Xing Archive

Business social network Xing has just released their earnings figures for the first quarter 2008 and comparisons with first quarter 2007. Overall income is up 91% to 7.51 million Euros (roughly $11.6 million). The majority of Xing’s revenue comes from premium members. Premium members accounted for 5.91 million euros in Q1/2008 (Q1/2007: 3.74 million euros).

Advertising made up just over half-a-million Euros while what Xing calls eCommerce brought in just shy of one million Euros. The company reports that the XING Marketplace for job listings doubled it’s clickthrough rate from the previous month with a total of 2.30 million clicks in the category.

Nice to see a non-advertising focused business model working. Xing focuses on business social networking and this category of users has no issue paying for services rendered. It’s still so interesting to me that Xing gets no play here in the U.S.

The full revenue charts are on the Xing newsroom. Check out our full-year 2007 Xing income coverage.

Business social network Xing is announcing the addition of a Google Maps mashup inside of their service. Assuming your contacts have listed addresses and have the correct privacy settings, you can see on a world map where the concentrations of your contacts are. Kristen Nicole suggests, "I imagine meeting planning and travel options could be one direction in which to head, as well as other location-based resources for obtaining news/updates/etc. about individual users within your contact list can also be helpful."

To be honest, why do I care about my contacts on a map? Wouldn’t a simple list of cities be easier? I agree with Kristen but would take it a step further. If Xing wants to make an absolutely kickass map, they need to add in tons of business coverage. When you select a location, tons of local resources should be shown (tie into Yelp, and YellowPages.com). Even more importantly, a list of other Xing members who aren’t on my contact list but are in the selected location that might be good matches based on my characteristics. That’d be hot.

Tim calls Xing one of the top German Web apps.

Xing has provided us with their latest user and revenue numbers this morning. As of January 2008, they have 5 million registered users. I’d love to see them share their active users as I have an account but haven’t logged into it in nearly four months.

Xing is Europe’s version of LinkedIn though they are starting to gain some acceptance here in the States as well. Over the year Xing launched a marketplace and acquired Neurona.

They have also released revenue numbers for 2007 that are on target with their guidance. Company revenues for the year ended at €19.61M (~$29M) and EBITDA at €6.89M (~$10.1M). This is double the numbers for 2006 and represents a EBITDA margin of 35.2%. 

Xing was one of our Top 10 social services in Germany.

The Social Web or Web 2.0 virus had finally hit Germany in 2006/2007, a bit later than in many parts of the world. Currently everybody in Germany – users, VCs, entrepreneurs and the media – is going wild for the social web. We’ve got social bookmarking, news, shopping, collaboration, networks and communities. Everything and everybody seems to be going social.

I’ve got the great opportunity to introduce you to some of the most interesting, fastest growing, best performing or best thinking Web 2.0 services from Germany. As there are probably more than a thousand social web services in Germany right now, I had to focus on some of them and so I picked my Top 10 Social Web players from Germany. I’ve sorted the list in reverse-traffic size order.

Luupo

Luupo is a very exciting social shopping service with an original business idea. Users can buy "luupo points" and bet them on products. With each bet the hidden product price lowers by € 0.40. The user that bets the product down to € 0 wins the product. You can also buy products. Great team and already 10,000+ users after only 5 months.

Amiando

Amiando is a great online invitation, event organization and ticket service. Choose a design, create an invitation text, add the participants’ eMail addresses, let the participants organize carpools, open a discussion board, sell tickets, upload party photos after the party etc. More than 100,000 users so far and several thousand events each month. A lot of my friends are already using amiando to organize their parties and events.

Weblin

After installing weblin as a browser plugin, you get an avatar that makes you visible for other weblin users while visiting a website which you can use to chat. Recently Mountain Partners and "High Tech Gründerfonds" another big player – T-Online Venture Fund have invested in the avatar service.

Mymuesli

mymuesli is an online shop for "user-generated Müsli". How genius is this idea?! Mix up to 566,000,000,000,000,000 different Müslis from all the available ingredients and make yourmuesli. Over 20,000 users to-date and € 125,000 turnover within 5 months.

Guut

Guut is one of the fastest growing live shopping services from Germany. Launched in the beginning of September 2007, the woot-clone has already attracted approximately 10,000 users and made € 180,000 in sales in its third month. The product selection, community spirit and pricing are its biggest attractions.

Yigg

Yigg is the largest digg-clone social news service from Germany. As of October 2007 they have more than 250,000 news items online, 12,000 users, 2.2million unique visitors and 50 million page views per month.

Mister Wong

Mister Wong is Germany’s most popular social bookmarking service. Over 3.3 million bookmarks online.

SpreadShirt

SpreadShirt is Germany’s largest and hippest T-Shirt customizer from Germany with a lot of international "arms". 250 employees, 300,000 shop partnerts and approximately 30,000 t-shirt designs submitted per week.

StudiVZ

Germany´s No. 1 Facebook clone has specialized on students. More than 4 million users make it the biggest social network in Germany and a must-have for any social networker. StudiVZ was acquired by Holzbrinck for € 80 million beginning of this year.

Xing

Xing is the most popular social network for business professionals. Currently more than 4.5 million users mainly from Europe with a majority from Germany. 100 employees from 21 nations. Formerly known as openBC, Xing went public in December 2006.

These are my personal choices — who would you add or delete from the list?

This article was authored by Tim Rohrer, 27, from Munich, Germany. He is working as an online marketing freelancer and has several projects including: Zpeech, Leselupe, Guut-insider and his newest site, 100wortereporter. Tim also closely follows the great internet ideas coming from the US market.

Xing, the business networking tool popular in Europe, has acquired Neurona. Technically it was Xing's parent company, OPEN Business Club AG who made the purchase. The Xing blog has more information about the transaction. No price was disclosed on the acquisition. Neurona holds about 830,000 business contacts.

From their blog:

I would like to express our strong appreciation and interest in the Spanish market. We sense great opportunities for us as individuals and as a company. Following our first acquisition of eConozco, with over 150,000 members, we now have a *huge number* of Spanish speaking business professionals in Spain and Latin America on the site, which indisputably makes us the market leader in the Spanish business networking market (on top of our already established market leadership in Germany).

Based in Germany, Xing leads in business networking outside the U.S. while LinkedIn is the market leader within the States.

We have just received word that Xing has launched a private beta of their new Xing Marketplace. Xing is a professional networking tool similar to LinkedIn and is widely used in Europe whereas LinkedIn is more popular in the States. It appears the service will start with jobs and then open to more service options.

It appears that any Xing user can post a job. No word on the fees associated with job postings. I have requested more information from Xing and will update as soon as I hear back. I have also requested some beta keys for our great RSS subscribers!

Dear Xing User,

We would like to invite you to become a beta tester for “XING Marketplace”.

On XING Marketplace, you’ll find the latest services, products and job openings from XING members. The initial launch will start with jobs only. Marketplace is currently in a private beta phase and will be available to all members soon.

You have been selected to be amongst the first members to test Marketplace – starting today.

You can visit Marketplace via the main XING navigation bar or via the following link:

(link removed)

Your XING Beta Team

Here are some exclusive screenshots:

These are the hottest startups from KillerStartups for the period ending April 13, 2007.

YoName.com – Search for Anyone Across Social Network Sites

yoName allows you to search for people's social networking profiles all from one spot. You can type in the person's name, their email address, or their username and see which sites they use and then go to their profiles. So far, MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, Xanga, Digg, and Match have been added. You may know just someone's name, but with that you can find which networks they're using and then check out that network and reconnect. read more »

CambrianHouse.com – Home of Crowdsourcing

You've always had a great idea but don't have the human resources to start it up? Cambrian House taps the wisdom of the people and relies the success of the model based on the theory that two heads are better than one, or in this case, entire crowds are better than one. The members of the Cambrian House elect to identify their strengths, skills, interests, super powers, etc, and submit ideas and business ventures onto the site. read more »

XING.com – Powering Relationships for the World's Business Professionals

XING.com is a business social networking site that has recently merged with it's Spanish-speaking counterpart, eConozco. Xing enables its members to not only add, edit and manage their business contacts, but also facilitates new professional opportunities through networking. The now bilingual enterprise also has representation in Beijing, Zurich, and in their headquarters in Hamburg. read more »

Ganges.com – Not Just Another Video Aggregator?

Like a growing number of sites, Ganges aggregates media– in this case videos and photos– and endows their users with the power to share, collect, find and inform. Its purpose is to 'be delightful,' and impart a feeling of joy and warmth among fellow gangesers. Said gangesers will no doubt feel tickled with delight to earn up to $40,000 with their pictures or videos; should your photo/video be voted to top place, your good karma will indeed pay off. read more »

Gigya.com – Boost Content Sharing with Gigya Wildfire

Wildfire is an incredibly useful tool for social networkers and content sites alike. Wildfire forms partnerships with content sites, such as Metacafe and Bolt, and creates a widget to put on their page that allows users to add their content to their favorite networking sites with minimal effort. Instead of having to copy and paste lines of code into their profiles, which can be difficult for less advanced web users, Wildfire allows users to choose which social network they want to send the content to, what their user name and password is, and in which section they want to post the content, and then it’s done. This allows users to continue browsing content providers’ sites without changing pages to insert the code, boosting virality for the sites. Not only that, but it’s free! read more »