VentureBeat

European business networking site XING and U.S. business search service ZoomInfo are introducing a way to bring their two continents’ worth of business contacts together to challenge rival LinkedIn as well as more general social networks like Facebook.

Starting tomorrow, XING members will be able to search for and befriend more than 18 million business professionals who have registered profiles on ZoomInfo and search a total pool of 40 million profiles (including unregistered ZoomInfo profiles) who don’t use XING. With this search option, the two companies are hoping to spur more social interaction. Search results will include people’s career history and professional highlights. Seeing this information about somebody may give you more reason to want to friend them within XING.

XING is small in the U.S. but popular in Europe and claims four million total users worldwide. ZoomInfo is not really a social network, as it scrapes web pages for information about the people in its database rather than relying on friend requests. Because it gathers information about businesspeople with or without their permission, it’s been more useful for recruiters than for professional interaction.

The new search offering is the second step in the two companies’ effort to present an international alternative to big business networking site, LinkedIn. The companies announced their partnership, including this search feature, last June (our coverage). The first step came in September, when ZoomInfo introduced a co-registration option so that people could register simultaneously for both its site and XING. ZoomInfo also introduced a public application programming interface for developers at that time, so other developers can create applications within its platform (our coverage).

Hamburg, Germany-based Xing, which went public last year, Waltham, Mass.-based ZoomInfo, and LinkedIn are also no doubt concerned that businesspeople are using more general social networks like Facebook for business networking. Anecdotally, I’m finding that Facebook is just as useful for business networking.

Linkedin, last I heard, has more than 16 million total registered users and says it is growing by around a million registered users a month. Facebook has more than 61 million monthly active users, although it’s not clear what portion of those people are using Facebook for business.

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).

(Updated with initial LinkedIn response)

Xing, the Hamburg, Germany social networking site for business contacts, has just signed a deal that makes its network larger than it U.S. competitor LinkedIn.

It has announced a partnership with ZoomInfo, the largest fact-checked proprietary database in the world, of some 36 million business profiles. Xing’s two million members will now be able to search and access basic information on those profiles for free, effectively giving Xing much wider reach than LinkedIn’s 11 million members. The paperwork was signed in New York this morning, and we just got off the phone with Lars Hinrichs, Xing’s chief executive.

Xing has been putting pressure of LinkedIn for some time, having recently gone public and expanding aggressively in Europe. The accord is significant because ZoomInfo’s profiles are largely for executives in the English-speaking world, where Xing has been weak to date. [Update: However, LinkedIn has responded, saying ZoomInfo has scraped contact and other information about people without their permission, and Xing will now have to deal with privacy issues. More below.]

ZoomInfo’s profile search is the gold standard for the headhunter industry, but so far it has not been accessible without a paid membership and it has few social networking features. However, under the terms, Xing members still have to upgrade to a premium account of $5 a month in order to contact ZoomInfo people they aren’t already networked with, or to change their profiles on ZoomInfo. This is not unlike LinkedIn’s requirement that people pay for a premium membership to directly contact people not already in their network.

While Xing specializes in social networking, ZoomInfo’s value is in crawling the web, performing semantic analysis of Web pages about people, and extracting information about them to add to its database of profiles. A paying member of Xing will get full access to this information under the deal, however will not have access to most sophisticated search abilities offered by ZoomInfo. For example, while a Xing member will be able to search for a name of an IBM executive on ZoomInfo, they will not be able to search for all executives at IBM at C level. ZoomInfo effectively becomes a tool for headhunters, while Xing becomes useful for most other people.

Additionally, ZoomInfo will be launching a marketing campaign, driving its members to sign up with Xing, Hinrichs said. ZoomInfo’s 4.5 million unique monthly visitors will be able to join Xing’s network directly with a two-click process. ZoomInfo makes money from the deal from a revenue share agreement the two companies have signed.

Contact information of Xing users will continue to be protected within Xing, Hinrichs said.

We’ve sought comment from LinkedIn, and will update as necessary. [Update: LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman is in transit, but did provide an initial response by email. He said "Zoominfo has scraped 36 million profiles (with lots of duplicates) and used datamining to figure out email addresses. Essentially, what this deal does, is allow Xing's users to send email or call without permission of the people that Zoominfo has scraped...I'm not sure that this is something to crow about."]

[Update II: Predictably, Bryan Burdick, COO of ZoomInfo, has responded to Hoffman's criticism. He said ZoomInfo searches for information publicly available on the Web, and simply tags and organizes it so that is more useful for searchers. ZoomInfo doesn't look behind firefalls or bot stoppers, and doesn't license any information from third-parties. "We're like Google," he said. In other words, if your contact information is out there, say on your corporate Web site, it will be in ZoomInfo. ZoomInfo lets people register and add or correct information about their profiles. ZoomInfo minimizes duplicates by requiring specific information on profiles -- such as name, current title, company and basic bio information. The resulting 36 million profiles is a subset of its 80 million names. Moreover, he said only 16 million of those profiles have contact information such as email address.]

Xing went public in December 2006. In March 2007, Xing acquired eConozco, a Spanish contact networks for professionals, and in May it launched a job marketplace.

The integration between Xing’s platform and ZoomInfo’s search engine will happen in fall.

LinkedIn, the networking site for professionals connect, has raised $12.8 million in venture funding.

The venture capitalists, Silicon Valley’s Bessemer Venture Partners and the European Founders Fund (EFF), an internet focused firm, placed a value of more than $250 million on the Palo Alto company, after the investment.

This catapults LinkedIn to the rarified group of networks that are actually worth something • though granted, this worth is still on paper • held on the books of venture capitalists, untested by the market.

The company raised the capital because it could do so on favorable terms (at higher values, a company gives away less of the company’s shares in exchange for an investment). Keith Rabois, the company’s VP for corporate and business development, said the cash will let LinkedIn experiment with various products, launching them and then killing them if they don’t work out. The company is already profitable.

VentureBeat hasn’t mentioned the European Founders Fund before. Founded by brothers Marc, Oliver and Alexander Samwer, the firm was behind the launch of eBay Germany (Alando), and Jamba, part of News Group, among others.

The LinkedIn network currently has 9 million users. The company says the number is growing at 100,000 members a week, which suggests acceleration.

We’ve written about LinkedIn’s business model before.

The company recently launched LinkedIn Answers, a service that allows members to ask business-related questions to their contacts (this differs from Yahoo Answers, because LinkedIn’s user has to use their name, and can only pose the question to their network).

LinkedIn is seeing competition from new players. One in Germany, called Xing (formerly OpenBC) recently went public in Germany, and has a wider reach in that country. LinkedIn has moved to expand its presence there.

Next, LinkedIn wants to market its new LinkedIn Experts service, launched on Jan 4. It lets people submit requests for expert advice. LinkedIn locates the top five experts it thinks are appropriate for the task, and lets the searcher hook up with the experts they select from the list — at a rate of $500 an hour. LinkedIn keeps $250, and the expert gets $250. (We’re not sure why anyone would pay this much, though. All they have to do is sign up for LinkedIn’s premium InMail service, which lets them contact the expert directly, and arrange to pay them just $250 straight). But then compare this to the Gerson Lehrman Group, which charges you $10,000 a month to sit down with top five experts in the field, and LinkedIn is a great deal, says LinkedIn’s Rabois. This is high-end stuff, designed for people who are time-sensitive, more than price sensitive. For example, LinkedIn hopes to attract hedge fund mangers, who want to research a particular company. LinkedIn also handles billing, so helps avoid hassles for the expert. Finally, it can track people who bypass the system, and eventual may choose not to help those people, spokeswoman Kay Luo said.