As we settle into the New Year and prepare exciting new endeavours for the next twelve months, we took a moment to look back at what was a very big year for us.
2011 saw Viadeo…
…Grow further in emerging markets
2011 was a year marked by significant growth. Not only did we reach our 40 million member mark, but we also experienced encouraging expansion in emerging markets. We’re especially proud of our achievements in China where Viadeo’s Chinese network, Tianji, is currently the number one professional social network in the Chinese market with eight million members.
For more details, check out our latest infographic released last year showing Viadeo development in all emerging markets including Latin America, Africa and India. There’s also the latest Tianji infographic focusing on our development in China.
…Open our first US office
March saw Viadeo unveil our first US office in San Francisco, California. We will use this base to build and develop new partnerships as well as to expand the Viadeo user base in the Pacific region.
Read more about the launch in this article on Business Wire.
…Launch in Africa
After opening in SF we were very pleased to announce the opening of our first African office in Dakar, Senegal in May.
We’re busy growing our African market, currently at 2 million members, a market brimming with growth potential. Chams Diagne, Viadeo’s General Manager for Africa, identified “acquisitions, targeting virtual and real-world associations and career groups while also building partnerships with professional associations” as the main ways in which Viadeo plans to execute expansion into the African market (taken from a Reuters article).
…Launch our API
June saw the launch of our public API, opening up opportunities for other organizations to take advantage of the Viadeo social graph to provide a more relevant user experience for their own site visitors.
As Viadeo CEO Dan Serfatyexplained in an article with The Next Web: “Now with our open API, third party developers can bring a professional social context to websites, applications and services via our globally-focused social graph.”
We’re already starting to see some really exciting applications of the API. If you’ve not seen them already, check out Viadeo Dev Challenge winner AvriGeo or the winner of our Viadeo London Hack Day SocialSafe.
…Acquire Soocial
For us, one of the most exciting bits of news from this year came in November, when we announced the acquisition of the Dutch tech start-up Soocial.
Soocial is a powerful contact synchronisation and management tool. The great news for our members is that in the future they will be able to use the features from Soocial to manage, organise, back up and share their different address books through the Viadeo platform. With the additional possibility for users to synchronise contacts across over 500 different platforms and messaging services as well as over multiple devices like smartphones, laptops and PCs, we think this’ll be a really valuable addition to the Viadeo platform.
To find out more about the Soocial acquisition, see this interview with Soocial co-founder and CEO Stefan Fountain.
…A Viadeo presence in all BRIC markets
Just last month, Viadeo announced a partnership with Russia’s leading publishing house Sanoma Independent Media.
Not only is Viadeo now officially active in Russia with an office now open in Moscow but the Viadeo platform will soon be available in Russian (Cyrillic). Working with our new partner, we’re looking forward to providing our Russian members and other Russian business professionals with tailored business services.
The announcement is particularly exciting because of the great potential of the Russian market and its rapid expansion in recent years.
Overall, 2011 was a year full of noteworthy developments for Viadeo. To support our rapid growth and so we can continue building a better service for our members, the Viadeo team itself also grew considerably last year. We went from 180 staff at the beginning of the year to 400 at the end of the year.
We look forward to sharing even more defining moments with you throughout the coming year– for news and updates watch this space!
We’d also like to take this opportunity to wish all our members, clients and partners a prosperous and Happy New Year.
