product Officer at the public company – told me to expect an integration with XING to follow suite soon enough.

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.

These are arguably rather mundane applications, but the bigger news is that the social network now also features its very own application platform and is about to open it up to third-parties as well. In the near future, 10 current partners will get to distribute their own OpenSocial applications on the platform, and Goldberg tells me ultimately the plan is to open up more and finetune the approval process for new apps.

For reference: XING boasts 7+ million members, mostly in Germany and neighbor countries, of which over half a million actually pay a monthly subscription fee to access some of the premium features.

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.

As of today, the service works both ways as far as the integration with Facebook goes. Once connected to the social network, users can now instantly share news with their Facebook friends, if they have a socialmedian account that is. As far as I can tell, this is the first social news service to use Facebook Connect in this manner, but Digg CEO Jay Adelson has hinted in the past that FB Connect might be the future of Digg, so expect news to come from them about a deep integration soon. Or not, of course (an announcement has been expected for some time but for some reason all remains quiet).

I asked socialmedian founder Jason Goldberg about the Facebook Connect integration, and why they went for it.

Socialmedian has always been about the news filtered by your network. The fact is that for most people around the world, Facebook is THE Network. While there has been some nice early adoption of Facebook Connect amongst blogs and pure content sites, as far as we are aware socialmedian is one of the first social networks to give the social network over to Facebook — let them take care of the profiles, the registration, and the social-graph, and we’ll stick to what we do best: the news filtered by your network.

He also hinted that there will be more initiatives launched from within Xing this Spring that will turn it into more of an open platform rather than an island, which should make it compete more effectively against LinkedIn, which is making its way in the European business social networking scene lately.

Socialmedian is basically 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. The startup was operating on a mere $560,000 in seed funding from individual investors and The Washington Post Company, so this is definitely a successful exit for them.

About 3 weeks ago, we reported on XING CEO Lars Hinrich, who founded the company in 2003 and led it to an IPO three years later at the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, stepping down. He still got to announce the news, though:

Why do we think that socialmedian is a perfect fit for XING? Here´s why: In business success depends on access to the right information at the right time. Both the speed of information and the sheer volume of data have increased rapidly due to the rise of the internet. Traditional media companies, social media such as blogs, tweets, videos and other user-generated websites now provide daily news, leading to a veritable flood of information. The consequence: Time-strapped professionals are forced to parse through numerous news sources for relevant information and sort, organize, and share stories on their own.

In the short term, this is mostly about adding business news functionality into the network, and hiring experience and knowledge. But with this acquisition, XING also shows that it’s not about to give LinkedIn and Facebook, both of which are expanding rapidly across the globe, an easy path to dominating social networking for professionals. The Applications Platform division that former Jobster CEO Goldberg will be heading is an entirely new business unit and will likely take a page from the application strategy that both LinkedIn and Facebook exhibit. It will basically enable application developers and content providers to connect to the XING platform. Goldberg’s first job will be launching OpenSocial on XING (due this Spring), after which he’ll concentrate on making strategic partnerships with service providers that can bring added value to XING’s member base on a professional level.

Publicly listed XING currently boasts nearly 7 million members (up from 4.8 million in 2007), about 510,000 of which are paying about $90 per year for a premium account to get full networking functionality. XING has been cash-flow positive 3 months after the start and boasted seven record-breaking quarters after the IPO, achieving more revenues and earnings in each quarter. Revenues from January to September this year amounted to $32 million, 28% more than in 2007 as a whole.

We’re left wondering if the acquisition was settled over Twitter. If you don’t know what we’re talking about, read this.

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. (Which is a fraction of LinkedIn’s reported $1 billion private valuation). 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:

Xing is performing better than expected and has built up a huge track record with the investor community. I think 40% EBIDTA margin [and] close to three digit growth speaks for itself. I am a serial entrepreneur (Xing is my third company) and and it’s different running a 180+ people company poised for growth and that goes after acquisitions.

Linkedin is rich on members but does not have the opportunities to engage & monetize them as we do. We are well prepared and they don’t get real traction around here. You have to understand Europe to win Europe – that’s what we are doing.

In fact, Xing’s numbers aren’t that bad at all. The site currently has 6.5 million members, about 510,000 of which are paying about $90 per year for a premium account to get full networking functionality. (LinkedIn claims 30 million registered users). XING has been cash flow positive 3 months after the start and boasted seven record-breaking quarters after the IPO, achieving more revenues and earnings in each quarter. Revenues from January to September this year amounted to $32 million, 28% more than in 2007 as a whole.

But apparently, this performance wasn’t enough. Xing isn’t pointing out exact reasons, but one factor might be the sluggish traffic on the site. In comparison to LinkedIn, Xing’s traffic on a worldwide basis has stalled in recent months (see the Google Trends chart above).

The share price might be one other major reason: Xing shares never really took off and now stand at about 25.50 Euros, 4.50 Euros less than the offering price two years ago.

Xing is quite strong in parts of Europe, where the company set up offices in Hamburg, Barcelona and Istanbul, but the site never gained a foothold anywhere else: Being almost unknown in the USA and Asia is a significant drawback as far as business networking in a highly globalized economy is concerned. Xing’s core markets are Germany, Austria and Turkey, while LinkedIn is winning in Great Britain, Belgium, Holland, France and Denmark, for example. Now Xing says one of the main duties of the new CEO is to pursue a more aggressive international expansion strategy and that it has a war chest of $50 million to achieve that goal.

Hinrichs, who is widely regarded as one of the few icons in Germany’s web industry, denied rumors about his withdrawal until Friday last week via his Twitter account. In his personal blog he says he now has more time to develop and implement new business ideas.

Two companies from the motherland of Karaoke, Japan, partnered up to develop a new Karaoke system that is tailor-made to meet the demands of the blind and visually impaired.

Tokyo-based Nippon Telesoft and Xing from Nagoya will release the machine this fall. It’s Japan-only at this point but Nippon Telesoft has set up a dedicated English homepage for the product (which means a lot here in Japan) so that exporting the technology at some point doesn’t seem to be impossible.

This is how it works: The Karaoke machine is connected to a PC (via USB) in which a special software transforms song lyrics into Braille characters on a display.  When the music starts, the person using the system touches the display and can “read” the song lyrics in the form of up to 40 Braille characters appearing on the display. Memorizing lyrics is no longer needed.

Xing and Nippon Telesoft also say that several of their Karaoke machines can be operated at the same time.

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.

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).

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.

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.