XING Meets amiando: An Event to Remember

As announced yesterday afternoon, XING AG has agreed to acquire Munich-based amiando AG (press release), a comprehensive events platform with a wide range of ticketing services used by a lot of companies and well-known trade fairs. In 2009 alone, more than 100,000 events were organized via amiando where, just like with XING, all of the tools are online, can be used straight away, and don’t require any form of software installation.

I and everyone else involved are really excited about this acquisition as it gives us an opportunity to provide huge benefits to you, our members. More than 150,000 events are organized via the XING platform every year – that’s over 400 a day! So it comes as no real surprise that this move to offer comprehensive event organization and ticketing services is the next logical step for us.

Our plans:

The feedback we received in response to the partial amiando integration launched in May was a clear signal that you, XING’s members, wanted to have a handy and easy way of organizing and taking part in seminars and business dinners without having to wade through various forms and lists on multiple platforms.

Your wish is our command, which is why we’ll soon be transforming our events section into a fully fledged tool allowing you to manage invitations, promote events online, handle the event registration process, host integrated billing services, and manage event entry. And that’s not all – we’re working hard to add the events section to our mobile apps and mobile site as this is a feature people really need when attending events and on the go.

And just in case you’re wondering, we will of course continue to offer you the option of posting free events on XING.

For amiando users, this acquisition means that it will be much easier for them to link their events to their business network. Having said that, we won’t be changing the popular amiando interface and amiando users will not be forced to sign up to XING. Speaking of keeping things as they are – amiando will remain as a  company in Munich, Germany, with all 35 employees keeping their jobs.