XING

www.xing.com

Xing has taken Europe by storm. A Hamburg-based company publicly traded on Frankfurt's Prime Standard exchange, the site has a strong presence in Germany and now also in Spain (due to recent acquisitions of Neurona and eConozco, Spain's biggest professional networks). Similar to Fast Pitch!, the platform does a respectable job of matching buyers and sellers through a system that analyses content found on each profile. In addition, the site offers a marketplace that allows users to position classified ads throughout the website. Xing has affiliations with various services through which it offers members hotel discounts, newspaper subscriptions and other business-related carrots. Company founder Lars Hinrichs seems unperturbed by competition from the likes of Facebook. "People have always paid for networking, at least business networking," he says. "Otherwise we wouldn't go to trade fairs or conferences." Xing has already signalled its aim to use its clout to buy out smaller rivals – by summer its stock was up over 50% from last December's IPO price of about €30 a share. But Xing is also looking to make inroads into the English-speaking business world through its deal with ZoomInfo, a business search engine, which would give its users access to nearly 36 million business people and 3.8 million companies.