Tomorrow it will be five years ago to the day that our platform first went online. And what a five years it has been! The network began life with 472 contacts – all friends and associates of mine. Back then I would never have dreamt that these humble beginnings would turn into the platform we are today so fast: Just five years of busy networking later, we’ve grown into the European market leader and count more than 6.5 million people worldwide amongst our members. And with more than 500,000 members who choose to pay for our comprehensive Premium services, we rank no. 1 in the world as the network with the most paying customers.

We look back on many eventful and exciting moments, when our ever-growing team only not only pulled off the relaunch of the platform and change of name, but also managed to acquire and successful migrate no less than three business networks to the platform.

The last five years – all 1827 days – have seen us welcome a continuous stream of new members as the network expands on a global scale. But this period is also marked by ongoing innovation and enhancement: In the last year alone we made 50 releases and introduced 30 major new features. The fact that our ideas and features are copied time and again by others confirms this pioneering status to us. And more than half of all these innovations have been made in response to the valuable input we receive from XING members!

There are enough moments and milestones since our launch to write a book, but in this limited space I’d like to sum up just some of the highlights …

Zero hour – We go live: The platform was officially launched on 1 November 2003 under the name openBC. And by the end of day 1 our numbers had already grown to 1,000 members – a promising sign for us! Way back then just seven people made up our small virtual team: Michael, Heiner, Norbert, Hanno, Bill and Daniela. And the grand company headquarters was my front room at home! The connection path algorithm was developed on an ancient Linux 486 PC – it was already pretty old back then but this was a deliberate move: Using the slowest testing computer we could get our hands on meant we were better able to test and optimize the system speed. These days we manage more than 120 million peer-to-peer connections between our members and my living room has returned to being a family-only domain. We started selling Premium Memberships from the very first day, after just 90 days we were cash-flow positive, and time has shown that our business model is a successful one for the long term.

The Groups are born: By the Christmas of 2003 we launched groups on the platform, known back at the beginning as “networks”. Fast-forward to the present and we have an incredible 20,000 groups on XING where thousands of members interact with and benefit from one another every single day.

Online meets offline: The dawning of Events was heralded when the Munich community, headed by the now Ambassador Martin Bockelmann, began meeting up once a month offline. The official Event feature then followed in February 2004 and XING members now organize thousands of events around the world using our platform. More than 35,000 in fact in the first half-year of 2008 alone!

Unparalleled multilingualism: Recognizing the potential of the global digital world early on, we acted on this and began introducing more and more languages. As of 2005, XING has been available in 16 languages. This makes us the first and to date only online business platform to lay the linguistic foundations for truly global networking without borders.

Private Clubs: Urged on by a number of companies, we developed a customizable white label solution of our software and started distribution from July 2005 onwards. We realized though that this wasn’t completely in tune with our members’ interests and that continuing down this road would not be successful in the long term. Since then we have driven forward the expansion of our popular Groups functionality and introduced Enterprise Groups as a new home for companies on XING.

1 million members and counting!: An exciting moment came at the beginning of 2006, when the number of XING members reached seven figures for the first time. This rapid growth involved the continuous expansion of our IT resources – and our scalable software made sure that this surge in users went almost unnoticed (for the odd downtimes that occurred every now and again we apologize once again). We now have almost 200 servers in two different data processing centers.

openBC becomes XING: In September 2006 we announced that we were changing our name and relaunching the entire platform. “XING” simply better reflects the platform we are today: A global community that unites more than 190 nationalities. We had outgrown the name openBC: Too many “BC” imitators had sprung up, many people interpreted “open” as being insecure and “BC” also had associations as the abbreviation “Before Christ”… The name XING is so appropriate because it is understood in many different cultures. And there’s more than one possible way to pronounce it: Most Germans would say “Ksing”, while the Americans would most probably say “Crossing” like their road signs, the Spaniards “Zing” and the Turks “Ssing”, etc. We came up with the name by the way back in 2004, but it took us some time to secure the international rights.

The Relaunch itself: November 2006 saw the relaunch of the completely reworked platform. The XING era heralded not only a new name but also a new logo, a fresh brand-new look and a much simpler, more user-friendly navigation.

IPO becomes reality: Just one month later in December 2006, XING AG became the first Web 2.0 company to go public. This stands us in excellent stead to withstand any financial crises that come our way: We are free of debt and have a full war chest – the best prerequisites for remaining independent and continuing on our course of expansion, even in the current financial climate on the markets.

We love rails: At the start of 2007 we kick-started the internal development of Rails projects. This is the perfect framework for supporting our agile, test-driven development and is ideally suited to our technical remit of a database-driven Web front-end. Rails has accelerated our development speed. We’ve already implemented Marketplace and BestOffers using Rails and are more than pleased with the results. This way we support the rails community and remain as innovative as ever.

XING hits Spain: In March 2007, XING acquired eConozco, one of the leading Spanish contact networks for business professionals. And then in June 2007 Neurona, the largest business network in Spain and Latin America, joined the XING family, making XING the market leader in Spain. This opened up the XING community overnight to hundreds of thousands of new additional business contacts in the fast-growing Spanish-speaking world.

XING Marketplace is launched in May 2007, marking a world-first with the integration of a job website’s functionality with all the benefits of an international business network. Our billing model is 100 % performance-based, like the new B2B offers we will be launching over the coming months.

XING Mobile hits the market: A completely reworked mobile version of the platform went live in August 2007. Originally launched in 2005, XING was the first provider to offer business networking with contacts on the go – and the relaunch of our mobile portal reinforced once again our status as technical pioneers in the field of mobile networking. XING for the iPhone was then launched in time for the start of iPhone sales in Germany in November 2007, and a native iPhone and Blackberry application is coming soon. Watch this space!

OpenSocial: In November 2007, XING AG became one of the first launch partners to join the open programming standard OpenSocial. Since then we’ve been busy testing in our OpenSocial SandBox. Our clear aim here is to ensure that there’s a clear added value for our members and that their data remains fully protected as well.

Turkey, here we come!: XING entered the Turkish market in January 2008, becoming the clear market leader for business professionals with the acquisition of the business network cember.net. Our Turkish members seem to have felt right at home on XING from the start, and the Turkish-speaking groups are already the second-most active, right behind the German groups!

So much more has happened over the last five years that I can’t leave unmentioned, so I will at least list the links here: Our joint venture in China, the Premium standard for all groups, the introduction of our BestOffer program for members, and this year alone the visualization of business contacts with Google Maps, the roll-out of official XING Seminars, the list just goes on and on.

Anyone who’s interested in becoming a part of the XING story is very welcome to apply to join our team. In spite of the current crisis on the financial markets, we’re still recruiting on a large scale and currently have more than 30 open positions all listed on our job page. I already have the privilege of working together with 160 talent colleagues from no less than 22 different nations – and together we continue to strive to create the best and most successful tool for the networked business world. It’s worth mentioning that we have been financially successful from the very outset: Growing member numbers have led to a continuous rise in revenues and profits. Our quarterly results since the IPO in Q4 2006 has risen from 3.6 million to 9.2 million euros in the current Q3 2008, while the EBITDA margin has increased during the same period from 23% to 40% at present. Which goes to show that there are business models out there that can be profitable in crises too.

Lots of people have been asking me how we’ll be celebrating our 5th birthday. We are in fact throwing two parties: This week we had a big party and meal with our whole team. And we’ve been giving away presents to members as well over the past days with a number of promotions on the platform. Because one thing is absolutely certain: Without our members and without our team of employees we wouldn’t be where we are today. So I’d like to thank you most sincerely for your loyalty, support and all the life you bring to our fantastic platform. Here’s to the next 5 years!

We’ve just announced the acquisition of cember.net, the leading online business network in Turkey. This is great news for all of us, but especially for the Turkish speakers in the XING world, as cember.net with its 280,000 members is the largest professional network of its kind in Turkey, one of the fastest growing national economies in Europe. I’d like to take the opportunity to give my heartfelt thanks to the entire team in Turkey for their tremendous efforts in the past years, especially founders of the network Çağlar Erol and Nihan Colak Erol, and to welcome them to the XING Team. Looking forward to seeing you all in Istanbul!

Since Saturday January 5, 2008, no online ads have been featured on any profiles of Premium Members. This is in response to the continuing feedback XING has received, which clearly shows that the majority of our Premium members do not wish to have online ads on their profiles when viewed by basic members. We very much regret that we misjudged the situation. And for this we would like to offer our apologies.

This move means that Premium Members are exempt from all advertising on the XING platform – both in terms of their own profile page and their general user experience on the XING platform. Basic members will continue to see ad banners on their start page, on profiles of other basic members, the search and search results pages, and other parts of the platform.

Why has XING introduced online ads for basic members?
Besides member subscriptions (Premium Memberships) and eCommerce (Marketplace and PremiumWorld), XING will also be driven from now on by the additional revenue generated from online advertising. You might be thinking: How is this relevant to me as a member? The answer is pretty simple: Just as you have invested time and effort into your network of people on XING, we have to invest in delivering services in a reliable, secure and effective way, with new and powerful features. More revenue equals more opportunities to invest in the technology, the platform, the team and ultimate in serving you. All members will benefit here. We will continue to work towards making both Premium Membership and basic membership more attractive: Basic members will be able to benefit from select features currently reserved for Premium Members only. Meanwhile we will be launching new exclusive services and functions for Premium Members in addition to their exemption from online ads.

Which data will be used for online advertising on XING?
We plan to make advertising on the platform as relevant as possible for our members. Targeted online ads have not yet been launched on XING, but this is planned for the future. This targeting process will be based solely on members’ anonymous data, such as their gender, city, or age. Personal data, i.e. specific information that can be attributed to a specific individual, will not be forwarded to any third parties at any time – either now or in the future. It goes without saying that this includes all personal information such as members’ addresses or cellphone and landline numbers.

As the operator of the XING platform, we are responsible for ensuring that our members’ data is treated securely and remains protected in accordance with our Privacy Policy. We are acutely aware of just how important it is to our members that their data is treated confidentially at all times.

The placement of online ads on XING adheres of course to all German and European data protection legislation and guidelines.

XING members have full control over their data security and privacy settings – and will continue to do so in future. Meanwhile advertising for basic members on the XING platform will help us to continue improving our services for all members.

Dear Members,

When you’re always striving for the best, sometimes things get a little worse before they get better.

In the last couple of days we have received a great deal of member feedback and witnessed much heated discussion regarding one aspect of our newly launched advertising system. As a non-Premium Member you´ll know that online ads have been featured on some pages including other members’ profile pages since mid-December. Of course, as a Premium Member you currently don’t see ads on any XING pages. The discussion arose because, frankly, we didn’t think of everything in advance. What happened was that non-Premium users were seeing ads when they visited Premium Members’ profile pages. The “oops” on our part was that we failed to offer our Premium Members the chance to opt out of (deactivate) having ads displayed alongside of their profiles. Our members objected to this, and we acted to change this as soon as we heard. It has taken us 24 hours to implement after announcing the change, and this option is now available in Premium Members’ individual settings.

At XING we strive for constant innovation for our members. Many features in today’s social software landscape were first introduced by us as a direct result of listening to member requests. Many other features that have entered common use in the industry have sooner or later been launched on XING. It’s a key challenge to address certain changes within all social communities in a way that suits and informs all members at the same time with the same information. Especially in an increasingly global environment with cultural and regulatory differences acting ‘across borders’, so to speak.

Last year, we launched 51 releases, over 20 major new features, and loads of smaller changes and adoptions. With this kind of development run rate and innovation, it is sometimes easy to slip up when entering new, unchartered territory. Despite our sincerest intentions and our intensive efforts to predict all possible use cases of any new features we develop, we are not always able to predict the way a feature will be received by our millions of members. As soon as we realize that large numbers of members take issue with something, it becomes a priority straight away for all of us in the XING team.

We pride ourselves on both speed and security at XING. That is why we’re able to implement changes within hours after a release – as in this case. Of course with millions of members depending on us it sometimes – in more complex cases – takes a day or two to come up with a solution everyone is happy with. Sometimes we put in a temporary fix until a more durable solution can be coded. Overall we’ve chosen to implement more releases instead of less. We deliver updates and alterations every week, sometimes small changes or new features, sometimes bigger launches, and this gives us the opportunity to develop and implement features faster for you. This brings added benefits for you, and increased challenges for us, which occasionally mean that we don’t get it quite perfect first time round.

In 2008, XING will be driven by three different revenue pillars: member subscriptions, e-commerce (different Marketplaces, PremiumWorld) and advertising. You might be thinking: Why should I care about this and how is it relevant to me? The answer is pretty simple: Just as you have invested time and effort into your network of people on XING, we have to invest in delivering the service in a reliable, safe and effective way, with new and powerful features. More revenue, equals more opportunities to invest in the technology, the platform, the team and ultimate in serving you. We´re currently planning for some of today’s Premium features to perhaps become available to non-Premium users in future, since we’re now able to cover more of the costs with advertising. At the same time, we will of course certainly be launching more brand new Premium-only features. Over 100 people at XING in three different locations are already working to give our members added value – and the good news is that we want to increase this number again in 2008, in turn improving the service you enjoy.

Our company exists because of our members. We are and always will be member-orientated. After all, the happier our members are, the happier our investors are. So it is a big deal for us when some of our members are unhappy.

This week many of our members felt that they were not adequately informed about the introduction of advertising on the XING platform. We did in fact announce that we would be introducing online ads on 16 November in the “XING news” displayed on your start page. A press release announcing the advertising launch was also published on 12 November. Having said that, we should have communicated in a clearer way precisely where the online ads would be appearing on the platform.

“XING news” – directly on your start page when you log in – is always the best place to look to find information about the most important developments at XING. We would urge you to take a look at this news on a regular basis – it is our way of keeping you in the know. This blog is an important channel, too. We have become more proactive in our communication, informing our members increasingly in advance about upcoming developments, hence giving you more time to get familiar with new features, ask us questions and give suggestions (this was particularly the case with the “Whats new in my network” feature, where we did a better job of implementation based on member feedback regarding privacy). Last but not least, we have a great team of people working in our community and support department, who are on call to take direct care of you and are always willing to get in touch and respond to your questions as quickly as they possibly can.
There is always room for improvement, and we’re always looking for solutions and improvements to the way we work. And in future we want to work even more closely with you, the XING members, to ensure that our new feature releases continue to please as many of our members as possible. We have started to launch beta groups on the live site. We are also further staffing up our quality & testing team.

We are always pleased to receive, listen and react to feedback from members. Not only that: We depend on it. Because ultimately we only succeed as a business in the long run if we ensure that we satisfy our members. And that’s why you matter to us.

Lars Hinrichs

Update:
From now on, Premium Members’ profiles will not feature any form of online advertising. You can find out more here.

Back in April, we announced plans for creating a XING API. What we couldn’t have
foreseen then was how important APIs would become, or how quickly they would do
so. The difficulties inherent in proprietary APIs—both from our perspective
(coordinating with European privacy laws, rights management) and from a
development standpoint (how many APIs can one developer learn?)—were
substantial. To be on the safe side, we started with a Partner API and launched
with Zoominfo.

The rest of the world was on to APIs as well: In September we met the Google evangelist
Patrick Chanezon, and he
invited us to participate in the OpenSocial initative. Right away, we
recognized how powerful an open standard could be, and decided to support
OpenSocial.

We at XING believe strongly in open standards. It’s a two-way street, a matter of
working together rather than against each other. After all, if you look back in
time, open systems have always led to greater success, from Linux to Apache to
the Web itself. We’re happy to support developers who add value and boost
productivity with their applications, and by adopting an open standard on XING,
we’re allowing thousands of programmers to code for our platform, all using
known web-standards of HTML & Javascript. Our members themselves can choose
which applications they adopt—who better? The freedom of such an approach is
infinitely superior to a walled garden approach.

Marc Andreesen, founder of netscape and now running the company Ning  put it perfectly by explaining the differences
between the two approaches area:

In a nutshell, Open Social is an open web API that can be supported by two kinds of developers:

• “Containers” — social networking systems like Ning, Orkut,  Hi5, Lnkedin, Plaxo, and Friendster, and…
• “Apps” — applications that want to be embedded within containers — for example, the kinds of applications built by iLike, Flixster, Rockyou, and Slide.

This is the exact same concept as the Facebook platform, with two huge differences:

• With the Facebook platform, only Facebook itself can be a “container” — “apps” can only run within Facebook itself.  In contrast, with Open Social, any social network can be an Open Social container and allow Open Social apps to run within it.
• With the Facebook platform, app developers build to Facebook-proprietary languages and APIs such as FBML (Facebook Markup Language) and FQL (Facebook Query Language) — those languages and APIs don’t work anywhere other than Facebook — and then the apps can only run within Facebook.  In contrast, with Open Social, app developers can build to standard HTML and Javascript, and their apps can then run in any Open Social container.

So we are very proud to be participating in this
week’s launch of Open Social. The platform is the web itself, we don’t need
another laywer in-between.

Thanks to the significant growth of our company we have won the Rising Star Award (2. Place) of Deloitte. It was a very nice event hosted in Frankfurt Zoo Palais. And we had a great winning table with Dr. Florian Holzapfel (Q-Cells), Hans-Martin Rüter (Conergy), Jörg Tesch (Deloitte Hamburg), Jörg Ohlsen (Deloitte Hamburg), Heiko Hubertz (Big Point).

I am always struck by the words of the late German banker Alfred Herrhausen: “Those who stop getting better, sooner or later cease to be good.” This philosophy rings true for me as an entrepreneur. That is why we place such importance on delivering real innovation and continuous technical improvements. And as time
goes by, it is always very interesting to see just how many XING ideas have since been copied by others – and especially to take note of exactly who these copycats are.

We aren’t completely alone in our market. As the market leader in Europe and South America, and the only social networking provider in the western world with a considerable number of Chinese members, and not just American ex-pats, we also have a competitor in the US. Competitor being the right term here, and not role model. A wave of copying is currently sweeping across Germany, while China is also a well-known example of this phenomenon. This trend almost certainly began with the Samwer brothers, who set up a 100% copy of eBay with Alando, only to then sell it to eBay within a matter of weeks. Now this trend seems to be taking the upper hand in this second Internet wave. Not a day goes by without someone declaring themselves an entrepreneur just because they’ve copied a good idea from the US. This isn’t real entrepreneurship in my eyes. Copying is just a euphemism for what it actually is, namely theft of intellectual property. The most extreme example of this boldness has to be the German network StudiVZ, which even stole the CSS files from Facebook, calling themselves entrepreneurs in the process.

Whilst all this is going on, there are many excellent ideas being born in Europe: Skype, Plazes, Zopa, Betfair, Fon and last but not least SAP, all of which have achieved more or less international market leadership. We can also still think back to inventions or start-ups that served as the inspiration for what are now large US corporations. “Echtzeit AG” for Google Earth, all the small coffeehouses in Italy for Starbucks, the CD
developed by Polygram, Philips and Bayer, or MP3s conceived at the “Frauenhofer Institute”. Innovation from Europe, Marketing from the US. The big question of who flew the first airplane makes this particularly clear: Popular opinion would have you believe it was the Wright Brothers. In truth however, it was actually Gustav
Weißkopf in 1901 and Karl Jatho on August 18, 1903, a whole 6 months before the Wright Brothers on December 17, 1903.

So for the record – here is the order of events as they happened. We take the imitation as a compliment.

Public profile: 2003, US competitor 2005
Photo in profile: 2003, US competitor 2007
Web links in profile: 2003, US competitor 2006
Payment model for Premium services: 2003, US competitor 2005
Display of people visiting my profile: 2003, US competitor 2007
Add new contact feature: 2003, US competitor 2007
Mobile version: 2004, US competitor ?
Powersearches: 2003, US competitor ?
Groups: 2003, US competitor ?

It remains to be seen what the future brings. One thing is clear: Generally speaking, the Americans outclass the Europeans in marketing. Hopefully that will soon change: Porsche, BMW and Mercedes being a role model.

For the
first time, I am a participant at the World Economic Forum. Klaus Schwab,
Founder of the WEF wanted to create a “Summer Davos” recognizing that a new class of leaders and innovators have emerged who are reshaping business and transforming society. The centre of business gravity is clearly moving
east. Dalian,  a beautiful coastal city in Northeast China, was chosen to host this Inaugural Annual Meeting of the New Champions as both  and continue to demonstrate the
dynamism and potential of growth.

Dalian is such strong growing Chinese cities, I have not known before the meeting. Population of 6,2m massively growing since the late 90s for IT Outsourcing and Business Process Outsourcing.

Some soundbites and and insights from the Meetings:

” China is continuing to growth strongly and wants world peace”. But with no word Premier Wen Jiabao is mentioning global warming.

“The top leaders in china consume first thing the morning the top ten blogs”
(bottom up media), by David Kirkpatrick

Consumer impact on GDP: 72% of Amirca’s GDP is in consumer demand. It is not supported by income, but rather by equity from over-valued assets, such as property. This has come into focus with the
recent sub-prime crisis.  China is slightly different with 35% like the average says Stephen Roach, Chairman, Morgan Stanley, Asia

China Mobile is adding 5 million new subscribers every month says Wang Jianzhou,
Chairman and CEO, China Mobile Communications Corporation.

Subprime crisis is likely to lead to more protectionism by Amirca says Kevan V. Watts, Vice-Chairman,
Merrill Lynch & Co

From the
Web2.0 world many participants are here: David Siffry, Martin Varsavsky, Tariq
Krim, Marko Ahtisaari, Rodrigo Sepulveda and many more.

Once again CYQUEST organized the fabulous NetSoccer Beach Clash (NSBC). This time the event took place at Veritas Beach, a location close to Hamburg. Participating Teams were: xcontrol, CoreMedia, cruisr.de, Alice/Hansenet, Travanto + Uhrzeit.org, XING, Freenet, Fluxx, AOL, TIPP24, Name Drive LLC, Faktor3, Lovells, CYQUEST, Libri.de, freiheit.com, Common Visions, Ynnor Systems, Advertising.com, StudiVZ, suesswarenversand.de, Google, Cellity, hamburg[at]work, eProfessional/Zanox.

Our team and the XING cheerleaders did an amazing series and won this years trophy! Congratulation to this success. XING scored victories against Fluxx, Google, AOL, Uhrzeit.org and lost only one match to Freenet in the prelims.

I am really proud of our team, the team spirit and ability to party we share at XING. If you want to join our team check out the marketplace with current open positions.

Our winning team: Daniel (Danger), Nils, Sönke, Timo, Felix, Nuno, Nelo, Timo, Fabian, Stefan and Toni. Not in the picture: Johannes

I am a EO member (simply the best Entrepreneur Organization in the world)  since 2001. Twice a year EO members gather together for what we call “Universities” -  Once in a lifeteam learning experiences with great speakers, great venues and really cool people from all over the world. I’ve been attending over the last years many interessting EO Events like Dubai, Marrakech, LA, Washington, Kuala Lumpur, Zurich and others. This year, for the first time ever EO Germany welcomed over 350 people for a University in Berlin. Marcel Otto Yon, Clemens von Beust, Birgit Hass and Karl Funke hosted the event  and created one of the best Universities ever. The grand finale of the 4 day workshop we had in the famous 1936 Olympic Stadium. 65000 seats for 350 people. If you are an entrepreneur and want to learn from peers make sure that you contact Karl and join EO.