Congratulations to StudiVZ founders Ehssan Dariani, Michael Brehm, Dennis Bemman. Despite the poor performance of their Web site, and the accusations that StudiVZ is nothing more than a facebook clone, they hit pay dirt today:
StudiVZ, a German clone of Facebook was sold for 100 million Euros to Holtzbrinck Verlag, a giant German publishing company, reports Spiegel Online, a well known German news outlet. The Chinese clone of Facebook was acquired back in October 2006.
StudiVZ, which claims to have a million users, had been having some serious performance problems, and many users had expressed their displeasure with the service.
The buyout is the latest piece of evidence that a Web 2.0 boom is raging in Germany. OpenBC, aka Xing went public recently. PageFlakes, a start page company raised venture dollars from Benchmark Capital. (WWD has a review of the top start pages today.) MySpace is going German, amidst local competition like Lokalisten.
Kasi-Blog will have more information as it becomes available.
