Startup aims to improve global business networking

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SAN FRANCISCO -- With Facebook valued at more than $15 billion and LinkedIn at $1 billion, online social communities appear worth investing in -- at least to a British startup, which is jumping into the fray with a networking site aimed at executives.Talkbiznow, available in the United States and Europe, bills itself as the world's first comprehensive interactive business networking site. Its founders say it offers something that other sites don't."It is not about dating your colleague, who works three blocks away, for Friday evening, but it is about doing business online," said Martin Warner, a former investment banker with JPMorgan who co-founded the site with Mark Parker. "We want to connect the global business community, so they can connect faster and smarter."Among the features Talkbiznow offers are e-mail, instant and group messaging and a calendar. It also provides the ability to set up online conferences or share business documents in an online hard drive. "We just want to make people more productive in their business," Warner said. They have their work cut out for them."Talkbiznow's success will be driven by how well they can really deliver on these added services from the beginning, said Rebecca Jennings, an analyst with Forrester Research Inc. "It may well be that these services mean they attract employees from smaller enterprises and the self-employed, as major enterprises will have their own internal systems for doing things like Webinars, for example."After two rounds of funding in Europe, Warner and Parker are trying to get at least one major U.S. venture capital firm hooked in their third, $25 million round.The company's U.S. office is in San Francisco. "Our board members and investors are here, and there's also a strong spirit for new ideas," Parker said.The founders hope revenue will come from advertising, and they say they're not going to charge customers for using special features. They hope to get 3 million users within the first six months."Raising the bulk of revenue from advertising will be a challenge," said Jennings. "They need to attract significant numbers of users in order to be an attractive advertising proposition."And, she said, "Business users won't want to be targeted by ads in these environments, so they'll have to come up with interesting and sophisticated ways of marketing to them."Talkbiznow is jumping into an increasingly competitive field: Besides LinkedIn, with 25 million members and projected revenue of $75 million to $100 million, there's European market leader Xing, which has 6.1 million members -- nearly half a million of whom pay for premium service. The German company has acquired sites in Spain and France and plans to expand in Britain. "There is still lots of potential for all these networks," Jennings said.(E-mail Susanne Amann at samann(at)sfchronicle.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)