Hey everybody,

eBuddy is nominated for “The Europas” - TechCrunch Europe Awards 2009!

These tech innovation awards honour the best web & mobile companies and startups from Europe, the Middle East and Africa. To win these awards, we need help from YOU

So, show your support for eBuddy & vote for us in both categories:

• - Vote eBuddy for Best Web Application
• - Vote eBuddy for Best Mobile Application

The winners will be announced at the Techcrunch Europe Awards Ceremony in London on Thursday, July 9th. The voting has already started and closes on Wednesday July 2 this week. Please vote now!

Thanks!

Right now we’re at the fourth version: eBuddy IM 1.0.4 – a good time to tell you about the improvements we’ve made so far.

Improvements in eBuddy IM for Android 1.0.4:

• - Always connected: if your Internet connection is lost, eBuddy IM will keep on trying to reconnect. Also when eBuddy runs in the background.
• - Notifications in the status bar: when eBuddy is running in the background and you receive a new message (or if something unexpected happens), a notification is shown in the status bar.
• - Blocked buddies will not show up as online anymore

Lately we’ve had some problems with Facebook chat, and not everything is working perfectly yet, but of course we will keep on improving the application and adding new features. So keep an eye on eBuddy IM in the Android Market!

Ivar

P.S. Haven’t got eBuddy IM on your Android phone yet (e.g. the T-Mobile G1 or Vodafone Magic)? Find us in the Android Market or directly with your barcode scanner:

As one of the founders of eBuddy, I was awarded the prize of Entrepreneurship and Innovation 2009 in Portugal, my home country. All candidates had to live abroad like me, living in The Netherlands.

OK, maybe Entrepreneurship is not my real thing, but when it comes to Innovation I might have a few words to say about it.  Being the original creator of this service, I like to think that I - one way or another - help steer the company towards a direction that I believe is the right one when it comes to technology, and that I inspired others to bring out their own innovative spirit from within.

Personally, it was an honor to be recognized in such manner, specially because the award was handed by Mr. President Himself, but most of all it’s important for the company. Every award we win makes us stronger, gives us that additional strength to go the extra mile, innovate and build things in our own style that makes us different from everyone else.

Having said that, no award would have been possible without the help of my fellow partners in crime, the amazing teams we work with and of course the millions of users that use eBuddy every day.

For all of you… thank you!

Paulo

Update June 26th:  Over the last week, our stats for Facebook Chat have gradually improved and the majority of our users can login & chat again. If you still have issues, we have not forgotten about you and we are doing all we can to find a structural solution

Update June 18th: We have fixed the issues for a big part of our users. You will see Facebook Chat gradually get better.

Update June 17th: Since 4 AM (European Time) this morning we are experiencing severe Facebook issues. We are working on an update, it should all work fine soon.

Facebook Chat on eBuddy has just been updated. Everyone using Facebook Chat on eBuddy probably noticed it wasn’t working very well lately. You either could not login at all or you were disconnected a short while after you logged in. Sometimes sending or receiving messages even caused problems.

Now time for the good news! This weekend we have made some big changes and Facebook should be a lot better now! Try it for yourself and login to Facebook Chat via our homepage, add it to your eBuddy ID or use it on your mobile phone!

Let us know if you still experience problems, by commenting on this post or sending feedback@ebuddy.com. Thanks for your patience while we were fixing these issues.

By the way, did you know you can become a fan of eBuddy on Facebook?

Happy chatting on Facebook!

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

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

Android is software for mobile devices, initially developed by Google. Android-powered phones, such as the T-Mobile G1 or HTC Magic, provide easy access to Google applications including Maps, Gmail, YouTube, and Calendar, plus real Web browsing capabilities. Android-powered phones also provide one touch access to Android Market, the place to discover and download a variety of fun applications.

And now, if you’re the proud owner of an Android-powered phone, you can find eBuddy for Android in the Android Market too. The familiar eBuddy quality and features you know, now also available on Android.

Here are some unique features of eBuddy for Android:

• - eBuddy ID – one login for MSN, Yahoo!, AIM, Facebook, Google Talk, and ICQ
• - Free, fast, reliable IM experience
• - Stay online when you get a call
• - New message alerts in the Android status bar
• - Switch easily between chats
• - Support for emoticons, sound, vibration, and buzzers
• - Automatic reconnect
• - Receive offline messages

Curious to see what it looks like? Take a look at these screenshots:

Pretty cool, huh?

We hope you like eBuddy for Android as much as we do. eBuddy for Android is now available as a phone download via Android Market.

Enjoy messaging everyone, everywhere with eBuddy for Android!

- Ivar

Update May 15: Version 1.0.1 of the app has just been released in the Android Market, with some connection handling, blocked buddies and login improvements. Enjoy!

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

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 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

Facebook Chat
Some of you might have noticed the Facebook logo on our homepage. We incorporated Facebook Chat in our client for a little while, but because of security issues raised by Facebook we were asked to remove it for the short term. The good news is that we are now working collaboratively with them to get Facebook Chat up and running again as soon as possible, so stay tuned a bit longer for Facebook Chat!

AIM, ICQ & Google Talk improvements
Our back-end team has been working on major improvements for AIM, ICQ and Google Talk. You’ll now receive fewer disconnects and experience better performance on these networks. When still you see something strange, report it via our Feedback.

eBuddy on your website
We receive loads of requests from people who want to spread the word about eBuddy by putting a log-in box on their own website. So, we’ve now created a log-in box that you can place directly on your blog, website or profile page. Look to the right of this page, it’s already there! –>
This enables your friends to quickly log-in to eBuddy and talk to you! Now how convenient is that?!?

Better Website
We’ve recently made some changes to the website to better explain who we are and what we do at eBuddy. We’ve also created a page where we explain all the benefits you receive when you create an eBuddy ID – and there are a lot!

Besides all these things, we’ve also fixed a large number of bugs and you’ll notice some minor interface adjustments designed to make eBuddy work even better.

More cool things coming soon, so stay tuned!

Check out our main front-end and back-end developers Menno and Paulo (a.k.a. mr P.), jammin’ away on a Friday-afternoon. Not only do they write some mean code, they produce some nice tunes too. Pretty good that these guys can jam together .

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

Every time we develop a new version, the translators quickly translate it to their native language which allows us to offer eBuddy in as many languages as possible. So a big thanks to all the translators for helping us out!!

With the latest version, eBuddy now speaks 37 languages! Is your language missing? You might consider becoming a translator. Sign up here.

Another change we’ve made in the latest version release is where the advertisement is located. We’re trying out some new things and now show you a sponsored message to the right of the eBuddy screen instead of at the bottom. Making the change to this space gives us more possibilities to show you interesting, relevant advertisements from premium brands… which helps us keep eBuddy the free service you know and love!

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

• 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)