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

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

Hi everyone,

We just released a brand new version of our Mobile Messenger!

The most important new features include:

Most recent chats The majority of you have buddy lists of over 200 buddies. Try fitting all of them on a mobile phone screen… We added the new Most Recent Chats feature to make it easier for you to find the buddies you chat with the most. On the top of your buddy list you will see a green group labeled Most recent chats. You will always find the last 5 buddies you chatted with here. It is always up to date, so if you’re looking for that cool, new friend that you just started chatting with a lot, he or she will be at the top of your list.

Type directly in your chat We are pleased to announce a much requested feature: Type directly in your chat. Now, you can see in one screen what your buddy is saying and chat directly back. This way you can type so fast, your buddies won’t even notice you are on a mobile phone! You can enable this feature in settings.

Improved battery life

Typing directly in your chat screen means that you can chat faster. Now with improved battery life you can also chat longer and longer and longer! We always try to minimize the battery usage for Mobile Messenger. We focused extra attention on this release that so you can now have eBuddy powered on for long time without burning through so much phone battery.

We hope you like the new version! You can get it at http://get.ebuddy.com

We welcome your ideas on what to improve & add next so keep them coming! Reach us at feedback@ebuddy.com.

Happy chatting!
Vincent

“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

The yearly nomination rounds for The Crunchies are here!

The Crunchies? The Crunchies!
The awards for the best tech accomplishments of the year 2008.

It’s organized by Techcrunch, GigaOM , Venturebeat and Silicon Alley Insider and the award ceremony takes place in San Francisco.

We are pretty proud of our tech accomplishments over the past year, so with your help we might have a shot…

Click on one (or all ) of the categories below to nominate us:

- Best Mobile
Both our Lite Messenger and our Mobile Messenger are used by millions of people around the world.

- Best International
…meaning outside the USA. Hey, we’re based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Land of cheese, clogs, water, windmills…and tulips

- Best App
We are approaching 10 million downloads .

Feel free to nominate us and tell your friends to nominate us too!

Cheers,

JJ

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

After many, many requests, we have just released offline messaging for Lite Messenger on m.ebuddy.com!

As of today, you can now send messages to your friends who are offline, direct from your mobile phone. To view your offline contacts in the Lite Messenger, simply go to settings and select “Show offlines”.

We know you spend a lot of time online, even if it’s not 24/7 yet . That’s why we now also support receiving offline messages. When you login to the Lite Messenger, you will immediately see the messages that were sent to you while you were offline.

We hope you like it, and as always, please keep those ideas coming!! 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 Lite Messenger.

Vincent

As you might know, the eBuddy Mobile Messenger works on over 550 types of mobile phones.

And we’re cooking up a new version soon with a totally new look&feel and new features.
Here’s a sneak peak of the start screen…

It is quite a task to test the new eBuddy Mobile Messenger on a lot of phones, but unfortunately we can not test it on each single phone out there. That’s why we would like to ask for your help!

If you want to make sure that eBuddy works on your phone and if you want to help us by becoming an official beta tester, please send us an email to feedback@ebuddy.com providing

If we think there is a chance that eBuddy Mobile Messenger will work we’ll send you a version which will hopefully lead to us officially supporting your phone.
You will be the first to have the latest version of eBuddy Mobile Messenger on a particular model.

Next to this we are organising a user day at eBuddy HQ!
On April 21, 22 or 23, get a sneak preview of the latest eBuddy Mobile features, try some cool mobile phones and afterwards, relax on the eBuddy boat…
Let us know whether you or your buddies would like to join. Send an email to userday@ebuddy.com and tell us your:

We hope to hear from your soon!

JJ - eBuddy Mobile

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.