Germany-based XING AG, a European professional networking site has acquired the New York based Socialmedian Inc., a social news aggregator, developed entirely in India by Pune based True Sparrow Systems for $7.5 million The Pune based company also had a stake in the venture. A report in Techcrunch suggests that as a part of this transaction, True Sparrow Systems will now be a XING shareholder.
Jason Goldberg, founder, Socialmedian, will join Xing in Hamburg, Germany in the newly created position of Vice President XING Applications Platform.
With the acquisition of Socialmedian, XING plans to launch several new innovations, including offering XING members custom filtered news. Though social median will help XING in providing relevant filtered news to its members, there will be no interruption for the socialmedian users.
Social median, which started in 2008 itself, was founded by Jason Goldberg and is currently backed by Washingtonpost, Newsweek Interactive and some angel investors including Allen Morgan of the Mayfield Fund. Socialmedian gathers information from about 19,000 sources, including social services such as Digg, Delicious, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Google Reader, FriendFeed, the international blogosphere, and industry and online media sources, and
then filters the news through members' social networking contacts.
XING is a network for business contacts in Europe. It was the first Web 2.0 company to go public with its IPO in December 2006. XING AG claims to have generated revenues of Euro 25.09 million in the first nine months of the current fiscal year. The company employs 161 staff based at headquarters in Hamburg and offices in Beijing, Barcelona and Istanbul.
