Sanchita Saha founded City Socialising back in January 2007. The site which allows users to meet new people and organise offline social events is available to sign up free which gives a limited service but also runs a subscription based model.

You also earn points for certain actions such as creating socials, writing reviews on socials, inviting friends and more. If you have enough points you can trade them in for a months paid subscription.

The young entrepreneur got the idea for this venture after her sister moved to San Fransisco and found it quite hard to meet people. “It got me thinking about how relocating can be quite isolating and I did some research and found that the only websites for meeting people were for online dating.” She says

In 2005 Sanchita received £2,500 from the Prince’s Trust for her to create an initial website. She then raised a further £30,000 in the form of a bank loan and investment from family and friends. She has since raised £260,000 of early stage investment in 2009 and more recently has seen £1million invested by PROfounders.

In 2008 Sanchita was named as in Management Today’s ’35 Women Under 35′.

Before starting City Socialising, Sanchita worked at the BBC but felt her entrepreneurial spirit fading away so she decided to get out before it was too late.

The company is already profitable and is now looking into expanding into Europe.

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Young entrepreneur, Catherine Cook has often been described as the female Mark Zuckerberg after setting up social networking site myYearbook.com. The site she started from her bedroom 6 years ago now has a user base of 25 million and growing.

Catherine’s social network site is one of the top 25 most visited sites in the US. She came up with the idea when she and her brother David were complaining about the photo used in their yearbook. myYearbook is a site where members can make new friends by creating profiles, interacting through Chatter, a real-time stream, sending virtual gifts, and playing games.

Catherine founded the site at the age of 16 while still in high school. Burning the midnight oil she worked all through the night after school to get the site up and running. Working with developers in India she would be on the phone all night.

‘Looking back I was only getting two hours sleep a night. It was hard to manage school and work, but soon afterwards I graduated from high school, and just as the business was taking off I realised my personal life was suffering too,’ she said.

Within a year of launch Catherine moved out of the bedroom and into a state of the art office in Pennsylvania with 12 employees.

The site passed breakeven in 2010 and has recently been valued at $20 million. myYearbook has received $16.9 million in funding to date. And although not a serious rival to Facebook just yet the site created by the now 21 year old Catherine Cook is a great achievement.

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Facebook has raised $500m of an expected $2bn in new funding in a deal valuing the social networking site at about $50bn or £32bn. The social networking site has reportedly landed a cash injection from the investment bank Goldman Sachs and a Russian investor.

According to the FT, this means that Facebook is now worth more than either Time Warner or Yahoo.

Facebook which has 500 million active users is expected to use the investment to fund development of new products and possibly make acquisitions, the New York Times said.

Does this now mean that each of the 500million users on Facebook are worth $100?

Facebook has grown rapidly and overtook Google as the most visited website in 2010, according to Experian Hitwise.

Read more about what this means at the full New York Times story.

Staff who use Twitter and other social networking sites while at work are costing UK businesses £1.38bn every year, a report has said.

Over half of those surveyed admitted using social networking sites during the working day for personal use.

On average those people spent 40 minutes per week on these sites.

IT services group Morse, who commissioned the research, said that such online behaviour clearly had a “productivity strain” on firms.

The survey questioned 1,460 office workers.

Read more

Top Brands in the US are using facebook to promote their brands, brands such as Nike, Coca-Cola and Starbucks
Sources from facebook says that the social networking site Giant attract 83 out of 100 top advertisers spenders in the US, even signing several partnerships with others such as commercials.

Read the full story

Charlie speaks to the founder of LinkedIn, a social network used primarily for business connections and job searching.

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