Facebook Board Director and founder of social networking company Ning.com Marc Andreessen has decided to relocate his company to the old Facebook offices in Palo Alto, California. Above is a slideshow of Ning.com’s new offices. Ning is currently valuated at $750 million based on their previous round of funding at $15 million. Ning has about 37 million registered users and created about 1.7 million social networks.

Ning is a free social network customization building platform created by Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini. The company recently announced that they will be rolling out an application platform for developers to build upon. The company launched Ning Apps to about 1.5 million social networks hosted by the service as of yesterday. Ning Apps is based on the Google OpenSocial platform. About 90 applications from a wide variety of services are available as of today.

Some of the applications include Hulu, Wordpress, PollDaddy, Twitter Tracker, Qik, and Tungle.me. These applications have different skins in order to match the look and feel of the social network that they are being installed on.

Ning raised $15 million back in July which gave them a valuation of $750 million. What the company’s exit strategy is… I don’t know.

Social network customization service Ning.com has raised $15 million in Series E funding.  This investment places Ning at a valuation of $750 million.  Last year Ning raised $60 million at a $500 million valuation.

Ning currently has about 29.3 million registered users and over 1 million social networks.  The company was founded by Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini.  Andreessen recently launched his own venture firm with former partner Ben Horowitz.  The venture firm that was started by Andreessen is called Andreessen Horowitz.

“The growth at Ning has been massive in the last year and, combined with the quality of the team and seeing that kind of momentum, it worked out well for us both,” stated Lightspeed Venture Partner Managing Director and co-founder Ravi Mhatre.

[via AllThingsD]

Ning recently hit 1 million created social networks.  How many of those that are actually active is a question mark, but now social network creators can add applications to the profiles of anyone that joins their networks.  Those users will automatically see the applications which beats the setup that Ning had before.  Prior to this feature, users had to find applications on their own and manually add them.

Some of the applications include Ticketmaster, Live Nation, Amiando, Cartfly, etc.  Ning often times shares the revenue of the applications with the developers.

Ning adds about 85,000 to 100,000 registered users per day, mainly through already-registered users inviting each other.  There is a total number of about 24 million registered users.  Last year Ning’s valuation was raised to about $500 million after raising $60 million.  This was around the same time that Facebook’s valuation was estimated to be about $15 billion.  What the company is valuated at today is a mystery.

[via VentureBeat]

Ning, the social network platform created by Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini has hit the 1 million milestone.  Over 1 million social networks have been created using their platform.  The company was started in October 2004 and launched officially in October 2005.  The company raised over $100 million in funding.

About 22 million users have registered for the service and they lost about 20% of traffic this past December because of the decision to shut down adult content and porn social networks.  Last February the traffic has been able to catch up.   Ning’s traffic comes mostly from social networks that have a strong following.  For example, thetwilightsaga.com is a fan website built on Ning that had 94,000 people join within two months.

[via CNET]

Athena von Oech announced today that Ning has hit 850,000 registered social networks. Ning is a service that allows users to create social networks on-the-fly. The service is free for basic social networks, but premium social networks are charged. Ning was founded by Netscape founder Marc Andreesen and Gina Bianchini. Ning has over $104 million in funding and is valuated at about $500 million based on their investments. Legg Mason, Allen & Company, and Andreesen are the primary investors in the company.

“We just passed 850,000 social networks on Ning and we couldn’t be more excited,” stated Oech. “We love checking out the new and interesting social networks popping up – at the rate of over 3,000 each day, and about 100,000 in the past month alone. Wow!”

Ning plans on launching new features next week including improvements to chat and redesigned media players. Below is a video demo of the new features:

Find more videos like this on Ning Network Creators

[image credit: About Ning]

Marc Andreesen has joined the eBay Inc. (NASDAQ:EBAY) board of directors starting immediately.  Marc is also signed up on the board of Facebook and is an investor in Digg, Plazes, Netvibes, Qik, LinkedIn, Revision3, and Twitter.  Marc is also a co-founder of Ning and accumulated most of his wealth from his involvement with the starting of Netscape Communications Corp. 

Netscape was acquired by AOL for $4.2 billion and another one of Marc’s companies (Opsware) sold to H-P for $1.6 billion.  Marc has a lot of experience with growing and selling businesses.  Perhaps he will be able to bring his wealth of knowledge to eBay.

“Marc is a true visionary whose experience will be invaluable to eBay,” stated John Donahoe, president CEO of eBay. “We look forward to learning from Marc’s insights and expertise as we drive further innovation on our platform, invest in growth opportunities and develop technology that will further benefit our customers, build powerful communities and enhance e-commerce.”

Ning currently hosts about 480,000 social networks on it’s platform.  Ning’s current valuation is about $1 billion based on the $104 million venture capital investment. 

“We raised the money to enable us to keep scaling given our accelerating growth (over 230,000 networks on Ning now, growing at over 1,000 per day) and to make sure we have plenty of firepower to survive the oncoming nuclear winter. At current growth rates, we don’t need it to get to cash flow positive, but having lived through the last crunch, it’s good to be conservative with these things.”
-Marc Andreessen, founder of Ning [quote source: VentureBeat]

I have to admit that when I started writing for Pulse 2.0 about a year and a half ago, I used to think that another bubble would happen again. So many companies were getting funding again like we were back in the late 90’s. Since then Facebook became valuated at $15 billion, Feedburner got bought for $100 million, YouTube got bought for $1.7 billion, and the list goes on. Just when we thought VC spending was slowing down again, Ning raised $60 million and is now valuated at a half-billion dollars.

Ning is a company that builds custom social networks for a large client-base. The company was started by a co-founder of Netscape, Marc Andreessen. Allen & Company is investor that plugged in the $60 million. Ning’s third round was $44 million, provided by Legg Mason. Legg Mason also is a major shareholder in Yahoo!

Ning plans to use this funding to build it’s infrastructure for scaling purpose.

In an interview that Peter Thiel (early investor in Facebook) had with Kara Swisher of AllThingsD, he stated with confidence that there’s absolutely no bubble in technology.  At first I was a skeptic of this quote, but now I’m a full believer.

Information Source:
[1] VentureBeat: Social network creator Ning raises $60M at $500M valuation by Anthony Ha
[2] AllThingsD: Kara Visits Founders Fund’s Peter Thiel by Kara Swisher

Ning Background
Ning is a company that creates custom social network platforms for small businesses and enterprises.  The company was founded by Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini.  Ning is Marc’s third startup company.  Marc previously founded Netscape and Opsware.  On Marc’s personal blog, he posted that he was delighted that Ning crossed the creation of 200,000 social networks.  Ning means “peace” in Chinese.

Ning Statistics
Over 70% of the social networks created using Ning are active.  Of the 200,000 social networks created using Ning, less than 1% are related to adult content.  Based on the current growth rate, Ning anticipates reaching 300,000 social networks in the next few weeks [Source: pmarca.com].

Funding
Ning’s total funding is at $44 million.  The funding was provided by both Andreessen and Legg Mason Inc.

[Information Source: DigitalPodcast]

If the rumor about what the Google executives previously dubbed NBC and News Corp.’s idea for Hulu is true, I see them as being completely hypocritical. Around March 2007, rumors were afloat that News Corp. and NBC were parterning to develop a YouTube competitor and Google executives were supposedly not worried about it because they were reportedly nicknaming the company that didn’t exist at the time as ClownCo. Today that company is named Hulu and they have impressed the hell out of several media bloggers including Pulse 2.0, TechCrunch, and GigaOM. Mashable seemed to have a more undecided opinion about how Hulu will perform in the market.

The reason why Google would give such a nickname to the company is because of the number of players involved. Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo!, MySpace, FOX, NBC, and News Corp. were all involved somehow as partners of the company in some shape or form. But the reason why I am calling Google hypocritical is that they seem to be pulling the same trick: partnering with a large number of companies to try and one-up a company that they cannot stand to see score a good deal for themselves. Microsoft’s investment in Facebook is what I’m referring to specifically.

I am making a bold statement by calling Google execs a hypocrite, but I have to admit that I was partially influenced by the article title on today’s New York Times: Google and Friends to Gang Up on Facebook. And when hearing Google and Friends Ganging Up on Facebook, I think of a $220 billion search monopoly picking on a 23 year old with a good idea. Shame on you: Schmidt, Brin, and Page. You guys should just take some money out of the bank and take a bath in it or buy more Boeings.

Who is Google allying with? Other social networks of course. These social networks include:
1.) LinkedIn
2.) hi5
3.) Friendster
4.) Plaxo
5.) Ning

Other companies involved in Google OpenSocial include Oracle and Salesforce.com. Just for the record, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch also mentioned that the only image associated with OpenSocial is a horny Elmer’s glue thing. As funny as that comment was, I agree that there is something highly wrong with this image.

All opinions aside, do I expect OpenSocial to really take off? I think developers will explore the prospects of OpenSocial, but won’t be as receptive to developing applications for Google’s partners. This is because Facebook’s core users are college students and young, urban professionals that are still receptive to adding applications that make networking more “fun.” And the social networks that Google has partnered with are losing their edge. As a recently graduated college student myself, I have personally left Friendster years ago and never looked back.

I think Google is an amazing service and will not sway from using their search engine unless something amazing comes along, but I think OpenSocial seems too much like a product created out of a grudge. And that doesn’t go along with their “Don’t be Evil” philosophy. When Facebook Applications were released, they were promoted as a way for developers to explore the creative senses while leveraging Facebook’s user base.