The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘austria’

An idea of how much I enjoyed playing The Creative Assembly’s, by way of Sega, Napoleon: Total War pretty much all weekend long: I just ordered all four parts of Max Gallo’s biography of Napoleon from Amazon France . I don’t even speak French! (Well, a very little bit, but certainly not enough to read a four-volume biography written by someone who’s a member of L’Academie française.) That’s a pretty big endorsement: the game re-kindled my interest in Napoleon so much that I bought books that I can’t even read. Wild

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You know what’s fun? Napoleon: Total War

Project Fair Bid, a stealth startup that is creating a Swoopo-like Auction platform, has raised $4.5 million in funding, according to a SEC filing. The funding was raised from the Mayfield Fund, First Round Capital, and Foundation Capital, with Raj Kapoor, Charles Moldow and Josh Kopelman joining the board of directors.

Details on Project Fair Bid are limited but we hear the startup hopes to reinvent and legitimize the Swoopo business model by using a different auction methodology to improve consumer engagement and retention. Swoopo’s business model has been criticized for its alternative bidding system.

Swoopo uses a unique pricing model that lets you to purchase virtual “bids” for 75 cents, which can then be used to bid on goods ranging from video games to high-end televisions. Whenever you bid on an item, its price increases by fifteen cents and an extra 20 seconds are tacked on to the duration of the auction. Oftentimes items wind up selling substantially below their market value, but this lower price comes with some risk: if you bid on an item, you don’t get that 75 cent bid back when the auction concludes. Even if the item winds up selling below its normal market price, Swoopo can make money from these bids (the site does sometimes lose money on an auction, but relies on the proceeds of other auctions to cover them).

But Swoopo may be on to something—since launching in late 2008, the site has grown to almost 2 million members in Canada, Germany, the U.S., Austria, and Switzerland and closed a $10 million funding round led by August Capital.

Photo credit/Flickr/walkinboston.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

LinkedIn has bolstered its position as America’s leading business social network by the month lately, with Germany-based Xing as the only company regarding itself a worthy competitor in the last few years. But now those days seem to be over - in the US and China, at least.

Today German newspaper Hamburger Abendblatt published an interview [GER] with Xing CEO Stefan Groß-Selbeck (who recently replaced founder Lars Hinrichs), and he revealed a couple of interesting tidbits of information about the future direction of his company (find a horrible, Google-translated version of the full interview in English here).

Talking in broad strokes, Groß-Selbeck said 3.5 million of the 7.5 million Xing members are based out of Germany, Austria and German-speaking Switzerland. This isn’t really that surprising, given the background of the company. But the interview also marks the first time a Xing representative publicly (albeit indirectly) admitted losing in the USA and China.

Groß-Selbeck said he rather sees Xing’s future in those countries where the company has opened offices: Spain, Italy and the rapidly growing web market of Turkey. This statement was followed by him dodging a question about Xing’s previous plans to enter the US and China (he specifically responded that the focus lies on said countries and Xing plans to double its German user base in the next years). In other words, Xing seems to have stopped thinking about expanding into those regions for the time being.

My guess is LinkedIn never really feared the Germans entering their home market anyway, as a) almost no American really knows Xing anyway, b) about half of LinkedIn’s 42 million members live in the US, c) coffers are filled to the rim and d) a $1 billion valuation is sure to let key employees sleep soundly (Xing’s current market cap at the Frankfurt Stock Exchange: $220 million).

Google Trends shows that LinkedIn outclasses Xing in global traffic, too:

But Xing backing up in the US and China isn’t necessarily good news for LinkedIn. Their strategic decision won’t make it easier for LinkedIn to gain market share in said European countries where Xing already boasts a string brand name and position. Here, LinkedIn is in for an uphill battle, which may takes years to win (especially as Groß-Selbeck also said in the interview he intends to boost the number of employees from 240 to 360). And China has no shortage of business social networks either (Tianji, Wealink [CN] or Alibaba’s Ren Mai Tong to name just a few).

LinkedIn is currently available in four languages (English, Spanish, French and German), with more to come soon. The only office outside the US is located in London. In Europe, LinkedIn is particularly strong in Belgium, Holland, France, Great Britain and Denmark). Traffic in China is negligible for both LinkedIn and Xing.

Quick note:
German is my mother tongue, which means I didn’t have to rely on the Google translation linked to above when writing this posting.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Something called the “iPhone 32GB” was spotted on T-Mobile Austria’s Web site; it has since been removed. This is huge news because… well, it’s probably not huge news, no

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‘iPhone 32GB’ briefly appears on Austrian T-Mobile site