Nimbuzz India

A new year is about to start 2009 with new challenges and we wanted to take a look back at what happened in 2008.

We officially launched our all-in-one mobile IM & VoIP app in May, allowing users to use their favorite instant messaging features from one contact list to connect with their friends on Skype, Windows Live Messenger (MSN), Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, AIM, ICQ, Facebook, MySpace, studiVZ, Gadu-Gadu-Hyves, and Jabber.

In July, we raised an additional $15 million in funding from our investors Mangrove Capital, MIH/Naspers, and Holtzbrinck Ventures. We also won Best Mobile Startup at Mobile 2.0 in Barcelona and got recognized for game-changing technology and market value as part of the AO Global 250 Winners during the Stanford Summit.

We added location sharing in August, so users can retrieve the location of Nimbuzz buddies to easily arrange face-to-face meetings.

In September, we added Windows Mobile support and The Times rewarded us with the “Best for Social Networking” award.

October saw us launch a new Nimbuzz.com website, and language support for Indonesian, Russian, and Polish. We also published the winners of the Nimbuzz survey – Congratulations again!

In November we signed a major distribution deal with StudiVZ and launched the mobile StudiVZ Plauderkasten, so you can chat with all your friends from Schueler- Studi- and MeinVZ on the go.

We also announced Facebook and MySpace support, and got selected into the Le Web ‘08 Startup Competition as one of only 30 companies worldwide.

The biggest news for November was “free calls chats messaging and more for your iPhone“. With Nimbuzz on the iPhone you can chat in landscape mode, and even if you happen to hang upside down from a tree Furthermore, we signed 17 global partners to our Operator Affiliate Program to bring instant messaging and social networking to operators.

To finish the year in style, we announced an additional distribution partner in India: Spice Mobiles, who will pre-install Nimbuzz on their handsets from now on. Our iPhone application now runs even if the screen is switched off, and is available in 10 more languages.

We are now adding around 20,000 new Nimbuzz users every day and have users in every country on the globe. 98% of you are recommending Nimbuzz to your friends – thanks for that and keep it up please

Happy press review quotes include:

Mobile Industry Review:
“I’ve been using Nimbuzz for a little while now and it’s most definitely my communications application of choice — both from a VOIP perspective and from an instant messaging viewpoint.”

The Apple Blog:
“For casual users and as a VoIP/voice chat supplement to an always-on client, Nimbuzz! is a great choice. Overall, the interfaces are clean, responsive, and well-designed and the app in general has a slick, professional feel. Kudos to Nimbuzz! for not rushing out of the gates and sparing us another bug-riddled IM client for the iPhone.”

MobHappy:
“A VoIP and chat aggregator that doesn’t suck. It does this stuff better than native apps in many cases — for instance, I think it does Skype better than the official Skype mobile app.”

Read Write Web:
“What makes Nimbuzz so compelling aside from the fact that it’s free? For one thing, it’s intuitive. Unlike other IM clients whose workflows are cryptic or difficult, getting Nimbuzz up and running on the iPhone was straightforward. For another thing, the application is fast and responsive. Within a couple of minutes of setup, I was IMing with my contacts and the messages were instantaneous. At times, it seemed even more responsive than my desktop IM client.”

Symbian Guru:
“I would highly recommend Nimbuzz if you’re looking for a free IM client for your S60 handset. The native S60 client completely rocks, first of all. It’s really easy to use and supports all the major IM protocols in a nice interface.”

We wish everyone a relaxing end of 2008 and a great start into 2009! Thanks so much for all your support!