LinkedIn announced a new round of funding at $1 billion valuation. As usual the investors like to brag about how cool and cheap this investment has been. No difference here. Now they seem to be coming to Europe and will then for sure give XING a run for their money. Will be interesting to see who wins this race. I can already see that LinkedIn has a much larger community even in Europe. They don't have the same depth of contacts yet in Europe but in 12-24 months this might look entirely different. Maybe XING will become an acquisition target by then?

I had two astonishing experiences recently. One was with my friends Easyjet, the other one with Xing. Let's start with Easyjet. I am still using them if the flight is min. 3x cheaper than that of other carriers so knowing that they don't make any money of me at all. This is regularly the case on the route Zurich to London and Basel to Nice. Now when you fill out the online form by default, insurances and a strange bag fee are checked and added to your total. I nearly clicked to check out because I was in a hurry but then saw that the total amount should have been smaller incl. all taxes and fees, so I checked it and saw the insurance and bag-fee adding about 20%. Not too much still but then I had this thought. How many people will not see this and simply pay for bogus things? Is it 20, 30, 40% or maybe even more? Don't know, but it is clear that Easyjet does this deliberately.

Now to Xing. People know that I don't use Xing but LinkedIn. But a few weeks ago someone from Switzerland sent me an invitation to join his Xing network, the first time ever. I thought I don't want to annoy that person so subscribed to it. But did not use it ever since and the info I entered was absolutely basic since I don't intend to use it at all. A few weeks later I got this e-mail here:

Dear Mr Haller,
Your XING Premium Membership will expire on 28 Apr 2008. Your account
will then be automatically converted to basic membership. If you would
like to enjoy the benefits of Premium Membership you can remain a
Premium Member for just EUR 5.95 per month:

I had a good laugh. What do you call it when you have a free membership, don't know it, don't use it and then get a message saying you better subscribe now to be able to continue to use it? It is obvious that in both cases Easyjet and Xing the same type of accountant guys are trying to outsmart people. It appears that they are successful. I just wonder who is so dumb as to fall into such traps? And what happens when they find out because someone like me tells them? I believe honest business practice will in the end always pay off and is the only successful model. I'll watch now Easyjet and Xing to see if my business ethics apply there too...

Last weekend I followed a discussion in Techcrunch on a post titled "LinkedIn traffic up, but is it enough?". The about 30 or so comments from the Techcrunch personal buddy network outed the article as trying to hype up Facebook as a LinkedIn competitor - which is entirely untrue. This example showed me vividly how the bad old times of overvaluation seem to be coming back BIG time. There are a bunch of guys out there whose job it is to hype up certain sites beyond any rational values. Now I read that Facebook thinks they are worth easly 2 billion USD but do not want to sell since they believe the valuation could go even higher. The company has "comparatively only" $50 million of revenues but a heavily growing user group who seem in my opinion to be primarly youngsters sharing their websites and personal stuff. I checked it out briefly for myself and tried to see if the LinkedIn functionality would find me any old colleagues in the US. While in LinkedIn I found about 200 old colleagues, ZERO popped up in Facebook. And still the guy from Techcrunch thought it was set to be the next big LinkedIn competitor. Not sure what dope he took or who sponsored him to say such nonsense. It appears the hypers are all back again so be aware!

The German OpenBC (competitor to LinkedIN and others) professional social networking site is running a website design contest for their own site. Everyone can submit a design and a jury plus public vote select a winner who will get $10'000.

What does the online community think about this contest idea?

TechCrunch carried this news and it attracted lots of backlash. Practically all comments were negative, which obviously surprised Michael Arrington quite a bit, saying: " What a terrible, ugly, hateful comment stream." Here a sample:

• "Well, they get 143 designs they now can offer to their users to personalize their pages. There’s nothing new to this “trick”, really."

• "well the designs are pretty boring imho."

• "Professional designers don’t bother with stuff like this. If you want to get a bunch of amateur crap with a contest, go for it. But at the end, you’ll still have amateur crap."

• "when looking back at many projects with German software or web-companies it seems it’s always the same. Pay as little as possible, don’t care about what really counts (user-needs, interaction and workflows), don’t care about a process - just make it pretty. The other extreme there is over-engineering (hello frauenhofer-usability fraction) until the core of boredom is revealed and let loose on the end-loser."

Looks like this publicity did not go well with the professional community that they are serving. Although OpenBC positions itself as a community site for professionals, I heard from many users now that the community is actually primarily low-profile people who are looking for a job, offering their services and hoping to chat with a "celebrity" in OpenBC, which of course does not actually happen. I must admit that I have not tried it myself so the above is really only a collection of other people's opinions, but ones that I can trust. The thing I noticed myself is that LinkedIn regularly sends me invitations to work with my - totally neglected - account and also to get many people trying to network with me. This never happened with OpenBC which is at the least a bit odd, I think. I am probably not a typical OpenBC guy: Oh well!