paidContent.org - Social News Startup Socialmedian Acquired By Germany's Biz Socal Net Xing For $4 Million And Earnout

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Rafat Ali

paidContent.org
Friday, December 19, 2008; 5:07 AM

A very quick exit for a service just launched: Socialmedian, the New York City-based social news service launched by former Jobster CEO Jason Goldberg, has been acquired by Xing, the Germany-headquartered European business social network. 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. The social new site was founded last year, and exited out of private beta couple of months ago. It will continue as a standalone site.

Goldberg will be moving to Hamburg, Germany, and join Xing in the newly created position of VP of Applications Platform. Xing is a lot like LinkedIn, and has been hugely ambitious in its expansion over the last year or so, and will likely use Socialmedian to help expand its professional services for users. This also helps it guard against LinkedIn and Facebook's own international expansion. This comes as Xing's founder and CEO Lars Hinrichs is stepping don from his post, replaced this month by Dr. Stefan Gross-Selbeck, eBay's GM for Germany. Under Hinrichs, Xing has tried to scale up to fight LinkedIn by buying smaller, country-specific European business networks - Spain's eConozco in March 2007; then Spain's Neurona three months later, before taking Turkey's Cember in December for a combined Euro 14 million price. On its home ground in Europe, it's beating LinkedIn, which last year hired a European MD. More details in release.

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