Our world is surrounded by things that affect our daily lives in many ways. Behind each of those things, whether big or small, there is a person or a whole team that made decisions to make them one way or another. Look around you. Someone chose the shape, size and placement of that Off button on your TV, and there’s a reason your face cream comes in a tube or a jar. I often wonder what types of people are behind some of these things - especially when something is designed oddly or just plainly done wrong.  What kind of person would make this kind of decision and what type of pressures and timelines is he or she facing.

To be fair, I ask those kinds of questions a little more often than the average person because I am an Interaction Designer. So it is my job to represent the users of a product and ensure that their experience is a pleasant one, without any frustrations. Also, I understand the fact that sometimes bad experiences are caused by a chaos of multiple reasons and I appreciate good design for it is not easy to achieve.

Coming to my first day at eBuddy was like getting a little peek into Willy Wonka’s factory itself. No Oompa Loompas here but instead I found a great team of people that really care about the products and brand everyone has come to love. They work on new and exciting launches and celebrate new users and fans. They also read all your comments and feedback and actually listen to them. Much of this is apparent in their products although sometimes things are not as simple as they seem.

But most of all they’re a great bunch of people. They decorate desks for birthdays, play foosball at lunch and organize go-kart races. After a month I really feel a part of the team and really look forward to working with them on making your experiences with eBuddy the best they can be.

Social networks have changed the way we communicate with each other and Facebook is the perfect example of it:
More than 400 million people sharing messages, pictures, videos, interests and much more with each other.

Last November we were proud to announce that our Facebook Fan Page had reached 100.000 fans. Today we have reached a new milestone: 250.000 fans!

That’s a quarter of a million people who have chosen to follow and interact with eBuddy on Facebook!

To have an idea,
-    If we would go to the movies together, we would fill more than 1000 movie theaters!
-    If would like to travel somewhere together, we would need more than 625 planes!
-    If would go on a school trip, we would need more than 5000 school buses!
-    If every fan would walk 1.5 kilometers each, we would walk the distance from the Earth to the Moon!

Not a fan yet? Join eBuddy on Facebook and be a part of our community!

See you on our Facebook Fanpage!

As of today we’re offering the first version of our New eBuddy Web Messenger! You will notice the icon above the loginbox on www.ebuddy.com, which will take you to this great new messenger.

The New eBuddy Web Messenger is designed and developed to be faster, better and more customizable. That means you will be able to login faster, chat easier and can control the Messenger, so it acts the way you like it.

One of the biggest changes is that you can now set your own background and color scheme! For now we’ve only included 10 themes, but these will be further expanded in the future. So if you don’t like our default blueish background, simply change it to a pink one or a black one. Whatever you like!

Also we’ve completely revised the way you are notified of new messages. Instead of scrolling the title indefinitely; we now play a sound, add a little counter on the tab where you received the message and we update the title to the total amount of unread messages. This way you can run eBuddy in the background, but still get notified of new messages!

Of course there is much more than this, but you’ll just have to try and see for yourself!

eBuddy was present at the “New Day for Indonesian Music” event last weekend in Jakarta.

Telkomsel, one of Indonesia’s largest mobile operators, put together this mega-event in order to show the latest trends in music, gaming, shopping and mobile services to over 5000 young people.

Located at the event’s “Chillout” area, eBuddy gave out various prizes to its users and kept everybody hydrated with lots of eBuddy water

Which country should eBuddy come to next? Share your thoughts with us!

Hi iPhone & iPod Touch users!

Last weekend the latest versions of our iPhone/iPod Touch apps became available in the Apple App Store !

We’ve been working very hard to make some of your most important wishes for eBuddy come true. Curious to know what’s new? Keep on reading …

THEMES

If you’re the proud owner of eBuddy Pro you can now personalize eBuddy by setting a theme. There are 11 themes to choose from, ranging from the very spacy ‘Retro’ to the cool and smooth ‘Dark Snow Leopard’ . So now you can make eBuddy look just the way you like:

AUTO-AWAY

With eBuddy your favorite IM accounts can stay online even when the application is not running on your iPhone/iPod Touch. Of course you get Push Notifications when new messages arrive, but you can’t always reply immediately. So we made a new feature: auto-away.

With auto-away you can automatically set your status to Away after a few minutes, and you can even set your own message that will be automatically shown to your buddies when they start a chat with you.

Pretty smart, don’t you think ?!

AND THERE’S MORE

In this update many other improvements were made, including:

• - Customizing your Push Notifications: choose to get a sound, alert, or badge update on new messages or chats
• - Seeing the nicknames of your buddies on MSN, AIM & ICQ
• - Several bugfixes
• - Etc.

LOOKING BACK

Ever since we launched eBuddy in the App Store last year we’ve been amazed by its success and the great response we got from you. In December we therefore added eBuddy Pro with even more features.

Our apps have now been downloaded over 4 million times !

We try to keep eBuddy simple and easy-to-use, but at the same time have the best chat features that you like. Here’s a quick look at just a few of the things we did in the last few months:

• - We added landscape mode so you can now chat while standing on your head
• - Now you can get Push Notifications for incoming messages up to 2 hours for the free version, and up to 3 days for eBuddy Pro
• - The buddy list and chat screen have been redesigned
• - We added Themes (eBuddy Pro only)
• - We added MySpace & Hyves IM
• - The stability & reliability has been improved
• - … and much more!

We’re very happy with all these improvements, and we hope you are too. Stay tuned, more is coming!

Let us know what you think in the comments!

- Ivar

P.S. You can of course download eBuddy for iPhone/iPod Touch and eBuddy Pro for iPhone/iPod Touch from the App Store if you haven’t done so already .

We have all seen the news and heard the devastating figures. The need to raise awareness and, most importantly, funds for Haiti is evident. I instantly knew we had the power to raise some money for the cause and started looking at different possibilities of how we could help.

Turned out that the rest of the company was already thinking ahead of me: The eBuddy sales team, with the help of RingRing Media, donated all our US banner traffic for a whole weekend to Yele Haiti in order to help increase donations.

Our development team planned a working-late evening, where the whole eBuddy team worked overtime and donated their earnings to Haiti. And just like every working-late evening at eBuddy, there was plenty of pizza available!

The eBuddy team was also given the opportunity to donate money from their salary, which turned out to be a great idea, as it received a huge response! Last but not least, we placed ‘Giro 555’ (the main Dutch campaign supporting the Haiti cause) banners in the eBuddy chat screen in order to incentive our web users to also donate to the cause.
After donations made by staff and having our fun & productive ‘overtime pizza night’, I am proud to say we were able to donate close to 8000 euros for Haiti!

In a very generous offer, The Dutch government doubled all money donated to Giro 555. That means that due to our joint effort, almost 16.000 Euros will go towards helping Haiti!

There are no feelings to describe how happy we are with this outcome. Have you helped? Share your experience with us!

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

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:

Facebook	1.100.000
Google	190.000
Amazon	94.000
Microsoft	75.000

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)?