Socialmedian, a social news site designed to allow users to group around news networks, has been acquired by the German social network XING, a major international player with more than 6 million business users.
Clearly, this is a big win for Socialmedian, which only recently came out of private beta.
“This is great news for socialmedian’s members as XING is committed to growing and developing socialmedian both as a standalone service as well launching integrated socialmedian services on XING, one of the leading online business networks in the world.”
But what does this mean for XING? According to XING CEO Lars Hinrichs, Socialmedian promises to make XING’s network of business people more successful – by saving them time:
“In business success depends on access to the right information at the right time. Both the speed of information and the sheer volume of data have increased rapidly due to the rise of the internet. Traditional media companies, social media such as blogs, tweets, videos and other user-generated websites now provide daily news, leading to a veritable flood of information. The consequence: Time-strapped professionals are forced to parse through numerous news sources for relevant information and sort, organize, and share stories on their own.
Thanks to socialmedian you can save the little time you have.”
As part of the deal, Socialmedian CEO Jason Goldberg will be relocating to the Hamburg, Germany headquarters of XING and serving as VP of the XING Applications Platform. The entire Socialmedian team will become employees of XING, as well.
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Update, Ed:PaidContent is reporting that “the purchase price was about $4 million in cash and stock (Xing is publicly traded in Germany), and a performance-based earn-out valued at between 0.5-2.5 million Euros payable over three years.”
Also see ReadWriteWeb’s in-depth comparison of Xing to LinkedIn back in March. At that time we suggested that “the real race for business networking has two horses. LinkedIn is clearly one. The other is not Facebook, but Xing.”
Keep your eye on Xing, they’ve just snapped up an innovative little social news network – and they mean business.
