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Two days ago, we reported that LinkedIn had finally added profile pictures to their features list. Now a competitor, Xing, is announcing a slew of new features.

Xing already had profile images. Its users will now have the ability to include more personal information on their profiles, including details about past positions, and a field showing their motivation for being listed on the service (e.g., to find new clients or jobs).

The service is also opening up user’s profiles to mention their profiles on outside sites, including Amazon, eBay, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, del.icio.us, Last.fm, Dopplr, Photobucket and Digg.

The people search engine Spock has made a similar move to incorporate profile information from outside sites. However Spock is much younger, and this could be Xing’s way of heading off incursions from Spock. LinkedIn, meanwhile, has kept a chilly distance from other Web 2.0 services.

The third new feature seeks to facilitate discussions between members. Members will be able to contact each other based on intention; a reporter and a salesman, for instance, would send different queries to other members.

Finally, users can dynamically edit their profile, changing information without going to a separate settings page.

Xing’s ability to quickly iterate and make design improvements may prove it as a worthy competitor to LinkedIn, despite its European origin. The site tends to differ in its friendlier appearance.

For years, technology to search for people has been neglected, compared to most parts of the Web. Until now, that is.

A wave of new entrants are making it much easier to find out everything about a person, from their job, to their personalities, their age and even where they live. Forget the privacy implications, the race is on.

LinkedIn, a social network for professionals, had the field to itself a few years ago. Sites like Friendster let you search for friends, but it wasn’t ordered for full-on people search.

Only over the past year or so has there been a frantic rush to offer more sophisticated people search. Facebook, for example, has emerged into a networking tool, and increasingly a place where people search for each other. Here’s the latest string of developments:

–ZoomInfo, one of the largest contacts site that lets you search a database of people and company profiles, will announce next Wednesday it will open to let developers build create applications on its platform. ZoomInfo is one of the more mature people search sites, but for while had remained relatively closed. The public API can be found here, http://developer.zoominfo.com (this will work next week) with more documentation. ZoomInfo has already worked with Amazon A9, Compete and Xing on this. For example, take a look at Compete’s profile on CNET, and you’ll see that it carries a widget on the right with more information provided by ZoomInfo.

– ZoomInfo now lets you look up full profiles at its site, and through widgets via its API; it merely limits the number of searches you can do on people. You have to pay to search high numbers of people, and to search by certain sub-category of occupation, for example. Related: ZoomInfo and a business networking site, Xing, announced a partnership to integrate their services in June, and there’s news next week on that front too. Xing adds the networking features that ZoomInfo hadn’t had until now.

– Viadeo, is a French-based company that lets you add a profile and then search for contacts according to industry they work in, or any other number of variables. It also lets you search for jobs. We registered, tried it out and found it functional. Each person tags themselves according to subjects they’re interested in, and people can get in touch with each other. The company is similar to LinkedIn. It just raised €5 million in funding (see Mashable) from its existing backers AGF Private Equity and Ventech. It has more than 1.3 million members. It now operates in several European countries, and is expanding into Chinese via a partnership with Tianji, a Chinese social network. (screenshot at bottom)

– Yahoo China has just released a new version of its search, Yahoo.cn, that includes a people search, though it’s focused on celebrities. Yahoo uses information extraction technology and semantic analysis to create a Flash-based map of relationships, along with explanations of why they are related to and the sources of the information. China Web 2.0 provides an example of Jack Ma. Another Chinese company, Koowo, reportedly got $5.5 million for among other things, a similar mapping of Chinese stars. However, the downside is that these offerings often appear to be inaccurate. Finally, there’s Ucloo, the Chinese people search, that last we heard was looking to raise a round of capital.

– Spock, the Silicon Valley start-up focused on people search, got off to a good start mid last month, when it hit the list of fastest growing sites, according to Alexa, even if it had some well-reported snafus (Spock lets users tag other people in profiles with words to describe them, and some people have complained about being tagged with insulting words). It joins Wink, another Silicon Valley company focused on people search.

–And this just in: There’s a new company called PeekYou. However, it looks considerably more lightweight, compared to Spock and others, perhaps because it has just launched, with less preparation than the others (Techcrunch has more).

Spock, the Redwood City, Calif. search engine for people, launches tomorrow after a year of suspense.

It has remained secretive for months (see our original coverage), testing its engine, adding some 100,000 profiles and inserting other social networking features. In those past stories, we showed examples of how profile pages of people contain all sorts of information about people.

We asked chief exec Jaideep Singh how he plans to make money. He said the company will serve ads next to searches just like Google does, though it will wait a few months before doing so.

Spock’s focus is key. If it can make people search fun and memorable, it has a chance to steal searchers from Google. About 30 percent of searches on Google are for people (Spock estimates that 20 billion searches are done on people monthly across all search engines), even if a good chunk is vanity search. People are obsessed with themselves and with others. Spock could prove more useful to Google if it mines the Web for all the information about someone and then organizes it coherently. Below is an example of a small profile of Dick Cheney found when searching for “President” (he’s not president, but as Vice President he ranks high in results).

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LinkedIn, ZoomInfo and Xing, all services that compete in some way with Spock, by offering business information about people, do not have the same interactive features. On Spock, you can submit a tag on a person, labeling him say, a “funny guy.” Other users can then come along and give a thumbs up on the tag. As second, third and fourth endorsements are made, the tag grows in size, reflecting it is a significant trait about the person. In the case of Dick Cheney, early test users appear to have marked Cheney “acting President.”

Here’s a way Spock differs from Google: Type “boxer” into Spock, and its top search results are Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson. Type it into Google, and it returns a Wikipedia entry for a “boxer” dog.

Spock also allows you to create widgets of your favorite searches, and paste them into your blog. See our example of Web 2.0 venture capitalists in image below. You can go in and click on the profiles, and vote (by clicking on the Web 2.0 tag) whether you agree or not that the VC should be ranked highly as a Web 2.0 VC. If you vote no, it will help drive that VC down in the rankings.

Looking at the rain outside my posh Sand Hill office, my co-founder Jay Bhatti and I wondered how we could assemble the right team to build the company we had envisioned. Every entrepreneur confronts this challenge. The vision, in my opinion, is the easy part. Getting it done is a lot harder. My experience in venture capital had taught me first-hand that building a market leading company requires a great team and a great company culture. That is what separates winners from also-rans! But it’s also a lot easier said than done.

Every founding team brings different skills to the table. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses is really important. Jay and I were past our productive engineering days, and were now business guys. As a VC at Clearstone, most of my current network was other entrepreneurs, execs, and other VCs. Jay, an exec at Microsoft, was moving from Seattle, and didn’t bring too much local engineering talent to the table either. But we had great chemistry, and trust, dating all the way back to B-school. And that was a great start.

The first move we made was put together a strong advisory board. We looked through our network, identified the strongest people we knew, and began pitching them. We realized that some got the vision instantly and some didn’t.

I have noticed that in technology we’re surrounded by very smart people. IQ is virtually a commodity. However, there are those who are analysts – can ask 1 million questions, and be skeptical of everything; then there are doers, people who apply their intellect and resourcefulness to find solutions. Find those people and keep them close to you. Stay a 100 miles away from the former.

We got Siva Kumar, serial entrepreneur, who had started 8 companies not only to advise but also take a board seat. We got Suneet Wadhwa, also a serial entrepreneur, and a friend to encourage us, and push us to to think more deeply about the user, and what problems to solve first.

Being at Clearstone was also a strong asset. Clearstone’s David Stern and others there were active and helpful in introducing us to well connected people. However, our engineering network was weak! We knew no great search guys personally.

Therefore, Jay and I next set about becoming full time “head hunters” - calling all the engineers in our network and asking them to recommend others. We got some leads, some relevant people, but not everyone is into taking risk. They loved the concept but didn’t want to leave their cushy jobs, especially when we’d raised no money.

Just like any large endeavor in life, we set up a process, and fine-tuned it over time. Pushing our contacts and cold calling people become the tasks of the day. We used LinkedIn, and Google, both great resources, judiciously. Each person, and each email was researched and personally crafted. Soon we began to build a large pipeline of qualified talent. Our advisors became a great resource not only to interview candidates, but also introduce us to others.

Siva introduced us to Jeff Winner, a well known VP Engineering with search and consumer background, who was sought after by every VC on Sand Hill Road. We knew we couldn’t close him right away, so we enlisted his help in interviewing candidates. This was a perfect arrangement for both parties. Try before you buy.

In a matter of 60 days, we had contacted over 200 engineers, spoken to about a 100, interviewed 40, and got 7 good guys who very interested. Hongche Liu was the star. He was a hands-on engineering manager and superstar at Yahoo!, a PhD with 10 years of complex IR product experience, in addition to research. Most importantly, he was excited about doing a startup and had a great work ethic and attitude. We put all our force into convincing him to forget his high paying job, de-prioritize his wife and 3 kids, and take a whopping $90k salary!

Vision and concept aside, Hongche, like most engineers who aspire to join startups, realized that the risk of not joining a startup was way greater than being a cog in the wheel at a large company. His learning and therefore value would be a lot greater by being a key member of a venture backed team.

We got lucky with our next hire. Wayne, a teenage entrepreneur, who had built dawsonscreek.com in high school, with over 2m page views a month, was at Microsoft working on the undo button in Powerpoint! He was aching to get back into the web, learn Ruby, and apply his energy while having fun. He blew us away within 15 mins of interviewing; he signed an NDA; 15 minutes later he was blown away by the service Jay had mocked up in Powerpoint.

Wayne was very smart and decisive, and so joined us after his two weeks notice. I realized that the most valuable people are those who are decisive, smart, and have a great attitude. Wayne had all three. Jay calls this the BAD principle – Brains, Attitude, and Drive.

The one thing that frustrated me was that I’d find Jay searching Craigslist for engineers and sending email upon email, with no responses. I pleaded with him not to waste his time doing “stupid” things. I called it adverse selection. I was proven to be the idiot!

Jay found Sam Williams, a young Caltech CS guy, who had goofed off two years in Europe, but was a Ruby on Rails star. Jeff interviewed him, and within 30 mins he walked into my office and said, this is one of the smartest guys we’ve interviewed. He’s a consultant but loves the Spock idea and can start immediately. Like Wayne, Sam was smart and decisive. The only difference was that he started in two days.

Meanwhile, Jeff Winner was spending more and more time with us. He helped us interview and hire. He began to spend more time architecting the product, and in the process began to evolve our product concept. He was also now fully sold on the vision and the team (that he had helped hire). He threw in the towel, and joined full time.

We were now a very strong 5-person core team. On the way we had raised $1m from my colleagues at Clearstone, and were off to the races. Today we have 16 full time people, have raised $9m, and get over 50 resumes a week.

As a VC, I had seen my investments do well when the teams were outstanding and the culture was great. But having gone through it myself, I realized the vast difference between analysis and doing. I have now internalized a few key lessons:

Lessons summary:

1. Find good co-founders, people you trust. Don’t be greedy. In my venture and entrepreneurial experience, many people mess this up.
2. Have an exciting vision. It’s the only thing you have to offer. If you’re not super stoked, nobody else around you will be either.
3. Have conviction and be passionate about your vision especially in the face of adverse feedback. High IQ analysts are a dime a dozen, and will raise a million exceptions. Ignore them; both as employees and as advisors.
4. Get the best and most experienced advisors around your company who share your passion. If u don’t know anyone, cold call until you find them.
5. Have a very high bar for recruiting, both talent and motivation. Don’t let fear and temptation get the better of you. It’s easy to convince yourself that the person has worked at other places and is probably good enough. Good enough is not good. You’ve got to be excited. Remember Jay’s BAD principle.
6. Pay lower than market in the early days; it’s a great filter.
7. Age is not a factor but motivation is. People who don’t work hard, will never be the key drivers in your startup. Perfection comes from hard work.
8. Don’t undervalue engineers from top schools. We got guys from Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, Caltech, etc. and they are all really good. There are lots of great engineers from average engineering schools (like myself) too, so don’t over-emphasize school either. It really is about talent, hard work, and great attitude.
9. There are those who look for problems and those who look for solutions. This becomes clear in interviews very quickly. Hire people who look for solutions.
10. Grow a thick skin for rejection.

Spock, the secretive people search engine getting ready to launch in two months, showed another demo to VentureBeat last week.

It has shown improvements from last year, when we first got a look. The company also just announced the “Spock challenge,” a competition that rewards $50,000 to the team that best identifies individuals referred to in a set of 100,000 documents selected by Spock. This is designed to help Spock find new ways to distinguish between say, Michael Jackson the singer, and Michael Jackson, the football player. This entity resolution problem is proving to be one of the toughest challenges for Spock.

Spock, you’ll recall from our early look, is a venture-backed Menlo Park, Calif. company that is combing the Web to find information about people, and categorizing that information onto a profile page for each individual. People search is becoming more important, as we’ve noted.

When Tim O’Reilly, organizer of the Web 2.0 Expo, was asked by Wired about what new, interesting technologies are emerging from this year’s Web 2.0 Expo, he mentions Spock.

If you search for “george bush” at Spock, for example, you’ll get a list of George Bush profiles, sorted by relevance. George W Bush is on top. See screen-shot below. Users tag can him with any word, from “president,” to even “drunken driver;” he has 118 tags, our arrow points out. Spock hopes to make tags a useful discovery tool. If you click on the “governor of texas” tag, for example, you’ll get a ranking of governors from Texas. If you click on the “drunken driver” tag, you’ll get other famous drunk drivers (Mel Gibson is on the top).

Moreover, if you click on the Bush entry, Spock takes you to a more detailed profile page (see image below). There, you’ll get more data, such as a fuller list of profiles about him, and resources like political humor about him and audio recordings (see screenshot).

Next, if Bush happens to be a “friend” of yours, your page shows an icon indicating that — and you’ll get more options, such as the ability to email him. Spock wants to integrate with services like LinkedIn, so you’ll also be able see when your contacts say, change their bio at LinkedIn; and with Facebook, so you can see feed updates about your friends there too. In other words, Spock wants to be the go-to place for all your people needs. You’ll also be able to get updates on the recent tags people have given profiles you care about. Like Google, Spock is shutting out porn images.

[Update: See Spock's job listings at VentureBeat's job board. They include a senior crawler architect, a server architect, an information retrieval engineer and a back-end rails developer.]

Spock, the Menlo Park start-up that wants to provide a definitive search engine focused on people, has raised $7 million in a first round of VC funding from Clearstone and Opus Capital Ventures.

VentureBeat reviewed the secretive company here, after getting a demo. It wouldn’t allow VentureBeat to publish screenshots, for fear of alerting competition. Ucloo in China is gunning for the same market, though Ucloo is focused on Asia for now.

Previously, Spock raised an angel round from Clearstone. It will release a closed testing version early next year. Clearstone’s William Quigley, Opus’ Ken Elefant and TheFind.com chief executive Siva Kumar will join Spock’s board.

Updated

So which Silicon Valley venture firm will dare touch Ucloo?

Ucloo is a year-old Chinese people search engine, and there are many things not to like about this site. First, check out the logo. What does it remind you of? At least they switched the colors of the first three letters (it is red/yellow/blue, instead of blue/red/yellow). See the page comparisons below, with Google, and with Baidu.

Chief executive Randy Ding tells VentureBeat that Ucloo has already indexed 90 million personal profiles for its database, making it the largest people search engine so far. Spock, the ambitious people search engine we profiled here plans to launch with 100 million. But Ucloo is adding between 10,000 and 100,000 profiles a day, Ding tells us, so it will zoom past Spock within a few weeks. It is focused on China now, but is expanding to cover the Chinese community abroad, including in Taiwan, US and Canada. It wants to launch an English version after it raises venture capital — and is now beginning to reach out to Sand Hill Road.

It’s eerily comprehensive. It wants to list everything it can find about you, including your name, birthday, contact information, education, work background, pictures, online activity and reputation — even court records. Check out this profile below, of “LoveGirl,” which shows her Gmail and MSN accounts, among other things. So what happens when it crawls your information, finds out what sites you’ve watched online, who you’ve corresponded with, etc, and you can’t appeal to U.S courts to take it down? Yikes.

It wants to 1) let people search for information on other people, 2) let companies check employee background and references, 3) let companies check other companies’ reputation and employees, and 4) lets a user check a company’s background. There’s the additional unanswered question about what China’s government would use it for.

Update: VentureBeat contacted three plugged-in sources in the Chinese tech community, and heard back from each of them that they hadn’t heard of Ucloo until we brought it to their attention. One of them tried it out, and found it useful. She did some research and reports that the current version of Ucloo launched in Sept. after settling some legal issues concerning its data sources, including allegations of theft. In addition to the material we mentioned above, Ucloo even collects your IMs and posts on online forums (so-called bulletin boards in China). Our correspondent found that most media coverage in China about Ucloo is negative, so the commenters below are off-base when they suggest VentureBeat is anti-Chinese. Ucloo’s Ding attended the recent Web 2.0 conference in SF.

Ding, meanwhile, has since responded to some of our criticisms on privacy. We will not edit his remarks. He is Chinese, and so applaud his effort to correspond with us in English.

Ding:

We have the function of “It’s me”, after we verify (by the email address which we send from our database or ask them upload the ID) the person who is listing on Ucloo, the user can edit his/her profile and add/remove some of information.

VentureBeat:

So I can remove anything I want, so that Ucloo won’t have anything about me?

Ding:

1. User can remove SOME of information which is included home address, home phone number or some of other directly contact information and can ask system to transfer all connection request through ucloo.
2. Personal education and work experience can be added new information by the owner, but can’t be removed.
3. Web reference is an hyperlink depend on source website, Ucloo cached to check.
4. Business membership can see all information whatever it has been edited or not.

Also, next version which will be launched the end of this year, we are going to change our logo NOT like Google.

Updated

Spock, a secretive Menlo Park start-up incubated with $1 million from Clearstone Venture Partners, will unveil a search engine for people by the end of the year.

From a demo we’ve seen, we think it could be a powerful addition. Spock could take this in some interesting directions. Its main challenge will be to wean users from Google as a first stop, though more on that in a sec.

When Spock launches, it will have 100 million profiles of people in its database, by far the largest open repository of profiles anywhere. Spock delivers a mixture of facts and research on a people, but also opens a profile to social input, giving it a touch of Wikipedia.

This move is a no-brainer, and it makes you wonder why no one has done this yet.

LinkedIn, ZoomInfo and other people-contact related sites were built in different eras, and have focused on specific subsets of people (LinkedIn and ZoomInfo on business execs, for example). Spock, however, exploits all the latest tagging technology and the exploding number of public profiles on the Web since social network sites like MySpace became popular last year.

Scrubbing millions of profiles from the Web wasn’t an obvious thing to do when Palo Alto’s LinkedIn launched several years ago. LinkedIn began as a contact site, allowing people to request meetings through their layers of relationships. It has since tried to move toward a more open model. Indeed, LinkedIn is aggressively building out its people profiles even as we write. (Last week, it also kicked off a major expansion into Europe and Asia as part of a land-grab, with a German version to go live soon.)

Spock starts from the other end. Spock dispenses with the “contact” element of LinkedIn. It is an open site, for people seeking information about other people.

ZoomInfo, which you must pay a subscription for, has 29 million profiles. LinkedIn has about 9 million profiles, and wants to grow to 100 million by 2008. Spock’s 100 million, meanwhile, will only grow, according to co-founders Jaideep Singh and Jay Bhatti.

If Google is a place to find Web sites that are relevant for your search, and Amazon is place to find goods, then Spock wants to let you find people, they argue.

Here’s an example of how it works: If you type in “actress,” Spock returns results like Google — with listings down a page. In this case, the first entry is Felicity Huffman, who Spock’s engine finds as the most relevant for “actress.” (Now, if you type in “actress” into Google, you’ll see why Spock has a chance; there are few actresses in the results, except for the annoying site ActressArchives at the top). Moreover, as both Spock and LinkedIn make their profiles more popular, these will rank higher in Google’s results anyway.

Continuing with our “actress” example, you first get a photo of Huffman, but you also get a bunch of tags underneath telling you how she is relevant. For example, there’s tag for “Oscar nominee for best actress,” and “Desperate Housewives,” for which she is well known. There’s a “Wikipedia” tag. If you click on these tags, Spock will take you its relevant results for that tag. This gives users a way of searching for information related to the Huffman.

The tag font size gets smaller if Spock’s engine detects the tag isn’t relevant for the person. So if users create a “sexy” tag for Huffman, the tag may get larger or smaller, depending on how many people agree. Spock gives users an option of clicking on the tag and selecting “yes” or “no.” If they select no, Spock factors this into its database. Then, if you type in “sexy actress,” Huffman will have fallen slightly in the ranking. Spock has built ways to keep people from gaming the system. If you want to add tags, for example, you have register — one way for Spock to monitor usage.

Nicole Kidman is the second result under “actress,” even though she won an Oscar (Huffman was only a nominee). Why would an engine rank a nominee higher than an actual winner? Chief executive Jaideep Singh says Spock’s engine factors in hundreds of variables for its algorithm on determining relevance. This is Spock’s secret sauce, he says. We asked if his algorithm takes advantage of Google’s APIs. He said yes, but there are many other sources, he said.

Spock will make money by running relevant advertising beside the profile results.

Spock has seven employees in Menlo Park, two in India, and six more part-time.

Singh and Jay Bhatti met in business school. Bhatti has a background in consulting, having worked at Accenture, Deloitte and Microsoft. Singh was a VC at Clearstone and worked at WindRiver. Jeff Winner, VP of engineering hails from Friendster, eGroups and Netscape.

David Stern, the investor at Clearstone (who contributed an op-ed to VentureBeat here) said the investment is a return to his firm’s roots as in investor in consumer companies — eToys, Overture, PayPal, United Online, MP3.com and eMusic are among them.

37signals, the jazzy Web 2.0 company, takes funding from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — See the company’s announcement here about why. We last mentioned the company here. The company boasts: Since we launched Basecamp we’ve been contacted by nearly 30 different VC firms. We’ve never been interested in the typical traditional VC deal. With a few exceptions, all the VCs could offer us was cash and connections. We’re fine on both of those fronts. We don’t need their money to run the business and our little black book is full. We’re looking for something else…We found a perfect match in Jeff. Jeff is our kinda guy.

Why is Jeff so exceptional? We’ll take a stab at the answer. Amazon, an online site fighting in the tight-margined retail world, was losing lots of money during the Internet bubble, and still was losing money after it burst. Bezos managed to attract billions of dollars of debt to sustain his effort, even through those worst of times, when investors were pulling the plug on just about every other company in the red. Somehow, Bezos pulled it off. He is exceptional indeed.
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