Congratulations to Open Business Club (renamed Xing) CEO Lars Hinrich for pulling off the first IPO of a Web 2.0 business concept. The company was able to launch yesterday on the Frankfurt Exchange at 30 euros per share, rasing over 35 million euros for itself. Not bad for a company that has revenues of just 6 million euros and no profits in sight.
"In the last fiscal year, which ended at the end of June 2006, OpenBC was able to boost its sales year-on-year from 1.6 to just under 6 million euros. In the first quarter of this fiscal year the company’s sales revenue amounted to 2.8 million euros. The global business contacts network will in future operate under the name XING. At the same time XING will no longer concentrate exclusively on business people — even today many experts and working people of all kinds make use of the service"
I signed up for the free basic service and like it; XING is more or less a German knock-off of LinkedIn, which has more than 10 times the registered users of XING, but still no path to profits.
It will be interesting to see what Hinrich does with the money in his coffers. Will XING move to consolidate its position in Europe (currently it’s pretty German-centric)? Or will he make the leap "across the pond" to epicenter of Web 2.0 start-ups?
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Ah, Web 2.0
I took an informal poll of the SysAdmins in my IT shop today. Not one of them had any idea what this term meant.
You can bet the marketing department knows all about it, though.
What a bunch of nonsense.
@Fry,
It may be pure hype, as you suggest.
On the other hand, I laughed at Google’s IPO and am much the poorer for that.
It’s not the potential of the businesses themselves that I doubt, it’s the term.
“Web 2.0” is a nonsense label with no meaningful definition, coined by O’Reilly to generate business for itself.
The types of ‘net services it purports to describe have been around in various forms for quite awhile, and have little commonality other than in the imagination of marketing execs.