XING acquires US company, socialmedian
- Image by gabemac via Flickr
Perhaps Lars Hinrichs‘ Christmas list this year included a new tie, a new iPod, and maybe an acquisition of leading news company in the states. I don’t know if he’s getting the tie or iPod, but I can report that XING has acquired New York-based socialmedian, an innovator in the online social news category founded by Jason Goldberg who also lead Jobster (by the way, the photo is of Daniela Hinrichs holding the newest addition to the XING family).
In the deal, XING will pay a combination of cash and stock valued at 2.9 million Euros (approx. $ 4 million), with a performance-based earn-out valued at between 0.5 – 2.5 million Euros (approx. $700K to $3.5 million) payable over three years.
With socialmedian, XING members will be essentially have their own personal news assistant trolling all sources of news, which we know doesn’t just include websites. Socialmedian essentially collects, sorts and organizes information from social services such as Twitter, Digg, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, GoogleReader, FriendFeed, the international blogosphere, and industry and online media sources, then filters that information through your social contacts. What this means is that you only receive the news you need to know based on your interests, job, and passions, from the people in your networks. Given we at Consort use many of these various services, we all applaud XING’s newest baby.
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I am also curious to see how Xing utilizes SM. Over time, we will have amassed too many social network accounts to keep track of. However, in college, I learned about a startup called Crayon.net that tried to do something similar with newspapers. It would be interesting to see if SM can pull it all together. The beauty of Facebook or other social services are that some of them are self-contained. In order for SM to get more traction, it has to be more than aggregrate info.
Great stuff. Keep up the interesting news!