Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 10th January 2009
8 COMMENTS 
Peter Robinett, Web Programmer and Founder of Lunch 2.0.nl
eBuddy, the web and mobile messaging company headquartered just down the street from The Next Web, won Best International Startup at the Crunchies in San Francisco last night.
Congratulations to the Amsterdam company for their big win!
Previous coverage on eBuddy:
eBuddy’s Mobile IM client hits 10M downloads in 18 months
eBuddy welcomes former Google NL executive to its team
Ebuddy mobile IM client downloaded 5 million times
Written on 5th December 2008
2 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
World’s leading independent IM provider eBuddy celebrated a rather impressive milestone yesterday. CEO and co-founder Jan-Joost “JJ” Rueb told us that eBuddy’s mobile IM client has hit ten million J2ME downloads in just 18 months.
The Dutch company launched the client back in June 2007. In 13 months, IM addicts downloaded the nifty little program five million times. Their 5M-announcement really boosted downloads, the press release notes.
“eBuddy Mobile Messenger is ramping at a rate of more than 1 million downloads per month, and we’re processing over 1.5 billion messages per month on our mobile platform for over 3 million unique monthly users,” says Mr. JJ.
eBuddy foresees a bright future, as research analysts at Informa recently estimated the global market for mobile IM will become an $11 billion (€7.4bn) industry by 2011, and that IM penetration will be nearly 100% by the end of this decade.
Last year’s developments at eBuddy HQ support the company’s hope for a profitable existence. Apart from the impressive milestones, the company also secured a series B round of 6.5 million euro from Prime Technology in February and welcomed former Google Netherlands executive Marc Duijndam to stimulate international growth.
Disclosure: we often drink beers with the eBuddy team
Written on 21st August 2008
7 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
World’s largest independent IM service eBuddy has hired former Google Netherlands executive Marc Duijndam to stimulate its international growth. Duijndam will work together with eBuddy’s senior management team. His focus will be on rapid development of eBuddy’s worldwide revenue and expansion of the partner network.
Marc Duijndam
From a national point of view, I’m proud to see a Dutch web company actively working to sustain and develop its international top position. But to hell with this pride, I’ll save it for the Dutch blogs. So here’s some more information that’s not just interesting for the Dutchmen.
Duijndam has six years of Google experience (2001-2007) and will play an important role in transforming a young fast-growing web company into a solid and really profitable player. Or, like eBuddy co-founder and CEO Jan-Joost Rueb says, “Duindam will take eBuddy to the next level”.
It’s part of every successful start-up’s growing curve. After gaining some traction, a round or two of funding, and some more traction; a careful selection of experienced business executives is made to turn the popularity into revenue.
eBuddy’s decision to hire the former Google executive matches with the international promise the company made when it secured a Series B round of 6.5 million euro from Prime Technology in February.
[Disclaimer: look at the right of this page, eBuddy sponsors this blog.]
Written on 25th July 2008
6 COMMENTS
Joop Dorresteijn, East Asia correspondent
The popular independent IM messenger eBuddy seems to be popular on mobile devices, the mobile J2ME version has been downloaded 5 million times! These numbers are unreal to me, since I used the initial version of the IM service primarily for some quick-and-simple IM access at the office back in 2003. Currently, the companies success keeps continuing, and the future of eBuddy seems to reside somewhere in the mobile applications.
Research analysts at Informa estimate the global market for mobile IM will become an $11 billion (€7.4bn) industry by 2011. Not by coincidence that eBuddy released a J2ME version last year.
Jan-Joost Rueb, eBuddy’s CEO and founder commented the following about the 5 million downloads, “We are now processing over 1 billion messages per month on our mobile platform for more than 2 million unique monthly users. The fast pace at which our application is being picked up shows how much people want a high quality, easy-to-use, intuitive IM application like eBuddy.”
The latest J2ME release also features a redesigned and improved user interface, and includes an unique ID feature which can be used to log-in and access all IM accounts simultaneously. The latest Lite Messenger release includes new features, extra networks and specific design functionality for iPhone, including the new 3G version released worldwide on July 11. (see picture)
eBuddy is located in Amsterdam, San Francisco and London. They offer their service in 38 languages. They received 11.5 million in funding, with the last round in February this year.
We tried to sneak into the eBuddy office to see if we could find the money back in February, check the video here.
Written on 17th July 2008
3 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
My vigorous competitor Mike Butcher from TechCrunch UK, that other European tech blog, is coming to town. He organizes a meet-up on July 22nd, with the help of eBuddy and E.Factor.
This photo (taken at next08) represents the whole idea of the geeky gathering: drinks, networking, and press coverage (see his right hand).
Anyway, the whole idea of my blogging nemeses coming to my safe haven is a little bit hard too take, so I’ll be staying in Italy for two weeks. Say hi to Mike if you see him though, he actually is a nice guy.
The event is almost sold out, so if you haven’t got one of the free tickets – you’ll have to crash this party. Feel free to approach us for advice, we have a great party-crashing track record.
Written on 5th April 2008
11 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Thanks for your great feedback yesterday! I’m really glad to hear that you guys had a good time and were inspired by the speakers and other attendees. Like I said yesterday, this blog will continue to report on European Web 2.0 news. Yet before we continue, I’d like to give you an overview of the posts we’ve written the last couple of days. So you can sit back, relax and relive the conference.
Keynotes
Adeo Ressi knows how to get funding
Gil Penchina: “Give your customers insane levels of control”
Khris Loux “Bloggers and startups, challenge the big companies and embrace open standards”
Leah Culver and the magical unicorn: A Pownce story
Nova Spivack: “The Semantic Web as an open and less evil web”
Robert Scoble about social media: “The first experience is a crappy experience”
Werner Vogels: “Everything fails all the time”
Garrett Camp: “one-size-fits-all in search is history”
Jessicah Mah: “Recommendations are crap!”
On the couch interviews
Kevin Rose: ‘Digg will soon start suggesting stories’ (this one made it to the Digg frontpage!)
Khris Loux interviews Chris Saad about Dataportability
Interviews by David – the man with the kilt – Petherick
Robert Scoble
Werner Vogels
Start-up rounds
1: CoComment, eBuddy, fav.or.it, Wauw, IntroNiche and Empressr
2: Netlog, Webnode, Lookery, Zilok, Radionomy and Wakoopa
3: Bemba, Backbase, andUNite, Twingly, Ubervu, ConfNetwork and a ‘warm body’
4: Symbaloo, Beezbox, Goojet, Hoera, Soocial, Locle and David Hasselhof
Media
1339 Flickr photos tagged with ‘thenextweb2008′
213 blog posts tagged with ‘thenextweb2008′
YouTube videos
Written on 5th February 2008
13 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
After last nights news about the €6.5 million investment in eBuddy we decided to sneak our way into the eBuddy offices this morning to see if we could find the money. We did find SOME money AND Onno Bakker (co-founder together with Jan-Joost Rueb and Paulo Taylor) of eBuddy. He told us a little bit about the investment and how they celebrated and how that felt the next day.
Check the shocked faces on the employees as we rush in and shout “Where is the money!”.
I’m glad we didn’t get shot OR arrested. Maybe we should make a series of unexpected interviews like this. Check out our earlier Michael Arrington Heist.
Written on 5th February 2008
6 COMMENTS
Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of The Next Web Conference. Twitter: @patrick
Co-founder Onno Bakker during lunch2.0
This just came in. Amsterdam web based IM service eBuddy secures a 6.5 million round of funding of Prime Technology ventures. The money will be used for further international expansion and growth for their mobile application (with already almost 2 million downloads).
While on the other side of the ocean people write and talk mainly about eBuddy’s competitor Meebo, eBuddy is still the biggest web-based IM company out there and with 6.5 million Euro in the pocket they will definitely try to get more presence and buzz in the US.
In October 2006 eBuddy got a capital injection of 5 million euro for Lowland capital. No details of both rounds are disclosed (yet).
Last week we had lunch2.0 at the eBuddy HQ and I must say that they’ve shown an impressive growth over the last years. Co-founder Onno Bakker told me that they were working on an API, but no news yet when they will release it. Congrats to the guys!
eBuddy, the web and mobile messaging company headquartered just down the street from The Next Web, won Best International Startup at the Crunchies in San Francisco last night.
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
