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.

Cheers,

JJ

Hey there,

Over the past years, the eBuddy website has evolved together with all our messengers. If you are a long time eBuddy user, you might recognize these

The current eBuddy website has already been around for 3 years and we think it’s time for some change. And who better to ask for fresh ideas than YOU … our loyal users that see and use our website every day.

We’d love to hear about what you think & get some ideas for improvement.

Tell us what you think of our website here

Your time & input is greatly appreciated

Thanks,

Yi-Ling

This is a big one… we’re officially announcing a partnership with one of the larger electronics companies in the world:
LG Electronics.

Our already immensely popular eBuddy Mobile Messenger, surpassing a whopping 20 million downloads last week, will be pre-installed on at least 1.5 million handsets in the Asia-Pacific area. To be more specific, that’s India, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia,Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia, New Zealand and Australia.

No downloading, no installation, just start up the phone and you get instant access to eBuddy on any of these phones:

These are the LG Cookie (LG-KP500), LG Arena (LG-KM900), the LG-KS360 and the LG Renoir (LG-KC910i).

So we’re not starting with one, not with two, but with four phones.
And this is just a start, more phones will be announced soon.

If you’re in the Asia Pacific area: check out any of these phones, coming to a shop near you soon!

Cheers,

JJ

Webcam Chat has finally arrived! Your requests during the past months haven’t gone unnoticed: we’ve now built webcam into eBuddy Web Messenger!

We are thrilled to announce that we now support webcam chat conversations. eBuddy has partnered with TokBox, the super simple Web service for video chat and video email. Now you can have a webcam chat with all your friends to see what they are up to or what that new haircut really looks like.

How to start a webcam chat

It’s extremely easy to get started:
Simply open a chat, click the webcam button and you are ready to go! It doesn’t matter if your friends are on eBuddy, MSN, Yahoo! or Facebook; you will always be able to start a webcam session with them. All you need is a webcam!

We have just enabled webcam on all our servers, so you should see the webcam button every time you log in! Do let us know what you think after using it, that helps us making it even better in the future. When you need help setting up or using webcam chat, take a look at this page.

See you later!

Vincent

Hi Everyone, 

We work very hard every day to deliver a great product and features to you – eBuddy users! So, we’re especially proud to announce that we’ve recently been named Best 3^rd Party IM for 2009 by About.com. 

About.com (a division of The New York Times Co.) asked readers to nominate their favorite IM clients in eight categories: Best IM Experience, Best Third-Party IM, Best Mac IM, Most Improved IM, Best IM Feature, Best Chat Rooms, Best IM Design (GUI) and Developer(s) of the Year.

More than 500 nominations from users around the globe were submitted, and after more than 160,339 votes were cast, eBuddy was named Best 3^rd Party IM in the second annual Best IM Awards honoring the best, brightest and most efficient IM clients of the year. 

Here’s what About.com had to say about eBuddy:
“This year’s winner of the Best Third-Party IM has rapidly made a name for themselves as the go-to web-based IM client for Internet users around the globe.  eBuddy, a new favorite around {our} office, offers one of the most exciting web-based IM experiences. From easy-to-use login and account set-up to a wealth of personalization options to the ease of having one single chat window with tabbed conversations, eBuddy has proven itself worthy of being named this year’s Best Third-Party IM.”   Check out all the winners! 

Thanks for all your support of eBuddy…we couldn’t do it without you! Happy Chatting!

Mindy

It took a bit of getting over the party of the weekend before I could manage to write this post. But it was worth it, because…WE WON!!!.

We won the award for best international startup company because you, you and you all voted for us,
So thanks Andy, Kees, Adesh, Gunther, Araz, Chiara, Alecio, Jerome, Yousof, and all the other thousands of people around the world that took the effort of voting for us.

Check out Onno and Paulo receiving the award and holding a speech (”I want to thank our developers, our investors, my wife..etc”): fastforward this movie to 40 minutes to see what happened:
Stream videos at Ustream

Pretty cool to be standing on stage together with companies such as Facebook, Google and Twitter.

Here’s a list of all the winners

Cheers,

JJ

“We’d like to thank the academy, our parents, our brothers and sisters and….YOU”
eBuddy has been named as a finalist for The 2008 Crunchies Awards - the internet equivalent of the Academy Awards!

We need your help! We’re asking all of our loyal eBuddies to help us “ROCK the VOTE” and win Best International Company 2008.

We’re very proud of our accomplishments this year - from launching new IM networks like Facebook and ICQ to exceeding a milestone of over 10 million mobile downloads of eBuddy Mobile Messenger.

Winning the Crunchies award for Best International Company of 2008 would be the absolute icing on the cake and would mean the most. Why? Because it’s voted on by YOU - and there’s no greater reward than knowing the people we work hard for really like and appreciate what we do!

The Best International Company is the category for all non-US companies, and since eBuddy is based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands - home of tulips, windmills, bicycles, cheese, canals and clogs - we definitely qualify. We also have a really great shot at winning with your help! The Crunchies are organized and produced by TechCrunch, VentureBeat, GigaOm and Silicon Alley Insider - some of the world’s top technology news sites. 

You can vote now and you can vote often  - up to 1x per day! Tell your friends and family too!

Finalist voting is now underway and runs through Monday, January 5, 2009 at 11:59 PM Pacific Time. Crunchies winners will be announced LIVE on Friday, January 9, 2009 in San Francisco at the 2nd Annual Crunchies Awards event! We looking forward to being there and *fingers crossed!* accepting the Crunchies Award for Best International Company - and thanking YOU!

Cheers,

Mindy

Communications Officer

eBuddy

Hi there!

Have you ever had the experience of working on something you’re really passionate about and love? Well, a few months ago I was given the challenge of working on “the best mobile chat experience on Earth” (that’s eBuddy, in case you’re wondering ), and the short story is… I’m loving it ! I’m mostly involved with our new-and-improved Lite Messenger. Yes, you read it correctly… we have just made the Lite Messenger (the one you can use straight from your phone’s browser (m.ebuddy.com) even better!

So, you’re saying to yourself, “Seriously, what’s really new?” Well, hang on to your hat; we’ve worked on quite a lot of cool new things to make your adventures with eBuddy even more fun and easy-to-use:

Contact list sorting

“So many friends… so little time.” So, if you have a lot of friends on your list, you can now select the following settings to improve browsing through that huge buddy list of yours:

Contact list search

We’ve also made it easier to find your friends quickly. There’s now a search link on top of your buddy list that you can use to search your entire list. For instance, go to the search, type in ‘foo’ and hit search – all buddies that have ‘foo’ in their name are listed, and you can chat with one or all of them.

Message time stamps

For all you curious types: Now you can see what time each message is sent and received in your chat screen. Simply go to the settings screen, enable it, select your time zone (e.g. ‘GMT+0100’ for Amsterdam), and you’re good to go! Don’t know your time zone? Look it up here: www.worldtimezone.com.

Active chat on top

The buddies that you’re chatting with are now always at the top of your buddy list, so you can quickly go back to chatting with them even if you step away for a moment.

Did-you-know?

… there are now notifications during log-in?

We want you to have the smoothest, best chat experience possible, so we’re now serving up tips and tricks for you after log-in.

iPhone

Using the Lite Messenger on the iPhone? We now have a pretty slick iPhone version (or at least we think so ), which is already discussed in a previous blog post.

Haven’t tried using the Lite Messenger on your mobile phone? Well “Carpe Diem (Seize the Day!)” because there’s no time like the present! Simply type m.ebuddy.com into your phone’s mobile browser and you’re good to go. Don’t forget to bookmark it!

We hope you like what we’ve done. So check it out, and don’t forget, feedback is always welcome and appreciated! You can share your thoughts on what we should add next by clicking on “Please let us know what you think”, after logging out on the Lite Messenger.

Happy messaging !
- Ivar

As stated in a previous post, there is a new version of eBuddy Mobile Messenger coming up.
We already have a few (say…over 500 ) beta testers that are testing and giving feedback and are quite enthusiastic. I wanted to show you this feedback mail that we got from a happy Beta tester:

Dear Ebuddy,

Regards,
Mick.

Thanks Mick! Of course, we also receive some issues that need to be solved. And some (though not many) of the old models are not supported anymore (or yet) with this one. Most notably the Motorola V3i, for which we accidentally sent out some invites. Oops.
Overall though, we get very positive feedback.

If you want to try the new version of eBuddy Mobile Messenger in beta, so with some bugs, drop us a mail at feedback@ebuddy.com.

Cheers!

JJ

Buenos Dias,

Each year we visit the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. It is the biggest mobile congress in the world with over 100,000 visitors in four days. And everything is there: the latest handsets, the coolest content, but also vendors of UMTS antennas and RFID chips (a little less interesting )

We had an eBuddy Booth!
So for four days we were telling all mobile operators of the world how important it is to let them open up their mobile portals for us and let you use eBuddy.
It’s a corporate event, so we were in suits and unfortunately we don’t see a lot of you guys. But we did see a lot of people dropping by and showing that they had eBuddy Mobile Messenger on their phone…. and they like it . No surprise with over 1.5 million mobile users last month in each and every country of the world.

So…what was new and hot?
First of all: phones, phones and phones. For a good overview of all released phones, have a look at engadget.
As an example: Samsung was big on advertising their new U900 phone, with a virtual navigation keypad. Didn’t like it myself. I need to feel the keys.
Nokia showed a big range of new handsets including the new N96.
Other topics were Android, Location and Mobile Advertisement.

It was a good show and we’ve got a lot more insights on how to make the eBuddy Mobile Messenger and the eBuddy Lite Messenger even better.
He’re’s a short demo of the Mobile Messenger which was filmed at Mobile World. Check out how fast the message is coming in.