XING

XING,Open Business Club until 17 November 2006 is a social software platform for enabling a small-world network for professionals. The company claims that it is used by people from over 200 countries. Available languages include English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, Dutch, Simplified Chinese, Finnish, Swedish, Korean, Japanese, Russian, Polish, Turkish and Hungarian. By displaying how each member is connected to any other member, it visualizes the small-world phenomenon.
The platform offers personal profiles, groups, discussion forums, event coordination, and other common social community features. Basic membership is free. But many core functions, like searching for people with specific qualifications or messaging people to whom one is not already connected, can only be accessed by the premium members. Premium membership comes at a monthly fee of 5 € (around 9 USD). The platform uses https and has a rigid privacy and no-spam policy. Unlike many other networking websites, XING provides its paying members very easy email access to any members.
XING has a special Ambassador program for each city or region around the world with a substantial constituency. The Ambassadors hold local events that promote the use of social networking as a business tool, letting members introduce business ideas to one and other, and get to know each other on a personal level.


IPO
The company went public (IPO) on December 7, 2006 with an issue price of 30 Euros. The Open Business Club Stock Ticker symbol is O1BC.DE and its ISIN number is: DE000XNG8888. XING became the first Web 2.0 company to go public in Europe.


XING Mobile
Xing.com Mobile allows users to access some of its functions using a mobile phone, PDA or smartphone. Standards supported: HTML 3.2, XHTML MP 1.0, WML 1.1.


XING Plug-Ins
Xing.com Plugins are available for free download that allow contact synchronization with Lotus Notes, Microsoft Outlook, Windows Address Book and Outlook Express. It also allows manual CSV File import–export and has a Firefox search plug-in.

History

OPEN Business Club AG was founded in August 2003 in Hamburg, Germany as a German limited liability company by Lars Hinrichs. The platform was officially launched on November 1, 2003. It was renamed from OpenBC to XING on November 17, 2006.

It gained much attention in German media and is widely used as a business network in German-speaking countries (DACH Region). Membership from other countries throughout Europe and the Far East helped the network platform grow to more than 1.5 million members in July 2006.

In March 2007, XING purchased the Spanish social networking business eConozco and intends to merge its members into Xing over the next 12 months.

In June 2007, XING purchased the Spanish social networking business Neurona. Neurona users were migrated to Xing on March 31, 2008.

In January 2008, XING purchased the Turkish social networking business Cember. Cember.net users were migrated to Xing on July 26, 2008.