Our start with XING has gained lots of international attention. And I have never ever seen a 90000% increase at alexa's Mover and Shaker statistics. Another nice effect we achieved this week with openBC.com - Pagerank 7 at Google.

I have to say that I often have a lot of fun when I come to the office in Hamburg,
despite there being so much to do,  Today was no exception, we had a little
party to celebrate the new brand and yes T-Shirts for all and XING CAKE!

So here is a pictures of the team XINGing together for my camera :-)

And lookXING at the new banner behind them!

You know XING is a copywriters dream Xere are Xo many XINGs
you can do with it. :-)

There is a burning desire in my heart to build my own business for more than 20 years.

When I was 12 years old, I founded my own roll delivery business in m neighbourhood. I didn´t go to the bakery and asked for a new job. I asked the baker for how much he would sell me the rolls and resold them to my neighbours. Since then I helped to build 4 successful companies, among them eprofessional, one of the pioneers and now leading search engine marketing agency in Germany, which was recently sold to Zanox.de AG.

Over the time, I realized that while you wait for your own happiness, your happiness is always already there, waiting for you. So I continued to love what I do and do what I love by joining the management team of openBC at a very early stage. I became the first employee of Lars, who has always inspired me with his great entrepreneurial spirit of “Just Do It!”.  Many of my friends told me that I had finally achieved to make a profession out of my favourite hobby, which is networking and I absolutely loved that job, helping to build up openBC to where it is today.

My whole world began to change when I realized that I could become a real entrepreneur in the true sense of the word. It was a tough choice to make and I made it. I decided to found my own enterprise in the mobile phone business together with some very good friends who had already approached me 7 years ago to start a business together, while I was not ready yet. I will be working in the new enterprise as of today. You can always reach me at https://www.openbc.com/hp/Sarik_Weber/.

I am very grateful towards you, Lars and Daniela, and you all for being such fantastic team members and colleagues, I haven’t experienced such a great company spirit in a long time. I also want to thank all our clients and partners for the great cooperation and hope to see you again soon.

With every end comes a new beginning. openBC has a great future and I wish you all to create an outstanding community out of one that is really great already. I am very sure that we keep in touch and overall get together wherever we are!

With my very best wishes to all of you,
Sarik

Many thanks to all the POWERFLASHER people who have once again helped us out with a great piece of Flash. The multilingual flash trailer is getting great feedback and was wonderfully fast and uncomplicated for us. Kudos to Carlo, Daniel all POWERFLASHER people!

Dear members, thank you for the massive amount of feedback in the last few days. We, like you, love our old brand openBC and it was a tough choice for us to let go of a name that has served us so well. When faced with a new opportunity for innovation, as a company we always seek to lead the curve and we see the new name as the cornerstone of great developments that we believe will bring great benefits to you, our loyal members. We are convinced that we can transform the brand values of openBC to the new brand. It’s a further development of openBC and we all look forward to a continuing and constructive dialog on the platform.

The tone of the feedback we have received from you all has been both positive and negative and we are thankful for your activity and involvement as it shows you care. That said, some of the concerns that have been shared on the negative side are truly baseless. So let me address them one by one: We are not driven by investors in this decision. We do not have any new investors. The decision about the new name for our platform was made by the combined management of the company. The decision was not a sudden one, as we have planned and discussed this intensively over a period of time and we have consulted widely, while keeping the issue confidential. Although we welcome members from all over Asia, our focus is and will remain on the entire international business professional community and our roots and our servers are firmly in Hamburg, Germany. 

I would like to acknowledge all our members for bringing us to where we are today and I would also personally like to thank you all in advance for where we will go together, which will be an even bigger and brighter community. In support of this our team is working days, nights and weekends to continue to build the platform in new and exciting ways to serve you in your daily business life. We are continuously updating and improving the site and we are investing in better serving you, our members, every day.

Lars

PS. On the constructive dialogue front, I know there are many of you who hold really passionate opinions and this is great. Can I just request that we all stick to good netiquette as it is not fair to our community supporters and other members when people use personal insults and flames to make their point.

PSS. Keep in mind that openBC is SSL protected and Alexa can't track us.

Let´s XING! :D

We are on the homepage of Technorati.  Thanks to the bloggers who are spreading the news.

The  Scottish poet Robert Burns  said " The best-laid schemes o' mice an 'men Gang aft agley".

What he meant was that no matter big or small you are never guaranteed that things are going to run to plan so imagine our chagrin at finding out that anyone reading our very own corporate website now knows what we had hoped was going to be a nice surprise next week.

So to make it official the new name of the openBC website will be, drum roll please... XING Ta Da!

This new name for our site comes with a brand new and delightfully short domain name www.xing.com and we have a new tag line that we feel reflects what we really do which is....Powering Relationships.

Of course our www.openbc.com URL will continue and the name of our company Open Business Club GmbH will stay as well as will all the things that make us who we are as a community. We have a lot more fun and interesting xings planned around XING and because the news is out early you will have to wait a few days as there is still a lot going on behind the scenes of www.xing.com so in another set of immortal words, Watch this space! www.xing.com 

With the help of the team I made it this year being a finalist in the Ernst & Young Entrepeneur of the Year award in Germany. Other finalists include the guys from the restaurant Vapiano, Lukasz from spreadshirt, Dirk Rösing from SHS and many more.

Inspiring women creating 'world changing' initiatives. Global Business Women (https://www.openbc.com/net/globalbusinesswomen/)  has been attracting members like  Gabriela Ender to share in a global dialogue amongst other professional women on openBC.  Gabriela has just been nominated for  "The Top 10 Who Are Changing the World of Internet and Politics for her real-time collaboration system 'OpenSpace-Online. Everyone from all over the world is invited to review the 20 finalists at www.PoliticsOnline.com and to electronically vote for the Top Politics & Internet World Changer of 2006.

By Chris Pirillo (blaugh)

Now that the online community has selected their TOP 5, it's up to the jury to confer and determine the final winner. These are the designs that have made it through to the final jury vote:

1 - atelier21 - pure design - by Claudia .Smolinski
2 - 2nd - deep blue - by Sebastian
3 - It's all about structure - by Harald Junkermann
4 - Weil Erfolg gluecklich macht - by Carsten Thöne
5 - Classic 2.0 - by Simon Köhler

Congratulations to all of you! And good luck for the final round. Of course we can't wait to hear which design has made it and what the future profile page will look like. Michael, Chris, Cal and Thomas will announce their decision some time early next week.

I’m sure it doesn’t come as any big news to you to hear that openBC is going to change its name, most probably at the end of September.

WirtschaftsWoche: Why is the company called openBC? Isn’t it a contradiction in terms to suggest free access and the exclusivity of a business club?

[Lars Hinrichs] To be honest: I couldn’t think of anything better at the time. But the name will be changed. It will be shorter and more international. “BC” in the English-speaking world is often taken to mean “Before Christ” and “open” is often perceived as being insecure. We have to establish a global brand. I will take our members on a renaming journey with us. I can’t say any more than that for now. (Source: wiwo.de)

What you definitely can see from our current design of the openBC logo is that there’s a lot of improvement. To help us come up with a logo that appeals to the most possible members, we have hired the design specialists from Metadesign. :)

The design work they have done in the past 10 years looks impressive to me. They are one of the international leading design agencies. Amongst their clients there are big chunks such as Siemens, Volkswagen, Audi, Springer-Verlag - and now openBC. The first initial ideas they sent to us for colours and form has already totally surprised us and has gone down a completely new path we’ve never ventured down before! Wow! Keep you posted!

tag: openblog, openbclogo, metadesign, openbc

Today there were obviously frictions both within the openBC community and between openBC and members of that community.

It is difficult to know what to say especially since there are so many different accusations flying some of which are directed particularly at our staff. I suppose we should not let the facts get in the way of a good argument and yet the feeling this end is one of bewilderment as we value our communities and hold ourselves to a high standard of service.

So for the record I apologies on behalf of the team for any confusion in the groups and I committ to investigating what is going on and to, if possible, solving it in an amicable fashion.

PS: I was impressed by the open communication I´ve received today and want to continue in that spirit.

Today we are announcing a new benefit program providing specially-negotiated "openBC rates" for premium members: PremiumWorld.

Important to know that openBC does not gain financially at all from the partners listings. Instead the program leverages the value of the community to secure the best deals possible, giving members special rates that are typically only available to employees in large corporations.

PremiumWorld will evolve quickly in the coming months. We are partnering with leading global and local corporations to provide members with unique privileges and services offers.

The openDESIGN challenge enters its final stage:  In the finalists' gallery you can choose between 19 final designs - the top 3 weekly designs and jury winners from the past 6 weeks - and vote for your favourites until midnight on September 10th. So please cast your votes before this coming Sunday. The 5 finalists will be sent to our jury, who will pick the final winner. Watch this space!

Mike Arrington:

OpenBC is a Hamburg, Germany based professional social networking site that is often compared to LinkedIN. They were founded in late 2003, are profitable, and boast nearly 2 million members and 275 million page views per month.

[click article]

Now that phase 1 of the openDESIGN challenge has come to a close, it is time to look back on your latest favourites. Here are the weekly winners of of week 4-6:

Week 4:
Community: "Weil Erfolg gluecklich macht" by Carsten Thöne
Jury: "Simple and clear" by Davidov Design

Week 5:
Community: "It's all about structure" by Harald Junkermann
Jury: "It's all about structure" by Harald Junkermann

Week 6:
Community: "The new freshness" - by Phil. T
Jury: "Classic 2.0" - by Simon Köhler

I guess it was a good decision to involve both the community and the jury in the final voting stage again, noting that they selected the same winner just once. Anyway, congratulations to the weekly winners!