Glossary

Basic Membership
Free membership with XING offering limited functionality.

User interface
Part of the computer program that interacts with the user, typically by
employing graphical symbols.

Blog / Weblog
A website that periodically contains new entries, e.g., a private internet diary.

Business intelligence system
Systematic and statistical analysis of the Company’s business to gain information for the improvement of products and business processes.

Communities
Special interest groups among XING members.

IFRS
International Financial Reporting Standards; issued by the International Accounting Standards Board (the former International Accounting Standards Committee) since 2001.

(Monthly) Churn Rate
The number of terminations divided by the number of Premium Members at the end of the relevant month. The average monthly Churn Rate is defined as the average of the monthly Churn Rates over the respective period.

Link
A connection between two websites; by clicking on a link the internet user is directed from one website to another website.

Live networking events
Events where XING members can meet in person and get to know each other (‘‘live’’ as opposed to ‘‘online’’).

Moderators
XING members who moderate online Groups on the platform.

Networking
Building and maintaining a social network; maintaining contacts.

Online
Status during which an individual computer is connected to the network; frequently used in terms of an existing access to the internet.

Online platform
A combined system of hardware and software components on which a computer application operates that can be accessed over the internet and that provides a user interface; here the XING platform.

Personal data
Personal information of individuals such as date of birth, place of residence, nationality, and also hobbies, preferences, etc.

Posting
A message in an internet forum or a newsgroup; a posting is usually visible to a number of users and therefore ‘‘public’’; postings often refer to each other and are shown in chronological order so that they resemble a conversation or discussion.

Premium Membership
Paid XING membership that entitles Premium Members to use all the functions on the XING platform.

Prepaid account
A user account that the user must pay for before use.

Professionals
Highly qualified professionals (or: professionals seeking employment), business men and women, used here as a collective term for the XING network’s target group.

Professional networking
Building and maintaining a network of job-related and business contacts.

Social networking
Building and using social contacts; in the form of online social networking by using special websites that facilitate communication among users and enables them to search for users with particular characteristics.

Tagging
To assign a keyword to simplify the sorting and finding of data, here to simply finding contacts within the XING network.

Top Deals
Special offers/discounts that XING AG makes available exclusively to Premium Members in cooperation with partner companies.

Unique visitor
Identifiable visitor of a website (by IP address or cookie); to measure the traffic on a website as a proxy for its popularity, some methods do not count identifiable, repeat visitors of a website; these repeat visitors are only counted once as opposed to methods that count the number of ‘‘hits’’ (page views; page impressions).

Viral marketing
A form of marketing that exploits existing social contacts in order to steer attention towards brands, products or campaigns by spreading messages epidemically like a virus. The spreading of the messages is ultimately based on word of mouth or other forms of communication among customers or consumers.

Web 2.0
Web 2.0 is a generic term for new interactive technologies and services on the internet that take into account the new perception of the internet as well as the focus on interactive online communities. Users are provided applications and different kinds of data on largely integrated web platforms. The Web 2.0 technology follows the trend towards a more user-friendly internet and a stronger social and communicative orientation of the internet.

Web-based
A process that takes place on the internet.