We are very excited to present to your the early access Beta program for the eBuddy multi network client!

It works like this; if you have recieved an invitation, please use the username and password to login to the blog here. Once you’re logged in to the blog you will get the eBuddy Web Beta login form, where you can login with your MSN, Yahoo! or AIM account.

If you have not recieved an invitation, but you want to be one of the select few to participate in the Early Bird Beta program, sign up here. We will only give out Beta accounts to a small group of people, so sign up early!

We are looking forward to hear what you think about it!

Oh yes. In May we present to you not one, but TWO hot Beta products!

First off we have a brand new mobile client, a blazing fast full-blown chat application for your mobile phone.

Our other beta is our new Web messenger, rewritten from the ground up for ease of use and performance.

The first group of people allowed a beta account will be strictly limited, so if you want to test the latest and greatest eBuddy chat clients, sign up early!

We’ve been nominated for the Next Web Awards! So please head on over and vote for your favorite Social Instant Messenger: eBuddy! (And don’t forget to tell your friends! )

The Grand Award Ceremony will be held in Amsterdam on June 1st, so we’ll likely be there. Come on over for drinks if you’re in the neighborhood, we might even teach you the top-secret eBuddy Victory Dance.

Today the MSN network was experiencing connectivity problems. You may have noticed you could not login to the eBuddy MSN service for a few hours, and you may have noticed our website was loading slow at times.

Here’s some more background on what happened. Usually when MSN is down, you cannot login to MSN through eBuddy either. But lots of people will try anyways, which results in a huge spike of logins on our servers. Because of this our webservers were having a hard time keeping up.

In the event this occurs a next time, if you have any suggestions on how best to inform you of this, please let us know. Off course we will remain to do our best to provide you with the best service we can.

It all started last year September 2006. I just returned from an internship in Perth, Australia and was looking for a graduation assignment. I spent a month searching high and low for a company that could offer me a graduation assignment.
One day by chance I came across eBuddy whilst chatting to a friend. I read they offered internships and so a quick phone call, several emails and two meetings later I found myself sitting behind a desk at eBuddy HQ. Things went fast and within the first week I was up to speed about the company and what needed to be done.

My graduation assignment was to make a communication plan and matrix for 2007. The company had been growing so fast that many things weren’t documented properly, especially in communication. My task was to provide a clear overview of how and what we should communicate with you, the user.

I wanted to graduate in February but things did not work out as planned. I became so involved with eBuddy because there was so much that needed to be done. After meeting with my graduation supervisor, I took a step back from work and bit by bit I pieced together a graduation report. The report is now complete and the last hurdle I have left is presenting and defending my graduation assignment. After that I’ll be graduated and done

My time at eBuddy has been a great learning curve for me, I’m glad to see that the things I planned in my report are being implemented. It’s really satisfying to know and see that my contribution has brought about change and did help make a difference.

Working for a start-up like eBuddy is different than working for a multinational because the work is much more hands-on and you learn a lot in the process. I don’t have to write reports which end up in a file cabinet. The freedom to express my thoughts and ideas has enabled me to fully develop myself within the company. What touches me the most is having so many new friends and being part of a team. Going out for drinks or having lunch together has always been fun and that’s what I really like about eBuddy. There’s still plenty to be done so as of next week eBuddy will be the first company I will be working for. Thank you JJ and everyone who has helped make this possible!

If you’re looking for a challenge and want to do work that does make a difference, eBuddy might be what you’re looking for. The hands-on work brings a truck load of lessons and experiences. So just like I once did give it a shot and find out for yourself!

Best,

Rick

If you’ve got a Samsung mobile, accessing eBuddy Mobile just got very easy indeed!

As already noted on various blogs, Samsung will be adding eBuddy Mobile to their Samsung Fun Club portal. This allows all you Samsung users out there to chat to your buddies on MSN, Yahoo! and AIM on the go.

So if you have a Nokia, a Sony Ericsson or another brand – we’re sorry, you’ll have to type in this URL manually!

To start chatting on the go: http://mob.ebuddy.com

After being on the road and (too) busy in the office I finally have some time for my first blogpost. In the first week of March we attended Adtech in Paris. Arthur drove down a car with our booth to this new eBuddy rising Country.

France is our number 5 country, up from 15 a year ago, so we thought it would be good to exhibit at an advertiser conference. This exhausting event (day and night ) was a big success. The advertisements you see on eBuddy help us to make some money to keep offering the free eBuddy service and develop cool new features!! If you know anyone who would be interested to advertise (usually bigger companies) please mail our sales people: advertising[at]ebuddy.com.

After this event I flew to San Francisco to have interviews for our new US office. Yes, after our Amsterdam and London office it looks like our third one will be in “the bay area”, close to some of the biggest internet companies: Google, eBay, Yahoo, Facebook etc.

In the meantime our Amsterdam employees stayed in the office day-and-night to make sure we can deliver you our new eBuddy messenger in the next months. Please be patient, more news on this soon!

If you are interested to test with us please add: ebuddybeta@hotmail.com to your buddy list. You might be one of the first 1000 people to use the new eBuddy.

On March 19th was announced in Cannes, France we made the Top 100 of European private companies by Red Herring!! see announcement here.

Finally Saturday we closed this great March month with some great record numbers: over 10M unique visitors and almost 20 billion minutes of online time, up 145% from last year. It was an unbelievable March month, curious what April has in mind for us………

You may have already noticed, the MSN version of eBuddy is available in various languages. A big thank you goes out to all the translators, who helped with the translations, or those who reviewed them.

To change your language, go to Settings and select your preferred language on the ‘General’ tab. After saving, the application will reload in the new language. Don’t worry - the language you selected is used the next time you log on to eBuddy.

Is your language not listed, or do you see incorrect translations?
We can always use some more help, please leave your name, email and language at feedback@ebuddy.com and we will let you know how you can contribute to the translations.

We won’t be asking for much of your time translating - but just a few remarks (to feedback@ebuddy.com) about incorrect translations are always more than welcome!

Our slogan ‘web and mobile messaging messaging for everyone everywhere’ is quite open for interpretation. Apart from mobile phones and on your website, eBuddy can be accessed in some interesting alternative ways:

Most used is our mobile version on a Sony PSP. Just by accessing the browser you can chat your way using WIFI. It’s amazing that over 150.000 users per month actually chat with the PSP. I’m not a frequent user of either the PSP or the DS so I’m not taking any position :-), but the text input of the PSP seems to be quite cumbersome. Then again… text input on a mobile phone is also something you need to get used to.

Since the Nintendo DS came a bit later with a browser, we do not see the same amount of users yet, but the touchscreen with the stylus input looks like an easier way to chat.

For something completely different, we have recently developed something for our neighbors in the UK. Millions of SKY users with a set-top box can press the interactive button on their remote, enter Skykey ‘EBUDDY’ so you can see all your buddies on tv :-). Text input is similar to a mobile phone, you just use the digits. Unless you have a remote with a QWERTY keyboard.

Any suggestions for other alternative access to your buddylist?