eBuddy has just reached a new important milestone: We have been downloaded more than 1 million times in the Nokia Ovi Store – in less than 3 months!

Distributing the eBuddy Mobile Messenger application in the Ovi Store allows eBuddy to increase its ever-growing popularity amongst Nokia users. In addition, eBuddy now supports additional Nokia devices, including the popular models N97 and N97 Mini, enabling even more Nokia owners to chat with their friends on eBuddy.

The news has already been picked up by major media outlets. Here what MobileCrunch had to say: eBuddy downloaded 1 million times from Nokia’s Ovi Store in 3 months

Click here to read the full press release.

Many thanks to all the Nokia users who made this possible and look forward to commemorating the 2 million mark with you very soon!

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