According to a report recently published by BITKOM and Thomson Media Control online advertisement in Germany is growing fast and 800 million Euro could be spent in this year.

627 million Euro have been spent in the first three quarters of 2007 already compared to 373 million for the same period in 2006 which is a plus of 68%.

It’s mostly telcos and ISPs who drive the growth. They have spent about 141 million Euro for traditionall online adverstisement between Q1 and Q3. Online retailers are second with 124 million Euro. Media- and entertainment companies (79 million), companies in the financial sector (69 million) and makers of cars (61 million) are also in the top 5.

While fast growing overall online adverstisement is still far behind traditional ads in print and TV and made up for 3% of the market in Germany in 2006.

ComBOTS - a publicly traded company which was founded by the founders of web.de after web.de was sold to United Internet in 2005 for 200 million Euro and 5.8 million (9.26 %) in shares - today announced to terminate the further development of their communication service and undertake a realignment of the company.

They wanted to revolutionise the web by integrating rich media messaging, advanced telephony and reliable file transfer in one easy to use tool for PC and mobile and have been pumping millions of Euro in R&D and marketing ever since without attracting a significant number of users and with zero revenue.

Recently they tried to cut down their expenses (lowering their net loss to 3.3 million in Q2 2007 coming from 9.3 million in Q2 2006). Since the share price of United Internet has been developing nicely they easily could have kept this service alive for a few more years.

Background of the decision is the unsatisfying market acceptance of the free-of-charge service for the personal, internet based communication, which has been offered in the 1.0 version since mid of March.

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According to a report from comScore on Germany’s largest social networking sites which was published today, 45 percent of the country’s online population – 14.8 million out of 32.9 million – have been visiting social networking sites in July 2007.

Leading social networking sites ranked by german unique visitors in July 2007

MySpace: 3.6 million
studiVZ: 3.1 million
jux: 2,6 million
Piczo: 2.0 million
StayFriends: 1.3 million
Netlog: 1.2 million
Sevenload: 1.1 million
Xing: 685,000
Skyrock Network: 507,000
MSN: 440,000
…
Facebook: 177,000

Source: comScore World Metrix

Two big surprises here: MySpace turns out to be more popular than studiVZ. And Facebook, which has been growing rapidly across the rest of Europe, has not captured the hearts and minds of the Germans yet.

This is just guesswork, but I think in terms of registered and active users and in terms of page impressions studiVZ is still miles ahead of MySpace in Germany. A lot of visitors of MySpace might have been randomly attracted via Google or other sources. And while Facebook when compared to studiVZ is the superior platform in basically every aspect, students just sign up to studiVZ per default just because everybody else does. We probably will see a major migration once Facebook has released its German localisation and the first mavens have moved.

See also Nicole’s critique on comScore’s significance for Germany: IVW Numbers For July, StudiVZ Over 3 Billion Page Impressions

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Students of computer science in Germany find SAP to be the most desired employer, with Google and IBM in second and third place.

A survey conducted by German computer magazine Computerwoche (CW) and the Trendence institute Berlin with 5,000 students of computer science shows SAP being the favourite employer on the market. CW reports about the reasons for these companies being the top three of the students (in German).

The winner: SAP
Besides being Europe’s most successful software house, SAP’s success is mainly attributed to its continuous and engaged HR outreach. Even top management appears at recruiting events or teaches at university like head of human resources Claus Heinrich. He is especially proud of the fact that SAP never had to lay off any employee due to sinking revenues.

We wish for a continuous partnership - a developer often needs a year to be fully trained and integrated. Employees are not just a resource which can be rearrange.

[…]

Trust is a fundamental value for us. It may sound pathetic, but we believe that employees are more engaged in their work and use entrepreneurship and passion in their daily work when they understand it is contract for life.

It strikes me that in a time when everybody pushes for the exact opposite as in “you will change your job!”, SAP’s position does makes a lot of sense, as the SAP system itself is so complex to work with, that training time is just longer.

Leaving SAP though means in many cases just changing the company, as you have been trained for a position in nearly every major company there is: because SAP is likely to be used by them. No wonder that students vote for SAP first, if you are at all interested in this financially attractive future, you do train at the core of it all.

CW continues to report that Mr. Heinrich would like to see more enthusiasm from his future employees, as local programmers seem to need the same kind of motivation as their colleagues in Bangalore - more competitive spirit and less lamenting would be good.

The new kid in the charts: Google
Innovative and cool is the image of the second placed company: Google. Benefits like free food, service offerings and alike (not only in the Valley, but also in Germany) helped Google to jump from zero to second place. Google is perceived as being very innovative and has a very positive image among the students.

150 employees work in Google Germany and 50 positions are open, though the selection process is tough.

Markus and I have noted before that Germany is big enough to be “self sustained” - and that goes for many areas. As such I find it surprising to see Google being the number two in this result. Not so much because I think Google is unattractive, but because I am not sure students are aware of the requirements of this employers. I think there is a reason why those 50 positions are not filled yet, and it is probably not the lack of submissions.

Old rival, third place: IBM
Third place is IBM, winner of last year. HR work is called solid and classical, though with innovative accents, one example being their recruiting centre in Second Life.

Head of HR Christoph Grandpierre acknowledges that they too have to fight for the best talent. Special bonus for working at IBM in his view is the chance to engage in international projects as well as being able to profit from flexible solutions for work time and place. Most important criteria for a new candidate is that they are willing to work on future technology as well as solutions for social relevant problems.

Students are demanding, but realistic about expected work hours
Besides asking them for their favourite employer student where asked additional questions, for example expected payment. The number for their first year pay check was given as 42,600 Euro which is 800 Euro more than last year. Students are very well aware of the lack of man power in the industry, but they are aware of their to be expected work time: 43.6 hours per week.

But money is not the only factor students are interested in - they expect reasonable answers on topics like work life balance, but do not expect the “job for life” but are aware of having to move on.

A good overview of the situation in Germany
The article gives a good snap shot of the situation in Germany, though one has to take into account some grains of salt with this. Completely missing for my taste is an outlook on how those students intend to see their future career in regard to international work and projects, and seems still very German centric.

Without access to the real numbers of this survey it is hard to tell how many of all students have voted for these top three - it would be a pity if this was everything on the horizon of the students: big old German based corporations and one funky Google.

Darmstadt based Emporis – which manages and markets building data in more than 50,000 cities worldwide – has completed a multi-million Euro financing round with Hamburg based VC firm Neuhaus Partners and KfW Bankengruppe yesterday.

Emporis collects data about the real estate and construction markets and has become the world’s largest publicly available database on architectural and building data.

As an open platform, Emporis.com allows users from all over the world to participate in the completion of building information in their own cities. The goal is to index all buildings using semantic syntax in order to query market no matter what language you use.

Currently 700 volunteering editors and photographers are gathering the data – crowdsourcing probably is the term du jour for this model of production. The access to this essential information for analysing the construction market, anticipating trends or finding business opportunities is sold at various Emporis Research plans.

(via Neuhaus partner Paul Jozefak who also joined the board of Emporis and alarm:clock euro)

Probably a big sigh of relief is going through the headquarters of Germany’s largest media group Bertelsmann since they were able to settle the Napster case’s lawsuit with the National Music Publishers Association as the Financial Times, Wired and others have reported this weekend.

Bertelsmann agreed to pay 95 million Euro to settle the final copyright claims after a five years dispute. According to the FT overall the Napster litigation has been settled for a total of about 300 million Euro after previously coming to individual agreements with Universal Music, Warner Music and EMI.

Bertelsmann’s involvement with Napster started in 2002, two years after the original court case has been filed. Shortly afterwards Napster shut down and was started off fresh by Roxio as a legal download service for music. Copyright holders went after Bertelsmann then, claiming they wanted “to preserve Napster’s user base for Bertelsmann’s own commercial advantage.”

Following up on 25 Million Germans Buy Online – a report from BITKOM from January 2007 suggests that they have spent 46 billion Euro in 2006 (up from 22 billion in 2004 and 32 billion in 2005) while doing so. They expect the segment B2C to grow up to impressive 145 billion in 2010.

Quite in sync with the study from the German Federal Statistical Office the most popular products are books followed by tickets, consumer goods, travel and downloads of music, videos, games and software. One interesting finding is that consumers increasingly feel comfortable spending more money on each transaction purchasing pricier and higher quality goods.

By far most e-commerce transactions are done between businesses (B2B): 180 billion in 2004, 289 billion in 2005, 392 billion in 2006, expected 636 billion in 2010.

Regarding Western Europe’s market share in E-Commerce Germany is in the lead with 30% followed by the UK (18%), France (15%), Italy (11%) and Spain (6%).

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Holtzbrinck Ventures and the European Founders Fund have invested in Platinnetz, as the Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung first reported yesterday.

Platinnetz is a social network for senior citizens targeting the growing market “of those who stayed young”. It was founded by Heike Helfenstein, Jan Bromberger und Markus Helfenstein and launched in April 2007. The amount of the investment has not been disclosed.

In related news, the European Founders Fund’s Samwer Brothers seem to stay true to their lucrative strategy of porting each and every successful concept to the German market before a localised version is available and probably are backing the just launched Doktus as well. Doktus is a plattform to publish and share documents and is largely inspired by Scripd, which raised 2.7 million Euros earlier this year. Officially Doktus has its company headquarters in Rumania and currently this is just a rumour, but zweinull.cc (in German) has dugg out quite some evidence to support this as a fact since they have used a similar pattern of front firms to hide their associations in the past.

German startups appeal to Europe’s venture capitalists titles the recent newsletter from Tornado Insider which breaks down European VC deals in 2007. blognation UK and alarm:clock euro already provide a good roundup, here just the relevant data points for Germany:

Overall Germany was raising 16.7% of all deals (13.6% since 2000) placing it second in Europe, UK has the lead. Distributed by city Berlin (3.5%) and Munich (3.1%) prove to be hotspots for VC funding and are 3rd and 4th only behind London and Paris.

On a sidenote: this raises an interesting question: when you start a tech or webtech company in Germany, how do you chose the location? The startup scene is highly distributed all over Germany, depending on which industry you are in there might be reasons to go for Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Cologne, Leipzig or even Frankfurt.

Choosing the location is not only relevant for connecting with your industry or being close to universities or venture capitalists, but may also be influenced by your support network as well as personal preferences - we know at least two companies who were very happy to go back to Hamburg and quite a few companies go to Berlin because it is easy to attract employees there.

Or are you just happy to found where you are? Which city do you prefer and why? Let us know in the comments.

Major German publisher Axel Springer has been busy expanding its online activities and investments during the past few months. Besides expanding the web outlets of their popular print products Bild, Welt, Computerwoche et al. they have acquired the price comparison site idealo and the financial portal wallstreet online, invested in zanox (a service provider for performance-based online marketing), auFeminin (the leading European internet portal for women in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, and Switzerland and number 2 in the UK) and city portal hamburg.de amongst others.

In a press release they announced pro-forma revenues from their online transactions for the first time yesterday:

In the first half of 2007, this pro-forma revenue from existing and acquired online business climbed by 50 percent from approximately EUR 68 million in the previous year to around EUR 102 million. Axel Springer is confident to achieve annual pro forma revenues of EUR 200 mill. from existing and newly acquired online activities in 2007, and expects this amount to more than double until 2010.

CEO Mathias Döpfner sees Springer to be

better placed for the digital future than many other, pure online companies, because we are precisely aligning our digitization strategy along the lines of those areas of core expertise that Axel Springer has been developing for decades: content, brands, target groups, marketing expertise, and our ability to create marketplaces which we have proven in the classified business segment. We do not view our online business as a separate and independent business area. Our goal is rather to digitize all our strong brands, content, and business models.

I guess most other publishers think exactly the same about themselves. The willingness to go digital – “all employees are responsible for digitization at Axel Springer because digitization is taking place everywhere” – is great, but it needs to be accompanied by an understanding of the economics of the web to make it worthwhile. I’m not talking about edge competencies. Just compared to the investments made by Holtzbrinck and Burda it seems like Springer is still very much stuck in a portal framed content generation/distribution mindset.