As you might have noticed, we updated our interface once again. To improve your trusty chat client we take a long hard look at what you, the user, want and what makes sense from a design perspective.

There are many small fixes throughout the client, both visible and not, but the main enhancements are these:

Personal settings bar

We consolidated all the different network settings into one single entity that we call the personal settings bar, also known as the PSB. Lets take a look at what it looks like:

At the top of the PSB you can see and change your personal message, just clicking on it will enable you to edit it. This personal message is then set on all of your logged on networks. On the left of the personal message you can see and change your current status. Below the personal message you can see and change your display name.

On the right side there is a convenient indicator of network icons, showing you the current state of each of your accounts. Clicking on it will bring you to the settings of each account.

Custom Emoticons

For a long time we have had the ability to receive custom emoticons, now you can also send custom emoticons, a first for web based IM clients! We have added a few funny ones into the insert emoticon window for you to use now.

If you want to use custom emoticons you will need to sign up for an eBuddy ID. With an eBuddy ID you can easily bundle all your seperate accounts (MSN, Yahoo, GTalk, AOL and MySpace etc) into one single, easy to use, account.

Offline messages

We also improved our offline messages support, now available on pretty much all the networks.

All these features enable you to express yourselves even easier then before. Just change your personal message on all networks, send some custom emoticons to your friends and receive messages from friends that you just missed.

Posted in eBuddy 46 Comments »

As stated in a previous post, there is a new version of eBuddy Mobile Messenger coming up.
We already have a few (say…over 500 ) beta testers that are testing and giving feedback and are quite enthusiastic. I wanted to show you this feedback mail that we got from a happy Beta tester:

Dear Ebuddy,

Regards,
Mick.

Thanks Mick! Of course, we also receive some issues that need to be solved. And some (though not many) of the old models are not supported anymore (or yet) with this one. Most notably the Motorola V3i, for which we accidentally sent out some invites. Oops.
Overall though, we get very positive feedback.

If you want to try the new version of eBuddy Mobile Messenger in beta, so with some bugs, drop us a mail at feedback@ebuddy.com.

Cheers!

JJ

Posted in Mobile Beta, Updates & Releases, Mobile Messaging, Instant Messaging 43 Comments »

After many, many requests, we have just released offline messaging for Lite Messenger on m.ebuddy.com!

As of today, you can now send messages to your friends who are offline, direct from your mobile phone. To view your offline contacts in the Lite Messenger, simply go to settings and select “Show offlines”.

We know you spend a lot of time online, even if it’s not 24/7 yet . That’s why we now also support receiving offline messages. When you login to the Lite Messenger, you will immediately see the messages that were sent to you while you were offline.

We hope you like it, and as always, please keep those ideas coming!! 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 Lite Messenger.

Vincent

Posted in Updates & Releases, Mobile Messaging 49 Comments »

Since so many people know eBuddy, but have never seen eBuddy in real life, here are some pictures of eBuddy.

Over here: working hard on a new Web version

And here: helping the Ajax Developers with a tough issue

Favorite pastime: sitting on Marjon’s lap

If not taking off with Lissa

This is a normal day at the office, but if you’re lucky, you might also catch a glimp of eBuddy outside the office:
usually breakdancing, base-jumping or just hanging out with some buddies

Posted in eBuddy 32 Comments »

As you might know, the eBuddy Mobile Messenger works on over 550 types of mobile phones.

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

Posted in Mobile Beta, Development, Updates & Releases, Mobile Messaging 20 Comments »

We launched our new eBuddy Lite Messenger a few months ago and asked you guys to share your thoughts on what features to add next. We received an enourmous amount of feedback and new ideas and decided to put you in the driver seat by implementing them. We added the most requested features in an update released today. 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!

Posted in Updates & Releases 36 Comments »

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.

Posted in eBuddy 10 Comments »

Buenos Dias,

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.

Posted in News, Mobile Beta, Culture, Mobile Messaging, Instant Messaging 11 Comments »

This morning we got the scare of our life, as dozens of police, ambulances and fire trucks raced by our office we found out that the building next to our friday evening hideaway (a local bar called P. King) was on fire.

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

Hopefully no-one was actually injured in this fire

Posted in eBuddy 6 Comments »

Prime Technology Ventures to finance international expansion & development

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).

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in News 21 Comments »