As is customary between Christmas and New Year, things are fairly quiet here at Gaensemarkt in Hamburg. The public holidays are now behind us so it’s time to start looking forward to 2012. But before we do, I’d like to look back at what’s happened here at XING over the past twelve months.

I think I’d be going overboard if I tried to go into detail about all of the new features such as the lunch planner and MINI job ad we introduced in 2011, so I’ll stick to the highlights from our product strategy and the points I think are most interesting to you.

In June 2011 we overhauled our site by introducing a completely new layout that includes new interactions focusing primarily on network activity. Not only that, we also introduced the option to “like”, comment on, share and recommend content.

Just over a year ago we acquired amiando, a Munich-based company, in order to expand and simplify our activities in the events and ticketing segment. I’m very happy about the ongoing development of our PLUS events and the fact that amiando turned over more than ten million euros by the end of the third quarter.

In terms of innovation here at XING, we recently launched our Beta Labs – a platform hosting beta-stage projects that are developed at high speed and of interest to XING users who’d like to test drive them before they go mainstream. And let’s not forget that our API will be released in 2012. (more…)

It may be the shortest day of the year, but our developers have been busy and are releasing the fruits of their labor which includes a number of optimizations.

We’ve made things easier for our mobile web app users who access XING by going to touch.xing.com on their mobile device’s browser. Now users can access group posts and view new group posts either in their “Network News” stream of by tapping << followed by “My Groups” in the menu that appears. By the way, you can also “install” the mobile web app like you would with the native apps by adding a link to your home screen. And we’re still working hard to allow you to reply to group posts when out and about. Oh, and our latest Android app now also features the optimized profile, including an easy shortcut to phone people. (more…)

There are less than two weeks until you can open your presents – people are trawling hectically through the shopping malls and streets, and on Gänsemarkt, too. The brisk pace continues a few metres above it all – our developers are nimbly tapping away, line of code by line of code, the project managers are coordinating assignments, our colleagues in Quality Assurance are on top bouncer-like form, making sure no bugs get into the platform.

Launching today: XING Beta Labs

And all our staff’s efforts are so that we can present you with a whole load of visible improvements to the platform. These include: (more…)