Development projects on XING are very interesting, but can also be very complex and demanding. Just imagine: Hundreds of functions, 16 languages, a variety of payment systems, over 20 technical partners who connect to the website, four revenue streams and over 100 employees involved in developing the platform. At the same time, we have to be in a position to rapidly adapt to changes in the market or business conditions. (more…)

Hello everyone! My name is Karsten Rieke, and I’ve been a Product Manager at XING since 2007. Actually, my association with Europe’s leading business network started before that, both as a member, and as an HTML and CSS expert and front end web developer during the name switch from openBC to XING. (more…)

How well I remember that February two years ago, my first day at XING. On the usual first day rounds to meet the entire team, we stopped by the third floor to see the developers, all three of them. Back then, the entire company was housed on two floors; I was employee number 76. A lot has happened since that day. (more…)

Today we released our preliminary financial figures for 2008, which was picked up by the news agency Reuters, among others.

You can view the complete press release on our financial figures here.

Over 55.000 people have already seen this video about the street sign exchange in the US. A lot of them believe it, others don´t. You want to know what the deal is? Read on…

Anyone who’s ever been to the US has probably seen those yellow XING road signs on practically every street corner – yes? Well they’re pretty hard to miss.

So now take the following ingredients: Work for a company called XING. Throw in a large amount of US XING road signs. Mix together with some creativity, an obvious pinch of wordplay and a country where anything is possible. Bake for 1 hour in a preheated oven. The result is a future that doesn’t exist – but we filmed it anyway:

XING protects its brand name XING on a global scale and the International court declares that all road signs across the US have to be replaced from XING to CROSS. It would certainly have put us on the map – that’s for sure. Moreover so many people tend to interpret the word Crossing in the name XING, which put the icing on the cake.

One of the first websites to write about the video was Sichelputzer.de which was followed by compliments from the Twidox blog – thanks Twidox – you’re not so bad yourselves The Blogosphere was not quite sure whether the video was a fake or not. Sloganmaker had a theory about the creative agency behind the video – sorry to disappoint you Sloganmaker but you’re far from the truth.

So in a nutshell it was fun shooting this video, we’re glad that (most) of you liked it and we could bring a smile to your faces. And for those of you who haven’t seen it yet – enjoy!

“It’s not just what you know, it’s who you know” – yes it’s a cliché but like it or not there’s always some truth behind clichés.

For example did you know that over 50% of jobs are found through networking? This is a huge potential that everyone can tap into and use, particularly in light of the current economic situation; contacts can help open doors to new opportunities or job possibilities.

Our new umbrella campaign is making people sit and up and recognize the potential and usefulness of their connections. Online ads are a perfect medium for using provocative openers and getting the message across:

And the campaign is working! We’ve had the most successful campaign start to date with more than twice as many new members signing up on XING than ever before. We want people to unleash the power of their business contacts and to start building up a network sooner rather than later. Start networking not just linkin’

At XING we know a thing or two about bringing people together. We help connect over 6.5 million professionals around the globe, after all. The right connections are often just a click away. And it’s no exception when making wishes come true for less-fortunate children in Germany: We‘re inviting our business partners and employees to help fulfill wishes made by kids in Berlin and Munich children‘s homes – by donating directly on the betterplace.org platform right up until December 15th. XING will pledge half of the money for each of the wishes listed on the site. Every single cent of donations made will go directly to the children’s gifts. And all donors can see directly on the transparent and interactive site how their money has been put to good use. So far, 100 wishes have already been fulfilled.
So let´s join together this Christmas season and make children´s eyes sparkle!

As you may already know, public companies enjoy a great deal of media attention, and are often the subject of rumors. This applies to XING as well. In the interest of informing shareholders, listed companies frequently disperse press releases or ad-hoc releases to share recent developments. We will continue to do this in the future as well.

We wish to inform our members that a report today circulated by dpa-afx contained major inaccuracies. There has never been a controversy within the company about the use of member information. Furthermore, as the founding spirit behind the leading European online network, Lars enjoys the absolute confidence of the Executive and Advisory Boards. Looking at the recent figures, we see that concurrent to its 5th year of successful operations, XING reported record returns in number of members, revenues and profits. We now have over 6.5 million members in over 190 countries around the world, with offices in Hamburg, Barcelona, Istanbul and Beijing.

In general, we at XING do not comment about rumors circulating in the media concerning changes to the composition of the Boards. For the record, dpa-afx has since corrected the earlier report.

Having published over 600 postings in the past three years, we finally decided to give our Company Blog a fresh new layout and new features. It was also about time for us to add a multilingual feature to the blog, offering different language versions for our growing communities around the world.

This relaunch was a lot of fun for our team. A big thank you goes out to Sabine, Angela, and the rest of the team for the coordination and preparation (and for the occasional 12-hour day!). Thanks too to Joaquin for helping coordinate the multilingual version.

We hope you like the new blog, and are already excited about discussions to come, your feedback – and of course your trackbacks.

Happy reading!

This week, Jackson Bond, our new Senior Manager Corporate Development,

tells us about his first few weeks at XING: Jackson, Corporate Development: I have been a XING member since 2004 and watched its growth with amazement. Before I joined XING I ran my own company in Berlin for seven years, specializing in speech recognition applications, with clients like VW, Daimler, BMW, DPD, Cable & Wireless and the Hamburg Public Transport company (HVV). After a larger UK competitor took over our company in 2007, it was my first opportunity to look seriously at younger, innovative technologies in the web 2.0 space. A few months ago a job description caught my eye on my XING home page. Now after my sixth week at XING? Wow! Never have I experienced the collaborative spirit and speed of integrating new employees and bringing them into the team and up to speed like I have experienced in my first days here. As I am a US citizen (married to a Swabian ) I also appreciate the international mix at XING.
I commute to work from Berlin where I live with my wife and two bilingual daughters. In Berlin I am involved in bilingual education. In ’98 I helped start eastern Berlin’s first bilingual Nursery school together with 10 families, now we have 100 kids in the Kita and started the first bilingual school last year. Here in Hamburg in CorpDev I continue to assess new opportunities for growing business, locally and around the world, as well as internally for business optimization potential. Being new to the team also brings a unique but fleeting advantage: we bring a new, outside perspective to the strengths and weaknesses of XING. Three powerful strengths I have found at XING so far: putting the user first in all business considerations, cross-departmental collaboration and openness to new ideas and a sense of urgency in the face of such a dynamic disruptive marketplace.

Interested in working at XING? Have a look at our job site – there are currently 39 job openings, including jobs in Jackson’s CorpDev team