In China, guanxi (relationships) means everything, especially for climbing your way up the social career ladder. That’s why any service that gives you the extra edge will be super valuable. Back in June, we interviewed Derek Ling, CEO and Founder of one of the leading online professional social networking services in China, Tianji.com. The Chinese based company is owned by the French Viadeo.com.
Just yesterday, Viadeo announced that it acquired an Amsterdam based contact management company called Soocial for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition will help all of its worldwide members, including Tianji, an easy way to ‘manage, organize, back up and easily and safely share their address books. Above all, the features will allow members to synchronise their contacts across more than 500 platforms and messaging services and devices including PCs and smartphones.’
Soocial is a start-up founded in 2007 in Holland. It specializes in contact management and universal contact synchronisation. As part of the acquisition, Soocial’s development staff will be joining Viadeo to work towards improving overall user experience on the professional social network.
“Contact and synchronisation management can quickly become a nightmare for a professional who must often juggle multiple formats of business cards and various electronic devices,” said Dan Serfaty, CEO and founder of Viadeo. “So we are very pleased to announce the Soocial acquisition: we will indeed be able to provide to our 40 million members worldwide the best technology to manage their contacts.”
“We are very excited to be working with Viadeo,” said Stefan Fountain, co-founder and CEO of Soocial. “We will be able to work together to achieve a common goal: to support our members to get the best and the most out of their contacts to expand their network.”
“Despite the acquisition taken place in our group HQ in Europe, this contact management function will be implemented to Tianji very soon. We are very excited about this new acquisition as we find this is going to be a really useful function for all our users. We would also like to highlight that we are the very first, and so far the only, professional SNS in China that is equipped with such functions. This definitely makes us shine among the others.” says Derek Ling, CEO of Tianji.
For Tianji, this will be a welcomed tool to their product. Every day in China there are countless events for networking and exchanging business cards and mobile numbers. Having an easy to use, contact management syncing service will be a bonus to Tianji’s members.