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

The newly added features are:

• Attend conferences
  Join your MSN, YAHOO and AIM friends in conferences! You can now have group chats with many friends at once, just like our Web Messenger.

• Send buzzers
  We heard you like to send a wake-up call to your buddies every once and a while. Good luck to them; sending buzzers to your buddies just went mobile!
• Show email addresses in your buddylist
  Small screens and long funny screen names of your buddies? It can be challenging to keep up with who’s who on your mobile, but not anymore. Now, you can also display your contact list by email address. No more awkward moments where you realize you’re not talking to exactly the person you had in mind
• Close conversations
  This one is easy. You chat a lot and like to be clear on which chats are still live. Simply close the finished conversations and they will not longer be displayed on top of your list.
• More languages
  The Lite Messenger is now available in 26 languages!

Stay tuned for more improvements and some very cool features coming soon! In the meantime, enjoy chatting on your mobile at m.ebuddy.com!

We’re very exited to announce an official partnership between eBuddy and AOL! This means we can now use all kinds of cool features from AOL to be integrated in the eBuddy Messengers.

This is all part of the OpenAIM initiative. Some interesting highlights:

Needless to say we’re very excited with the decision of AOL to go open, it will open up a lot of opportunities for us, so stay tuned to eBuddy.

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.

Onno was quick to take a snapshot with his mobile phone:

Hopefully no-one was actually injured in this fire

AMSTERDAM – February 05, 2008 – eBuddy, the world’s leading independent provider of web and mobile instant messaging (IM), announced today that it has secured Series B financing of €6.5 million in an investment led by Prime Technology Ventures (PTV).

Jan-Joost Rueb, eBuddy CEO and co-Founder commented, “eBuddy experienced a 50% increase of unique visitors in 2007 and now counts more than 12 million unique monthly visitors. As we continue to grow from strength-to-strength, we are delighted to welcome our latest investor, Prime Technology Ventures. PTVs support and investment expertise with worldwide mobile and internet companies will enable eBuddy to continue our fast-paced growth and international expansion – specifically in the UK and US – whilst focusing attention on new advertising platforms and increased mobile IM development.”

According to research firm, The Radicati Group, the number of public IM accounts worldwide is 993 million and the market will reach an estimated 1.5 billion accounts by 2011. Furthermore, research analysts at Informa estimate the global market for mobile instant messaging will become an $11 billion (€7.4bn) industry by 2011. eBuddy is in a unique position to capitalize on that estimated IM growth based upon recent performance and achievements including:

• 12 million monthly global visitors
• 1.5 million new network users added every month
• 1.2 million unique mobile users worldwide
• 1.3 billion+ advertising impressions per month
• Google Zeitgeist 2007 Report: #7 most searched keyword (global)

Prime Technology Ventures Managing Partner and Founder, Sake Bosch said, “We are excited to be involved with a dynamic, high-growth company like eBuddy. The management teams’ vision has produced a profitable business model that is well-positioned to capitalize on the continued
evolution of web and mobile-device instant messaging. Prime Technology Ventures’ investment in eBuddy will ensure they have the resources and additional expertise necessary to succeed and reach international maturity at a rapid pace.”

About eBuddy
eBuddy (www.ebuddy.com) created the world’s first, independent, web browser-based instant messaging service as e-Messenger in 2003. Its patent-pending technology enables more than 12 million monthly global visitors with AOL, Google Talk, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo Messenger accounts to chat free of charge in one interface without having to download or install any application on their computer. Users can also access eBuddy on their mobile phone, independent of carrier or device via WAP or mobile internet browser. (m.ebuddy.com). eBuddy is a privately held, Netherlands based company backed by Prime Technology Ventures and Lowland Capital Partners. For more information, visit www.ebuddy.com

About Prime Technology Ventures
Prime Technology Ventures (PTV) is a leading European venture capital fund investing in fundamental hardware and software technologies in wireless, networking and the Internet. PTV focuses particularly on technology centers in the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, Israel and the
United Kingdom. The PTV team works closely with portfolio companies that strive for rapid international growth and maturity. PTV brings along a special combination of successful real-world business experience and a broad network of business accelerators, special investors and partnering expertise. This combination also makes PTV an attractive lead investor in syndication with local funds. To learn more about Prime Technology Ventures visit www.ptv.com

eBuddy PR contact:
Mindy M. Hull
Head of Marketing Communications & PR
Tel: +31 20 514 1426
Mobile: +31 62 072 4373
mhull@ebuddy.com

Prime Technology Ventures PR contact:
Marloes Drost
Tel: +31 70 311 5864


Articles covering this news item
• NY Times Blog
• Red Herring
• Techcruch.com
• CenterNetworks.com
• GigaOm.com
• Pulse2.com
• The Next Web
• NU.nl
• Science Business


Today we are very pleased to announce the launch of our own eBuddy IDs. eBuddy IDs allow you to bundle multiple network accounts in one easy to remember username and password, a feature that plays very nicely with our multi network chat client.

Over the last few weeks we have been working full force on getting this feature out of the door and the result is actually quite nice. To create a new eBuddy ID simple click on the ‘Claim your free eBuddy ID’ link on the homepage and you will be transported to a simple signup form. After you create an eBuddy ID you can add all your favorite network accounts to it by using the same interface you have been using in earlier versions of the multi network chat client, so you should be up and running in no time.

You can use your shiny new eBuddy ID in our three new clients: the eBuddy Web Messenger, the eBuddy Mobile Messenger (currently in Beta) and the eBuddy Lite Messenger. So now it is even easier to manage all your chat networks across all your devices, from your desktop to your mobile phone to your game console.

The next time you log into your eBuddy ID all the networks accounts that you have set to log in automatically will log in without any assistance.

If you have any comments or feedback drop us a mail at feedback@ebuddy.com.

After the launch we received a lot of feedback that scrolling through your contact list was just too difficult… It only worked with the directional keys, but we now improved this . The most common way of scrolling, by pressing the square button and using the analog stick, now works with the eBuddy Lite Messenger.

We hope you like the improvement and please continue to tell us what you think!
Vincent

Today we launched a complete new version, built from the ground up to offer you the best chat experience on any mobile device, without having to install anything. Since it’s completely new, we decided to rename it from eBuddy Mobile Internet version to eBuddy Lite Messenger. Why we made a complete new version?

This eBuddy Lite Messenger version allows you to login all your accounts at once. Chat with your friends from all your MSN, Yahoo, AIM, and Google Talk accounts in one single buddy list! We also added Google Talk so you now also can reach those friends on your mobile.

Thanks to our eBuddy Translators you can choose your own language for the interface. 13 languages are currently supported, and counting… Choose your language once and the interface will always be displayed like this. No matter which network you chat on, all emoticons are supported

You can have multiple conversations at once and add / block /delete buddy is supported.

Set your status and personal or away message. and choose to see your offline contacts in the buddylist. You can even make this Lite version xtra lite, by turning off all images.

Check out the new eBuddy Lite Messenger on m.ebuddy.com and please let us know what you think. We will be adding new features soon, so your ideas on what we should add first are very welcome!

Enjoy the new version!

Vincent

Portuguese (Brazilian), Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simplified), Dutch, English, Finnish, French, Hungarian, Italian, Swedish and Vietnamese.

And therefore I would like to give some special thanks a couple of translators who truly worked completely voluntary all day and night to complete their translations before the new release this week!

Also, Blue-Cyber made a very cool eBuddy Translator display picture and inspired our own designer Allan who created 6 cool eBuddy Translator Avatars for you as a small X-Mas gift …

Here’s one example, the others can be downloaded via the translation Wiki

To all of you who want to help us update and/or translate eBuddy in your own language, send me an email at translation@ebuddy.com with your name and language you wish to translate!

Merry X-Mas to you all!

Marc and Niels

After a couple of minutes of studying the logs and stepping through the sourcecode we found the issue and it was quickly resolved.

Servers are being upgraded as we speak, so Yahoo service should be restored fully in a short while.

Interestingly enough, they used Instant Messaging to start the rally. The call to strike spread over the internet like wildfire, winning out over media such as mobile phones and email.

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.

Editor

Arguably, the most important area was the chat editor where you can type the messages you send. Since chatting is what this application is all about we felt users should experience as little delay as possible while doing it. Before we started working on the performance of this component we identified two main problems. Firstly, while typing a new message, users could experience delays where the letters were lagging behind, appearing seconds later than they were typed. Secondly, when the new message is ready and the user pressed enter or clicked the send button, it sometimes took more than a second to appear in the message area above the chat.

The solution to the second problem was fairly easy. It was basically just a matter of showing the new message before anything else is done. The first was a harder nut to crack. While a user is typing a new message there’s a constant flow of update messages coming in about, for instance, the status of contacts. These messages are taking up a little time each to be processed in the background which is what causes the delay. In the end we decided to postpone the processing of these messages until the user is finished typing.

Tree

Optimizing the contacts tree came with its own set of challenges. It is certainly the most dynamic part of our chat application, constantly updating the status, display name and personal messages of the contacts. Here we identified the following problem: even though logging in with an average account (about 150 contacts) didn’t take very long, it still took a significant amount of time before we were ready with building the contacts tree and we could show it. This caused a problem with the perception of the performance: users thought logging in took a very long time when in fact it didn’t. We needed to find a way to show the tree sooner.

This was perhaps the hardest to optimize and I have to take off my hat to my fellow-developer Mike for that. Not only did he manage to really speed up the rendering of the tree, he managed to implement new sorting options as well. The tree can now be sorted in three different ways: by groups, by name and by account. For each of these options showing offline contacts is optional.

Tabs

We felt the chat tabs definitely needed some work as well. Once a user had several chats open, switching between them took a noticable time. Additionally, creating a new tab by starting a chat with someone sometimes took more than two seconds. Certainly a lot of room for improvement! To speed all this up we had a hybrid approach of doing things in a different order and optimizing the avatar pictures so we can show the tab contents sooner.

Tools

To be able to improve software performance you have to be able to measure it. Sometimes this means sitting next to your computer with a stopwatch, other times it means adding measurement points to the code and sometimes you rely on third-party tools like Firebug, which can accurately measure and profile code performance on the Firefox browser. It is very unfortunate that such a profiler doesn’t exist for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, the most popular browser.

To bridge this gap Mike has developed a really interesting bit of JavaScript code that hooks into the client and profiles how often certain bits of code are used and how long that takes. For developers this is hugely interesting information and this tool is amazing enough to deserve its own blog post. Keep posted for this in the future.

Results

Without wanting to pat myself and my co-workers on the back too much, I really feel we’ve made a huge leap forwards in terms of performance and stability. The end result of this development phase is even better than I expected and we all really hope it translates into a better experience for our users. As always, please let us know how you feel about our products. We are continually working to improve them based our own experiences and, much more important, on user feedback.

Here are some snippets from his review:

Ebuddy was actually my favorite of all three programs I tested. It was the only one that didn’t try to simulate the desktop environment and did its own thing. When you first go to the page, you can select one of 5 instant message systems, MSN, AIM, Yahoo, Google Talk, and MySpace Messenger. This was the only one of the three I tested that supported MySpace.

I honestly didn’t have any problems with ebuddy. It was very fast, very smooth, and easy to use. To sign into more than one account at a time, just click the wrench at the top, then accounts.”

Ebuddy is the only one of the three I tested that I can actually see myself using on a semi-regular basis when I’m away from my computer. I really liked it.

To read the full review, head on over to the Dastardly Report blog. Or just jump in and try to new eBuddy Web Messenger for yourself and see how you like it!

Okay, JPEGs should just work as an avatar picture… Seems we need to do a bit more work there!

At first it sucks:

Then it rocks!

Mr. Halovidnoob, thanks for the reviews! You might want to try out our new version, I’m pretty sure you will like it much much better. Go give it a whirl here, maybe you can make another video review!

Users from over 240 different countries and regions login to eBuddy to stay in touch with their friends and relatives. To make the use of eBuddy as convenient as possible, we receive some highly appreciated help of some very enthusiastic translators translating eBuddy into their own languages.

At this moment the following languages are availalbe: اللغة العربية, Deutsch, Español, Français, Indonesia, Italiano, Magyar, עברית, Nederlands, Norsk, Polski, Português, Português Brasil, Русский’, Română, Slovensko, Suomi, Svenska, Türkçe, Tiếng Việt, 汉字. More languages are currently under way, i.e. Chinese (trad), Filipino, Thai, Norwegian (Nynorsk), Galician, Bosnian, … (click here to see the full list).

On behalf of the entire eBuddy Team, we would like to thank all of our current translators (see the contributors list) for their help to translate eBuddy into their own language. We are sure that many will enjoy using their favorite IM program in their own language! Because we would like to offer eBuddy in your own language as well, we could use your help with translating eBuddy in more languages.

If you are interested in helping us translate eBuddy, please contact us by mail: translation@ebuddy.com

Today we released a new version of our Multi Network Beta. By popular demand, and to follow up on our quest to make the Beta into a non-Beta, this iteration we emptied our guns on Conferencing (a.k.a Groupchat).

The actual feature is pretty straightforward, you can now start group chats with all your buddies that are on the MSN, Yahoo or AIM networks. This means you can start a MSN groupchat, a Yahoo groupchat or an AIM groupchat, not one with mixed contacts.

We have added some other nifty features like being able to give a group chat a name, so that you can find it easily, and being able to filter contacts when you invite them.

Credit where credit is due, bigup to our UE Expert the G-Man, conferencing looks awesome! ;) 

As I like to keep it short and snappy, go ahead and try it for yourself.