A few more hours and it’s 2010. While Kirimati has already popped the champagne, we’re almost wrapping up to go and celebrate the new year.

This is our countdown to the new year:

100 billion messages have been processed; the equivalent of about 450 thousand bibles

3 billion is the amount of times that you have used eBuddy, this is about twice as much as the number of Cokes served world wide every day.

39 million is the number of eBuddy Mobile apps that were downloaded in 2009, the same number as iPhone and iPod Touches sold this year.

150 thousand is the amount of years that you were online if we add up all the hours that you have been logged in to eBuddy. If we go back 150 thousand years in time, we would be in the ice age…

135 thousand is the amount of fans that we have on Facebook…and counting!

We could go on for a while, so let’s speed it up:

…3 totally new clients were introduced this year: an Android version, an iPhone and an iPhone Pro version.

…2 major prizes were won by eBuddy: in January we won the Crunchie for best international start-up and earlier this month we won a Mashable Open Web Award for best mobile service

…..1 is the position we had for most part of the year on Getjar (okay…until Facebook took over )

……..Happy New Year!
¡Feliz Año Nuevo!
Selamat Tahun Baru!
Bonne Année!
كل عام وأنتم بخير
Gelukkig Nieuwjaar!

Thanks for your continued support of eBuddy. it’s a great reward for all the hard work.
Let’s make 2010 even more spectacular!

JJ

It doesn’t snow that much in the Netherlands, but this winter we had our share. It even looks like it’s going to be a white Christmas.

In fact the last time there was so much snow all over our country was 30 years ago! No wonder the team ran out for some winter entertainment during lunch time. The result, an eBuddy snowman!

OK, it’s not a picture perfect replica of the logo, but the resemblance is striking

Enjoy!

Niels

Thanks to all eBuddy fans out there!
You kept on voting day after day after day, spreading the word on Twitter and Facebook, and it has paid off:

Mashable is the world’s largest blog focused exclusively on Web 2.0 and Social Media news, with over 12.5 million monthly pageviews (so it’s not like we’ve won some small local award ).
Also check out the other winners, such as: Best Mobile Game, Best Twitter App (also used by eBuddy), Best Online Newspaper, Flickr Photo of the Year, YouTube Video of the Year, or view the full list here.

Again, thanks to you all. This is a great encouragement for us to keep on working hard to deliver the best Instant Messaging experience around!

JJK

One of the metrics used in our industry is the one for users per engineer. Facebook is regularly communicating this ratio, and has also shared this ratio in comparison with other Giants in the industry. Facebook takes pride in having a pretty good ratio in this respect, and their VP of Technology, Jeff Rothschild, discusses this ratio in this Video (skip to the 3:25 mark) and he compares this to other companies:

Since I was interested how this ratio is holding up for eBuddy, I calculated this over a few points in time.

When comparing this to Facebook, it seems we are not doing that bad, we even beat them!

So how come we can work so efficiently at eBuddy? We think this is because have been working with Scrum for the past 3 years. When we started adopting Scrum we quickly realized this was not just affecting the development team, but required a mind shift in the entire organisation.

Having an efficient development team is partly about having the right facilities. We have an environment where builds are created all the time, executing automated tests and informing the teams about the build status. Each team can continuously integrate their code on the development servers, and off course all the supporting tools are in place, e.g. issue tracking, wik’s etc.

But to be efficient is not only the process. When we work on a feature for 2 months but it is not going live any time soon, all the efficiency in the world can’t compensate for that. So it’s also about making choices. The teams need to be able to focus, since you can’t do everything at once. In close collaboration with the development team, the product owners make sure we are working on the right things and allowing the teams to focus. And off course the teams are working closely with the operations team to make sure we can roll out features smoothly and keep up the level of service to our users.

But what it really comes down to is the people, we have an amazing group of people, who really care about our users and try to improve our products every day!

Congrats team!

Niels

P.S. We have great confidence in our User to Engineer ratio, so we are hiring! We are looking for a Backend Java Developer, Mobile Java Developer and a Front-end Developer

The eBuddy family just got a bit bigger today . We’re very proud to introduce eBuddy Pro for iPhone and iPod Touch!

eBuddy Pro is the premium version of the eBuddy mobile instant messaging application for iPhone and iPod Touch, and includes exclusive new features:

• - Push notifications for incoming messages when you exit the app - up to 3 days!
• - Set your display picture from your camera or photo library
• - Send pictures to friends
• - Advertisement free

And of course you get the same fast, reliable, and high quality chat experience that you’re used to with the free version of eBuddy.

eBuddy Pro is available in the App Store now at an introductory price of just $4.99 USD (€3.99 Euro).

Here are some screenshots of eBuddy Pro:

You will also be happy to know that we plan to release frequent version updates with more new features soon – including landscape mode!

If you like what you see, you can download eBuddy Pro for iPhone & iPod Touch from the Apple App Store here.

As always, please let us know what you think of our new application. Enjoy premium messaging on your iPhone and iPod Touch !

Happy Messaging!
Ivar

P.S. Did you know that our eBuddy for iPhone and iPod Touch app has ranked as a top 10 social networking app in 76 of the 77 Apple App Store countries since launching in July 2009 (according to app store analytics company Distimo)?

Wannahaves, the popular ‘Mentertainment’ brand - presenting the latest and greatest in gadgets, games and entertainment - had an item on eBuddy for iPhone yesterday in the Dutch version of the program.

Even if you don’t speak Dutch, it shows some of the use of our iPhone app (which you can download here).
Another app, Layar, is presented in the second part of the item. They are doing some pretty cool stuff in the field of Augmented Reality, which you can see while taking a walk around pretty (and eBuddy hometown) Amsterdam. (more…)

Update: If you experience any crashes at startup, please disable automatic login at startup. This is only temporary; an updated version with a fix for this issue will be released as soon as possible.

Hi iPhone & iPod Touch users,

Drum roll, please! Just for you: a big new update of eBuddy for your iPhone & iPod Touch, available in the App Store now! We hope you’ll enjoy all of the improvements:

• - Faster & secure login: Logging in is now a lot faster - depending on the quality of your connection, of course! We’ve also improved security.
• -Push notifications up to 1 hour: You can choose to stay logged in and receive push notifications for incoming message up to 1 full hour!
• - Saved chats and messages: Your chats stay open until you close them, including all your messages. Never lose any conversations!
• - Clickable links in chats: When someone sends you a link, just tap on it to go directly to that link without exiting eBuddy.
• - MySpace IM added: You can now chat with your MySpace buddies as well. Just add MySpace to your chat account and you’re good to go.
• - Start a group chat: Invite multiple buddies to have a group chat with you directly from the chat screen.
• - Clickable pictures sent by other eBuddy users: You can now view pictures sent to you by fellow eBuddy users directly in your chat.
• - Many other improvements and bug fixes.

We‘ve also been listening closely to all your feedback, so don’t worry: a new update is coming soon, which we think will more than live up to your expectations! Here’s one hint: eBuddy will “go wide” .

And for those of you who don’t have our iPhone app yet, eBuddy is available now as a free download in the iTunes App Store.

Happy Messaging!
Ivar

About six months ago, we announced our Twitter page and our Facebook fan page.

We are happy to announce that we now have more than 8.000 followers on Twitter and
more than 100.000 fans on Facebook!

To put it in perspective: that’s two football stadiums full of eBuddy Fans.

A very BIG thank you for joining and supporting us on Facebook and Twitter.

If you already are our friend or follower then you probably know that you can nominate us every day for the Mashable Open Web Awards 2009.
And if you haven’t nominated us yet, simply sign in to your Twitter or Facebook account, go to Mashable mention eBuddy, and select “Best Mobile Application” from the drop down menu. It’s that easy

To everyone who hasn’t connected with our eBuddy community yet: talk or just connect with us on Facebook and Twitter to keep in touch to receive updates, news or anything eBuddy related.

See you soon on Twitter, Facebook and eBuddy

Nadine

We have just updated the Beta version of our New Web Messenger to the latest version. Thanks to the great feedback we received from our early users of this version, we’ve done some nice improvements.

Besides many minor updates, these are the major changes:

-    We now support all emoticons for all networks
-    More themes have been added by popular demand
-    Drag and drop contacts into groups (for specific networks only)

Try this new eBuddy Messenger at http://www.ebuddy.com/newmessenger. Use the link below the Messenger to send us feedback or feature requests!

Happy chatting,
Vincent.

PS. Remember this is still work in progress, so you might find things that do not work for you. That’s why your feedback is important to us! For more info, see my previous blogpost.

You were probably wondering what has been going on with the eBuddy Web Messenger lately. Besides some small updates you have been seeing over the last couple of months, we have been working on a completely new Web Messenger.

We had a couple of reasons to build it from the ground up again. First, it has been over two years since we’ve launched our current Web Messenger. In those two years, browsers have advanced, computers got faster and web technology evolved quickly. Second, your expectations of eBuddy are also changing. Lots of users send us emails every day with new ideas and requests for new features. Finally, we just wanted to make something cool

So we decided to take advantage of all the new technologies and create the next generation Web Messenger. We already built in some nice new features, like setting your display picture with your webcam and better sound controls. Also we have completely redesigned the interface and made it a lot faster.

A personal favorite of mine are the Themes. With Themes you can change the look of the Messenger just the way you want it. In the mood for a pink background or rather prefer orange with funky dots? Change it with two simple clicks. How cool is that? But you’ll notice a lot more has changed!

Today is the first day we are showing this new Messenger to you. Remember, it’s not finished yet, and there is still work to be done. Also things might not work on your machine. But we think it works fine in most cases. Therefore we would like you to tell us what you think about it. What do you like and what do you hate about it? We hope you love this Alpha Version ^? of the new eBuddy Web Messenger.

Now go and get ready to use the next generation eBuddy Web Messenger at http://ebuddy.com/newmessenger. Make yourself heard and complete the survey in the Messenger!

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