XING, The First Web 2.0 IPO
by
on November 14, 2006,
Recently, one of Profy’s contributors, bel3bel, wrote up a review of OpenBC. Monday morning, Om Malik, one of the most respected names in tech journalism today, uncovered a piece of news that I thought would add something extra to the original post here at Profy: The first ever IPO from a Web 2.0 company will be issued in the near future.
This could be big, or it could sink fast. XING is the name of the outfit, previously known as OpenBC. According to the CEO, they’re evolving to provide the best professional collaboration software on the web in the coming months.
A look at the preview trailer highlighted XING’s collaborative powers, allowing for live networking to take place among teams and across corporate divides throughout the world. In the brief letter, Lars Hinrichs (CEO) states XING’s “primary goal is to enable you to do your work more quickly, easiliy, efficiently, and with greater economy.” If XING is all it’s cracked up to be, there’s a good chance that this IPO will make it flourish on the new social internet of the new millennium.
Of course, we’ll have to see how it performs when thrust into the public eye come its stock market debut, but at a time when Google is looking to encroach on Microsoft’s turf with its own web-based software suite, and more projects are starting and finishing virtually, rather than locally, XING appears to have as good a chance as any at integrating design houses, brick-and-mortar businesses, startups and commerce cornerstones.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to profy RSS feed!
Svetlana Gladkova
doe
CopyrightLawSucks 
kwarren84 
Michael Fidler 
Jaime A. Restrepo 
Yolanda
Nice article. Pity I couldn’t see it in moderation when I started writing my own version of this. Though I must say, yours is much better anyway. Nice one!
In addition to what I wrote (below, as not to be wasted!) I’d like to say that you did good at translating the letter from German. I myself stuggled with this. Good job that GigaOM helped me out! Article below.
OpenBC, recently renamed Xing, is one of the internet’s biggest competitors to LinkedIn, the current social business network dominator. But according to a very interesting posting on the officia
l Xing blog, they’re about to become the first Web 2.0 company ever to go public. Here’s the post on their blog. Apparently, Deutsche Bank and Lehman Brothers are currently the highest offerers in the bidding. The network, which currently has roughly 1,500,000 members is the European targeted version of LinkedIn. That’s not to say that European people can’t use LinkedIn (I am!), but it is evident that Xing is not meant for those outside Europe. The company is reportedly making about six million Euros in annual revenue. The first quarter of this year alone, has seen the company rake in a whopping 2,800,000 Euros! Klaus Hommels and Wellington Partners are the VC backers of the company. It seems that the three years strong company is planning to use proceeds to move into international expansion, meaning that people outside Europe will get to use the companies great services. There’s not been any new buzz on this for a few hours now, but it’s expected that another statement will be made soon.
I wish I could say I translated a letter from German, but from what I can see, the link I posted was pointed to a page with English text.
http://introducing.xing.com/ceo-video.var
Ahh. I didn’t find that! I was on the Xing website, only to find the German letter. Silly me. Hah!
I was on the Xing website, only to find the German letter.
The http://introducing.xing.com website is multilingual. Switch your browser’s language preference to get the page in all 16 languages of openBC/XING: English, Spanish, Finnish, French, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Chinese and German. The videos are not available in all languages, though.
The letter was an image, German. I see now though.
The letter was an image, German.
Oh, then we were talking about two different things. Sorry for mistaking that. The letter at http://blog.openbc.com is the official announcement, which, due to legal reasons, had to be posted as an image. (Don’t know why. Ask the lawyers.)
Paul G (and I) was talking about http://introducing.xing.com, which is the announcement of the name change from openBC to Xing.