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:

eBuddy has won the award for
Best Mobile App

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

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

“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

We just found out that on the Google Zeitgeist 2007 “ebuddy” is the 7th fastest rising search term Globally! Great news, we are very VERY happy.

The development team behind the new eBuddy web messenger has been working for some time now to make this client our future flagship product. While we are working on this client we are usually focused on certain themes or sets of (new) features, like conferencing or the support of a new network. Since it’s a new client, features like this are usually quite visible for you, the end-user and you can follow the progress we are making if you log in regularly. However, this doesn’t mean we spend all our time on the creation and development of these new features. Recently we’ve been focused on improving the performance of our client.

Performance has always been an important theme in software development and in every project it means something different. In our case we decided we wanted to dive into three different areas: the contacts tree, the chat tabs and the chat editor. For each of these areas we wanted to greatly improve the responsiveness so users spend less time waiting and more time chatting.

In this blog post I’ll dive a little deeper in what our approach was for each of the problems to give you a little insight in the work behind what we feel is the best chat client on the web. Please let us know how you feel about our efforts.

(more…)

Following another iteration ending, we have just released a new version of our Multi Network Beta. Again we have taken your feedback to heart and have tried to make those changes that you most requested. As usual we are always bug-fixing and improving our product, and have done so as well this iteration. So on top of these below a list of the major features and improvements:

Google talk Support
Definitely very noteworthy is the introduction of Google Talk support. As this is the first time we will be offering this on any of our products, we hope you will enjoy using this on eBuddy. All standard GTalk functions are included, including uploading your own Avatar.

Improved text editor
Being a major point of feedback received from users, the text editor used to input text has been improved. This component has had a complete overhaul and is functioning a lot better than before. On top of improved performance we have resolved an issue with text styling dissapearing while typing, causing you to have to set it over and over again.

Performance
Again we’ve looked intensely at the performance. We believe we’ve made a big step forward this iteration. An issue with processor usage going through the roof while being logged in with more then two accounts has been resolved. This impacts not only the editor as discussed above but also improves general usability as a whole. As always, your feedback is much aprreciated, so if you have any, feel free to let us know here!

All this said, if you haven’t tried it yet, try our eBuddy Multi Network Beta now!

You’ve probably asked yourself the same question like I did: where is that darn debugger?? Where did the stack trace go??

Well, in fact, there ARE a few tricks you can apply to IE to make it more developer friendly! First of all, the IE developer toolbar is a must-have tool. But that’s not a debugger like, for instance, venkman is.

Debugbar is a nice effort of creating an actual debugging-, css- and DOM-inspection capable plugin for IE. It even lets you inspect your XMLHTTPRequests and it’s free for personal use. That’s also the reason why we chose not to use Debugbar.

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