Multilingual Social Network XIHA Life Creates Cross-Cultural Connections

April 23, 2008 - PRLog -- SAN FRANCISCO -- XIHA Life (http://www.xihalife.com/), a new social network targeted at multilingual people living outside their home country, introduced new features at the Web 2.0 Expo. For the first time, social network users can select multiple languages to communicate and share content with, enabling multicultural communities to form across the globe.

"Online social networking is obviously proven to be much more than a fad, a global phenomenon bringing people together and creating new type of media and communication networks", says Jani Penttinen, the Co-Founder and CTO at XIHA. "However, after going through all the leading services, we discovered a serious flaw which is common to all of them. As users typically can only select one primary language, user communities are formed around a single language. In XIHA Life, users can simultaneously select as many languages as they know or want to learn.  Our technology platform recognizes and filters the languages, so that the user generated content is displayed based on the language preferences."

XIHA Life features include user homepages, blogging and photo sharing tools, as well as versatile ways to integrate content with other social media websites. To counter the industry-wide problem of monetizing social networks, XIHA Life has a popular digital content store with fun products relevant to the users. The web service is localized to over 20 languages, and the company's target is to expand to a 100 languages during 2008. XIHA Life visitors come from all over the world, the biggest countries being United States, China, Brazil, France and Spain.

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XIHA Life is developed and operated by XIHA Ltd, a Helsinki, Finland based startup company founded in 2007. Co-Founder and CTO Jani Penttinen has 15 years of experience in game industry, including companies such as Remedy Entertainment and Electronic Arts. He has previously founded two startups in the U.S. and one in China. The name XIHA comes from Chinese and means 'fun' and 'happy' - a name invented by the company's other founder Xiaowen "Wen" Sun.

Website: www.xihalife.com/