And now it appears Xing is trying a new angle on its game: according to Netzwertig, the social network is trying out an newsletter that aggregates industry news that’s relevant to the user. Think LinkedIn Today, only with a greater focus on the email aspect.

It’s interesting timing, given the legal brouhaha in Germany right now surrounding copyright and its applicability to headlines and brief news snippets. In Xing’s favour, the most recent draft of that new ‘ancillary copyright’ law only targets search engines. However, a third draft is imminent and that could see a return to the first draft’s inclusion of news aggregators in its remit.

Outside of German-speaking countries, the same issue has most definitely hit news aggregators, specifically the Norwegian firm Meltwater.

One of Meltwater’s businesses is very similar to that being tested out by Xing: the sending of keyword-specific news alerts to business customers. In the UK, the courts have ruled against Meltwater in a case launched by a newspaper association, and AP is now suing the firm in the US.

Assuming Xing manages to avoid such troubles, it still faces the more general problems around social network email alerts. Fact is, people don’t pay much attention to them. Even if they don’t disable them, most sane people direct such alerts to a lesser-used email account.

That said, if the alerts are even moderately successful, they could pay off particularly well for business-oriented social networks such as Xing and LinkedIn. For such networks, people tend not pay much attention at all until they’re looking for a job (which is why ExploreB2B’s more Quora-esque approach has an opportunity).

If Xing’s news aggregation service sees the light of day, and if it’s done right, it could be a valuable tool in the quest for customer retention, and maybe further growth.

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• Social 2013: The enterprise strikes back
• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1

No, it’s not a holiday.

Amiando, whose system powers such conferences as LeWeb, along with other live shows, announced on Tuesday that CEO Felix Haas, CFO Sebastian Bärhold, biz-dev chief Dennis von Ferenczy and CTO Armin Bauer will leave at the end of August. The move comes at the end of a transition period planned when social networking company Xing bought the German firm for €10 million a year and a half ago.

The new CEO is Norbert Stockmann, who’s jumping over from his head role at rival outfit Ticket Online. He’ll be working alongside verticals VP Julian de Grahl, with the two forming what Amiando calls a “management duo.”

But what about the founders? Flush with cash, it seems they’re off for a deserved break – then an intriguing return.

“We are planning on starting a new venture together,” von Ferenczy told me. “When we leave the company we’ll probably take a few months off, go travelling a bit and get some new ideas.”

He added that the new business would probably be internet-related, “to leverage the experience we got from the last few years together”. But that’s all he’ll venture for now.

As regards to Amiando, all is good, it seems. “The collaboration with Xing has been very good over the past one and a half years,” von Ferenczy said. “It’s running very smoothly.”

The Amiando founders’ new operation should start to reveal itself around the end of this year or the start of 2013. Given their successful exit and the success of the company they’re leaving behind, I think it’ll be wise to watch this space…

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• Google and the Ghost of Silicon Valley Past
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• Facebook’s tactical retreat on privacy

Enter doo.net, a German company that has just thrown its cloud-based service into open beta — but only for Mac OS X users and the handful of people running the yet-to-be-released Windows 8 in Metro mode.

Doo offers quite an impressive combination of features. Apart from being free, it’s able to take in both digital documents and those that have been scanned or photographed from paper form (optical character recognition does the rest). The documents are then ‘self-organised’, with Doo filing it by type.

The documents are all searchable and collaboration-ready, too, with doo gearing up to offer Google Docs integration as well as native clients for iOS, Android and “other platforms”. Those other platforms include the most widely-used of them all, Windows (or at least, the versions of Windows that are already out there).

Especially given doo’s potential popularity among the small-business crowd, it seems a strange decision to go for a Metro app first (the app has also only been submitted to the Windows 8 marketplace for now, unlike the OS X client which is available for download).

But, co-founder and CEO Frank Thelen argued, the new Windows interface is just that good:

“We will have a ‘Windows Classic’ version, as we call it, but we started with Metro because we love the new interface from Microsoft,” Thelen said. “We wanted the best possible user experience [at launch], but the Windows Classic version will follow soon.”

Has doo been working with Microsoft on the Metro version? Heck yes. “We’ve been working very closely with them – they help us a lot,” Thelen pointed out.

It’s not hard to see why: although doo is new, its management has quite some pedigree. Thelen and co-founder Marc Sieberger used to run ip.labs, a photo software company that they ended up selling to Fujifilm. They took the money and turned angel, with Thelen in particular playing a big role at productivity firm 6wunderkinder as both investor and co-creator of the company’s Wunderlist task manager.

Now it’s time for a different challenge.

“We wanted to solve a personal problem – I have documents that are analogue and documents that are digital. We wanted to put the two different pieces together and be able to say what is an invoice, what is a contract, and which people and companies are involved,” Theler explained. “Unfortunately there is still a lot of paper [being used] and we are bringing together the old and the new worlds.”

Usefully for doo, the company is able to achieve this with its own proprietary technology for OCR and keyword and date extraction. Using your own intellectual property is always a plus, and it’s certainly a reason behind the seven-figure investment by Target Partners that was also announced on Friday. That means doo now has a total of $10 million from investors that also include DuMont Venture, Xing and HackFWD founder Lars Hinrichs, management guru Hermann Simon and Thelen and Sieberger’s own e42 Ventures.

“With doo.net, there is now a single solution for organizing… important information,” Target partner Olaf Jacobi said in a statement. “It is this market positioning, backed up by proven technology and an experienced team, that inspired us to invest in the company.”

Doo has the chops and the cash, and perhaps the decision to avoid going ‘Windows Classic’ from day one is a smart hype-building tactic. Whether or not that’s the case, there’s a lot of demand for this sort of all-encompassing approach, so let’s hope the general desktop-toting public gets a chance to try the service out sooner rather than later.

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• Will cloud computing push the BRIC market to the front?
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Enter Konnects. Konnects wants to fill in the gap between LinkedIn and Facebook, providing social tools for a younger professional who may not quite have enough contacts to make LinkedIn really work for them but want to focus on business more than Facebook promotes. Konnects wants to be not only the place where business professionals can find one another but also the place where they can transact business on the site, exchanging all of the information and documentation needed to solidify a working relationship.

Konnects focuses less on email and much more on chat, instant messaging, video conferencing and Twitter integration. The site has the usual social networking features such as Your Network News which is similar to the status updates of you and your contacts on many other networks.

You also get recommended communities on your Konnects home page although I’m not sure why some are being recommended to me. The “Women’s Resources” made sense since I’m a woman. But “Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber”? I live in Alaska. And “Accounting?” I hate accounting.

What Konnects has that LinkedIn doesn’t have is an integration of Communities – not Groups – that are essentially white label networks a la Ning. Maybe I’ll create my own community.

Also on your home page, you are fed videos from your communities but if you don’t belong to a community yet, you get a plain icon that says “Join More Communities. Get More News.” And you can blog.

While Konnects claims to have over 350,000 members so far, my interactions on the site have felt a little lonely even though I am connected to the CEO of Konnects and one of their publicists. I’ve poked around at some of the communities and put out a few invitations to connect (with a free account you are limited to three). I’ve put out a bulletin to my contact list of two. I’ve updated my profile. I’ve tried to connect with people I know who are supposed on Konnects (as per the site culling through my Gmail address book) but never heard from anyone. And I’ve watched the paint dry.

Konnects is still in beta but it is more visible now so perhaps the community will start buzzing. Additional features are for premier users only such as unlimited messages, profile advertising (so you can market yourself to others), and free Internet calls to members. Monthly membership is $14.99 or $89.99 for a year.

With paid membership, you can also view the profiles of the people who have viewed your profile. Despite the creepy aspect of this, it does give you an advantage to see who is curious about you although getting in touch with them after they viewed your profile could also seem pretty creepy.

A nice feature of Konnects is aggregation of your community content. If you join a number of communities, you can actually get an aggregated view of, say, the classifieds from all communities, and you can access all you communities with one login, one password (unlike Ning). Another useful feature is that you can list certain people in your contact list but make others private – a smart way to protect your higher profile contacts.

More features, productivity tools and other third party tools are in the works.

As an avid user of many social networks, I know that especially with professional ones, you get out of them what you put into them so I am reserving judgment for now and will keep plugging away at upping my Konnects connectivity.

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Anyway the valuation of $1 billion -not as insane as the valuation placed by Microsoft on Facebook – was jaw dropping. Sure, LinkedIn has more value than plain vanilla me-too social networks but is it really worth a billion dollars? I ended up doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations while watching Boston Celtics celebrate their 17th NBA Championships.

The question of over-valuation had first popped up when I read about this round in May 2008 on Venturebeat . Techcrunch then reported that Allen & Co, the New York bank was helping Reid Hoffman’s company raise fresh capital at the $1 billion valuation.

So I decided to do a back-of-the-envelope comparison with XING with some of the publicly available data on XING, a European Social Network that is publicly traded in Frankfurt. It is a pretty good proxy for a business-focused social network, such as LinkedIn.

It has a market capitalization of about $300 million. It has has 5.71 million subscribers. XING had revenues of around $11.6 million at the end of first quarter 2008; about 70 cents per month per subscriber. That works out to about $52.30 per subscriber. For sake of comparison, Facebook’s reported $15 billion valuation works out to $125 per subscriber.

If you use those numbers, then LinkedIn’s rumored 20 million users are worth $1.04 billion. The company is adding about 1.3 million new subscribers a month, so by those estimates it should end the year at around 29 million subscribers. USA Today reported that LinkedIn was on target to do between $75-to-$100 million in revenues this year. Lets be generous and assume that they indeed do $100 million that works out to about 29 cents per month per subscriber (assuming that the number of subscribers at the end of the year is about 29 million.)

My back-of-the-envelope calculations show that if your user the value per subscriber of then LinkedIn’s $1 billion got a market valuation. On per-subscriber revenue basis, LinkedIn seems a tad overvalued, especially considering that their traffic is range bound, and the number of active uniques is showing a slight slump.

What do you guys think?

Update: Connie Loizos of PE Hub is spot on in saying that this video of LinkedIn VCs self-congratulating themselves made her cringe. Me to Connie.

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• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
• Pinterest: signs of staying power

Noujaim first presented her idea to Al Gore at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival; in 2006, she was awarded a TED Prize to fulfill her wish of bringing the world together for one day a year through the power of film. It’ll be like a multicultural celebration of the human spirit, akin to Al Gore’s decadent Live Earth concert series, but with fewer self-absorbed rock stars.

Now Nokia and Gore’s own Current have come on board to help collect and disseminate stories. Noujaim spoke to NewTeeVee in New York this week amid last-minute preparations.

Noujaim said TED organizer Chris Anderson provided the seed funding for what has grown into an event with over 1,300 screenings in over 100 countries. “It’s not one singular vision; it’s a lot of different visions coming together,” Noujaim explained. She also said that sifting through the more than 2,500 films that were submitted has been a significant challenge.

The event is being made widely available, through every medium possible. “We offered it
to all the networks for free,” Noujaim said of the television plans. “I was hoping Fox and Al Jazeera would carry it at the same time, but that’s a hope for next year.” Instead, Current’s television station will carry it in the States while it is telecast around the world subtitled in seven different languages.

On the mobile front, video-enabled mobile phones can tune in for the entire 4-hour affair at mobile.pangeaday.org. Additionally, you can upload your own Pangea Day video and pictures and chat live from your mobile at www.ovi.com/pangeaday.

While she’s excited about cutting-edge technology allowing more people to participate, Noujaim, a Harvard-trained visual artist, still sees unanswered questions as online video grows.

“How do you use these cameras to get as much varied content in through these [web sites]? How do you gather people together online to make for a live, communal experience? Me personally, I’d love to see this collect and gather people and then set up real-life screenings together with real people. I do think there is an experience people won’t want to lose of sitting in the dark and watching it together and communicating together face-to-face afterwards.”

NewTeeVee feels the same way. Remember our Pier Screenings?

Pangea Day will present the international community with a variety of questions. What did Tiananmen Square look like from inside the tank? What do Americans singing the Mexican national anthem on the border sound like? Can film unite a world? Find out this Saturday at a screening event near you or catch it online.

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I decided to put three of the professional networks that I belong to through a completely non-scientific analysis to see how they are working for me. Of course, once I got this idea in my head, the answers were obvious to me, but it is a good exercise to write it all down.

So without any further ado, the networks I will look at are Ryze, SoFlow, and Xing.

Ryze

My Ryze Page: http://www.ryze.com/go/alizasherman

Whenever I log into Ryze, I find two things to be true:

1. Everyone seems to have been members since around 2002 but stopped updating their pages in 2004 – or least the people I know and with whom I want to connect. There is almost an eerie, time-capsule feeling about it.
2. I don’t know what to do on the site. I have only two friends which is usually the kiss of death for any attempts at actually networking on a social networking site. I’ve invited some other friends, but they are all on Facebook or LinkedIn these days.

Plus I’ve never gotten any inquiries, requests to friend, or lead from Ryze. I think Ryze’s day has come and gone.

VERDICT: TRASH IT

SoFlow

Well, when I wasn’t looking at SoFlow, which was often, it became Wis.dm or at least the SoFlow URL points there now. From what I can tell Wis.dm (“wisdom” is a social networking site based around users interacting with one another by answering yes or no questions.

No wonder I haven’t heard from SoFlow in nearly a year.

Just for kicks, I entered my SoFlow username and password. And? Nothing. Of course, just like spring cleaning around the house, this one seems like something I should hold onto instead of throwing away. Since it is a new service to me (but old by Web standards circa mid-2007), I should try it out just to see what it’s all about.

VERDICT: SIGN UP FOR THE NEW SITE

Xing

My Xing page: http://www.xing.com/profile/Aliza_ShermanRisdahl

When it comes to international social networks, Xing seems to be a player. Formerly Open BC, the service seems to cater to the European Union much more than the States. Of my confirmed contacts of which there are…five, two are from Alaska (one who moved to Alaska from Europe), one is from South Africa, one from India, and one from Germany who served as an intern at my Internet company back in the mid-90s.

Other than reconnecting with said intern, Xing hasn’t produced much more than the occasional very random request to connect from some guy in his late 50s in some far flung country. Not sure what that means, exactly. Is Xing an international dating site posing as a professional networking site? Or am I just not using it so I’m relegated to the “has no contacts so she must be desperate” pool?

I’ve never paid for the premium membership and just feel that I can make international contacts through many other networks such as Twitter, Second Life, and Facebook, for example. While Ryze seems like it will continue to provide no value to me, for some reason Xing seems like there’s hope. I’m on the fence with this one.

VERDICT: CONTINUE TO LET LANGUISH

I’ve described how several professional networks are not really working for me. I know that any social network is really only as good as how often you use it and how many connections you have, but even when I pay little or no attention to LinkedIn, it still proves useful to me. I’ve even set up a new LinkedIn account for my Second Life avatar which has helped me connect with contacts from several major corporations specifically for my Second Life work including International Hotel Group and Manpower. Not too shabby for a social networking account for a virtual, cartoony version of myself.

When it comes to spring cleaning social networks, should I actually delete the ones I don’t use or continue to leave them languishing? Part of me says that even though they are not serving immediate purposes in my Web work or network building, they are still a “satellite” presence for me that someone may randomly happen upon one day and offer me a high-paying freelance gig.

And to me, it is almost criminal to delete content off the Web. There is something so nostalgic about stumbling onto a very old Web page that I remember from the early days of the Web without having to visit the WayBack Machine. Still, nostalgia doesn’t pay the bills.

Delete or let languish? That is the question.

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• A 2011 NewNet Forecast
• Social 2013: The enterprise strikes back
• Is LinkedIn trying to become WordPress for the business executive set?

Arne also has posted a video of the new HTC Advantage (T-Mobile Ameo) that is going to ship with the soon-to-be-available Opera Mobile 9.5.  Arne’s video shows Opera 9.5 which looks very cool on the five-inch Advantage screen.  I really want to get my hands on this new version of Opera.  Take a look at Arne’s video and you’ll see what I mean.

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• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
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A day before Thanksgiving, this is a great time waster.

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• How consumer media will change in 2013
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I’m talking about the web sites that accompany these shows — shows whose content is aimed squarely at a tech-savvy audience. The lack of features on these sites makes it clear just how little thought went into them. Visit the sites for Chuck, Reaper and Bionic Woman and you get the standard video clips, cast and crew bios, some behind-the-scenes interviews, message forums, maybe a clickable game. Yawn.

Where are the tools that get people wrapped up in your programs, extending the time they spend with your TV shows to their everyday lives? Let’s run through some possibilities, from the very basic to the more advanced. Listen up, networks, these ideas will help promote your show, and you’ll barely have to lift a finger.

Wikis

Forums are so… blah. Especially when you lump all your shows into one area. That’s why fans make their own sites. So set up the foundation for a wiki. Fans will populate it for you, and they’ll probably keep it more accurate than you would. Plus, they’ll do it for free. For one example, see Lostpedia.

Uploads
Where is the ability for watchers to upload their own clips? In the YouTube age, this should be par for the course. People should have the option to tape themselves reacting to an episode, or offering up a theory, or examining a still photo or clip in front of others. Then you get people taping responses and suddenly your audience is buzzing about your show in between episodes. Best of all, you get to keep all that traffic.

Webisodes
Shows like Battlestar Galactica and The Office both offered up web-only fare for their audiences in between seasons. It keeps your brand active during downtime, and provides more fodder for discussion in the boards wikis. Don’t want to produce a video? Try an online comic like NBC did for Heroes.

Costume Patterns
Go ahead. Laugh. Then go to Comic Con. Nerds love to dress up and they love accuracy. So make it easy for them. Offer up downloadable costume patterns that they can print out and make their own costumes with (and get on TV at the next major Con).

Fan Films
MIT Professor Henry Jenkins notes that kids these days all grew up with action figures. They grew up inserting themselves into the worlds they saw on TV and film, creating their own stories. With the advent of cheap video and editing technology, networks should be encouraging people to do this “for real” and make their own fan films.

Equip audiences with sound effects, music scores and tips and tricks to make their own characters and scenarios. Sure, most fan films are gonna suck. But do you have any idea how much fun people have making them? How much fun they have associating with your brand? Yes, there are legal considerations, but there are workarounds for that. Need an example? Check out Battlestar Galactica‘s Video Maker Toolkit.

And finally, there is one thing that all networks can do to make sure the geeks get in your corner. Make a decent program.

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