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.
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Disclosure: we often drink beers with the eBuddy team
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