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,

Over 1,300 users participated in our survey about social networks. In that survey, 70% of you indicated that you want to be fan & friend of eBuddy on social networks. Well, you can!

Connect with eBuddy & we’ll keep you posted about new stuff:

•  Become Fan of eBuddy on Facebook
•  Follow eBuddy on Twitter
•  Become Member of the eBuddy Hyve

More results from the survey:

- 80% of you use social networks

- Facebook is the most popular social network, followed by MySpace and Bebo

- Most of you go to social networks to chat with friends and check photos & messages

- Most of your friends on social networks are also in your buddy list

Interesting … then you might want to try Facebook chat on eBuddy. This allows you to have your Facebook friends together with your IM buddies in one buddy list and have all chats conveniently in one screen.

Thanks for participating & happy chatting!

Yi-Ling

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

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

Yes, we are still here! It has been a long time since you heard something from us on this blog. We have been working really hard to fix some annoying issues that had been laying around for too long. As from today we serve a new version of eBuddy Web Messenger to all of you. Simply login via ebuddy.com and you get all the latest improvements, which include:

• Loading of your contact list is now twice as fast as before! This means no more waiting, especially when you have a lot of friends in your contact list.
• Many stability fixes, no longer your eBuddy gets disconnected for no reason or you can see users online who left the computer hours ago!
• Adding a network to your account has never been easier! We completely redesigned the way you add another account to your eBuddy, so it is less likely you make a mistake.
• Redesign of all popup windows! They were soooo 2007.
• New way of changing your name and custom status. Our user research showed that this actually annoyed you the most, so we changed it! Your name is most important, so it is displayed above your personal shout.
• New Help pages. We are not there yet, but we completely redid the Frequently Asked Questions page. It should now answer your most urgent and common questions (surprisingly).

We have many more improvements pending so stay tuned. In the meantime if you want to send your ideas or feedback, send us an email at feedback@ebuddy.com!

Enjoy the new version. Happy eBuddying!  (oh and don’t forget to watch the eBuddy video in the post below)

Hi everyone!

My name is Vincent and I am the new product manager of eBuddy’s Web Messenger. I just graduated and recently joined eBuddy. It is my job to voice the ideas and feedback that you, users of eBuddy, submit to us by turning them into cool new features of eBuddy. At the moment we have many great ideas which we will show you in the upcoming months. But first, the news of today…

I am happy to announce that we have released a brand new version of the web client, which now supports the ICQ chat network .

I still remember the days when I was in secondary school back in the 90-ies, when the Internet was a new and mysterious technology. We used really slow dial-up over the phone line, with the distinctive sounds while waiting for a connection. One of the really cool applications was ICQ, “I seek you”, which allowed me to send pop-up messages to my friends or even to chat with more than one of them at once. The first version of ICQ was actually developed in 1996, more than 11 years ago! For that time revolutionary: The first world-wide Instant Messaging application!

And now we have added this network to eBuddy, so you can also chat with your friends on eBuddy via ICQ! Besides the addition of the ICQ network we have also improved our Yahoo! connectivity and fixed a lot of minor issues.

Enjoy chatting on eBuddy and stay tuned for more improvements and new features!

Cheers!
Vincent.

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