openBC Goes Glocal

12/14/04 - PRNewswire

openBC Goes Glocal PRNewswire HAMBURG, Germany December 14

HAMBURG, Germany, December 14 /PRNewswire/ --

- German company tops international standard for networking. In a league with ebay, Yahoo!, and Google, the business social networking platform openBC has implemented UTF-8, the Unicode universal character set. openBC stands alone among social networking software providers to support multilingual characters and languages.

Europe's leading platform for business networking is now operational in all alphabets and character sets and systems used throughout the world. The Hebrew, Arabic, and Cyrillic alphabets are now supported as well as Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Thai syllabic writing systems.

Hundreds of thousands of members from more than 160 countries communicate on openBC in their native languages of English, Spanish, French, Sweden, Russian, and Chinese. Additional language versions of the website such as Hungarian, Turkish and Korean will become available in the first quarter of 2005.

"Our experience shows that key business transactions are completed in local markets despite the advance of globalization. It is essential to be able to communicate and network in your own language to achieve business success. We provide the social infrastructure and additional applications on openBC to enable professional networking - globally and locally," states Lars Hinrichs, the company's founder and Managing Shareholder.

openBC is pursuing a sustainable European growth strategy with representative offices in Finland (Helsinki), Sweden (Stockholm), The Netherlands (Amsterdam), France (Paris), Spain (Madrid), Hungary (Budapest), and Israel (Tel Aviv). openBC is supported by country managers who are based in the local culture and benefit from an existing network of contacts. These country managers encourage users to grow their networking connections.

As part of its international expansion, the company is focusing its efforts on growth markets in Asia and will soon be opening offices for business in China (Hong Kong and Shanghai), India (Mumbai and Delhi), and Russia (Moscow).

openBC's rapid expansion is driven by revenues from its monthly EUR 5.95 premium membership fee, giving premium members the most comprehensive set of power networking features in the industry. The companies' complimentary membership is also feature rich and offers innovations such as conference calling and mobile to mobile telephony.

openBC is a product of the Open Business Club GmbH.

For more information, please call:

Open Business Club GmbH Daniela Waschow Press Officer Tel.: +49-40-419131-19 Fax: +49-40-419131-11 daniela.waschow@openbc.com www.openbc.com