We have a very committed group of users at eBuddy who help translate our homepage and Messengers into languages from all over the world! For example, did you know you can set eBuddy to speak Icelandic, Dutch or Brazilian Portuguese? Simply go to the settings and select the language you want eBuddy to speak.

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!

Posted in eBuddy 1 Comment »

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

Posted in News, Mobile Messaging, Entertainment, Web2.0 9 Comments »

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)

Posted in News, Updates & Releases 18 Comments »

Posted in eBuddy 51 Comments »

Hi Everyone, 

We know how much you love eBuddy and so do a lot of other people – including those in the business and communications world. 

eBuddy has been nominated for Accenture’s 2008 Innovation Award and has been selected as one of the Top 50 finalists!

We need your help to win! There is a Public’s Prize or People’s Choice award voted on by the public…YOU!  

Please visit http://www.innovation-awards.nl/ to make your voice heard and your vote count. The site is in Dutch, however there’s a tab in the upper right hand corner to easily translate the page to English. Scroll down the page and select the link, “Vote here for your favorite concept”. Scroll down the next page, tick the eBuddy box, enter your name and email address and click on the “Verzenden” box. All done! 

Tell your friends…and vote for eBuddy!

The awards will be handed out on October 23, 2008 during Accenture’s Media and Communication Innovation event.  

We look forward to telling you we won so get out there and vote! 

Thanks!

Mindy
Communications Officer
eBuddy

Posted in Culture, Holland 56 Comments »

Hi guys,

I’m happy to announce our mobile team just pushed the button; we have a brand new version now available! Want to have a look? No need to wait a single minute, simply open your mobile browser, go to get.ebuddy.com and off you go! The most important new features we’ve added are:

More networks
As of today, you can chat on Facebook and ICQ from our Mobile Messenger

Sending pictures
Want to share the cool stuff you do with your friends? Take your mobile, launch eBuddy and snap a picture using the camera in your phone. Just open a chat, click on Menu and choose Send Picture and you’re all set!

Send SMS
Want to reach a friend that’s not online? You no longer have to leave eBuddy, you can simply send an SMS direct from your contact list. Click on any offline contact and choose Send SMS.

Happy chatting, and as always, please keep that feedback coming at feedback@ebuddy.com!

Vincent

Posted in eBuddy 143 Comments »

Hi everybody,

We now have a new network on eBuddy mobile: Facebook

To chat with your Facebook friends download the latest version of the eBuddy Mobile Messenger to your phone at get.ebuddy.com, or just browse to m.ebuddy.com on your phone for the eBuddy Lite Messenger.

And by-the-way, we also have support for ICQ and automatic login on m.ebuddy.com (find out for yourself )…

Happy messaging with everyone, everywhere!

- Ivar

Posted in eBuddy 172 Comments »

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.

Posted in News, Updates & Releases 11 Comments »

Hi!

Not only do we run around the office to make messaging with eBuddy even better, we also like to run on a track for fun! (sometimes )

Last Friday we participated as a team in a run for 5 or 10 kilometer, and of course eBuddy was there to cheer us on!

Here’s eBuddy at warming-up:

Here’s most of the team:

Time for some action:

… and there’s that action shot:

The rain that came down didn’t stop us from running our personal best times :-). And of course afterwards we went for some well-earned drinks:

Next time I’ll try chatting on my mobile while running ;-). Happy messaging!

- Ivar

Posted in Entertainment 13 Comments »

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

Posted in News, Updates & Releases, Mobile Messaging, Instant Messaging 69 Comments »