Tycoons Row

CEO Gina Bianchini, has just re-launched Ning, your own personal, customizable social network. Ning is like a combination of Netvibes & MySpace, allowing you to create your own featured portal with your own theme and ability to create your own network. Founded in 2004, Bianchini & Marc Adreessen, created a company to allow people to create their own social networks. Right now, the company runs over 30,000 social networks and has 27 employees with headquarters in Palo Alto, Ca. Ning will quickly be adopted by creators and innovators who seek to create their own “space” in a digital world.

Strategic Philosophy

Ning has just re-launched a great new version of their website. I think their current philosophy is to gain widespread adoption of their service through catering too innovators who want to start their own fan club. The concept would be to focus on evangelists within their respective industry, for example an aspiring actress or even an upcoming novelist who is passionate about their work & wants to share it with other like-minded individuals. With Ning, those evangelists can also become tech-geeks by creating their online network platform.

Mission

Nings’ mission is to improve the technical landscape of developing a social networking. With Ning, the barriers to entry of creating a MySpace has just dropped to zero. I forsee Ning continually improving on the technical infrastructure and allowing for a user-friendly experience. This is a company that will focus on ease of use & simplicity.

Vision

The underlying vision of Ning is to be the go to site for creating & customizing an online community platform. This will be accomplished if they continue the scaleabilty of the system. Right now, the service is free. The drawback is having the Ning user id within your URL on the free service. You can pay $4.95 / month to get your own domain name. In my opinion, this is the key factor of whether or not to use Ning, because, for tracking & statistics purposes, you won’t really be able to track the stats of your network using the Ning alias. Just examine some of the Wordpress.com blogs & sites on Compete.com or Alexa. These tracking companies track the main domain name & not the full one.

Finance

TechCrunch reports Ning has been finance by $9 million to date fom Andreessen. The company offers a free service, however, it is ad-supported. They have to generate revenue somehow right? Additionally, if you wanted to get rid of the ads & support your own ads, it will cost $19.95/month. To utilize your own domain name, it will be $5/ month. This evidently shows how this company understand that just an ad-revenue model isn’t the only way to generate revenue.

Overall, I think the greatest value that Ning has is the ability to customize & privatize an individuals creations. Above, you will be able to see a demo of the product directly from the CEO.