Oliver over at MobileCrunch posted exclusive coverage this morning of a new free service called Nimbuzz that he believes could really shake up the mobile world. Users can IM with MSN and GoogleTalk users in individual and group chats, send SMS around the world for ten cents, leave and retrieve messages and call anywhere in the world for the price of a local call. Users can also send quick buzzes, or single rings, to each other for notification of something important. Nimbuzz communication between mobile devices and PCs is possible as well.
The service is a product of Buzzaa Media Group, in Rijswijk, The Netherlands. The company recently received funding from Mangrove Capital Partners, a group that provided initial funding for Skype. Check out Oliver’s post for far more details and analysis.
I refuse to try anything with such a terrible name.
Before I started my most recent project, I spent about five years working on mobile email software.
I have one bit of advice for anyone thinking about mobile communication services, don’t even think about trying to get people to download applications to their mobile phones. Even in the best of circumstances it is a bad experience for users, and the cost of maintaining compatibility with 100s of devices is prohibitive. Very few companies have done well with device based software, and the few that have, Blackberry, Good, etc, did so by focusing on a small number of high end devices, or built their own hardware.
If you need to make cheap international calls from your mobile, just get prepaid phone cards. Call a local number, dial the international number, talk.. hang up. Simple. No J2ME download or overly complicated software required.
Bryan,
Wake-up. Technology evolves. You were too early. Sorry for you.
Brian, I think you’re absolutely right about downloading apps to phones. It’s just too hard to expect a novice or general user to do it. Then find the app once it’s on the phone and make it work.
I must admit that Nimbuzz makes it easy to download via a URL, or they’ll SMS you the URL (I wish I could click on the URL in the SMS, but I can’t), but then the download timed out on me all the time. Is it my settings or them? At some point it becomes too hard.
Interesting idea , i love it , i tried to develop one my self to do Voip over GPRS but couldn’t get it to do full-duplex so i give up , although i recently saw app doing it : http://www.sillyant.com/but it wasn’t that good any way.
back to Nimbuzz , the article Say’s : and call anywhere in the world for the price of a local call.
Well , this feature is not supported yet , i downloaded and installed the mobile client , it Say’s after activation : Coming Soon : Voice!
So now its just a simple text chat app , nothing more then the already installed IMPS client in most new handsets.
..
Nike it worked fine for me , i got the URL by SMS , opend the link and downloaded it , maybe your phone dosn’t support wap push and that’s why you couldn’t click on the link.
I sugesst you download it to your PC and then send it to your mobile over bluetooth connection or some thing.
You can download it to your PC using this link L http://get.nimbuzz.com/mobile/select/
Nike it worked fine for me , i got the URL by SMS , opened the link and downloaded it , maybe your phone doesnt support wap push and that’s why you couldn’t click on the link.
I suggest you download it to your PC and then send it to your mobile over blue-tooth connection or some thing.
You can download it to your PC using this link L http://get.nimbuzz.com/mobile/select/
Thanks Faisal for the link, don’t have bluetooth on the computer so I’ll have to get out my cable (something that SHOULD come with a phone) and work out how to get it on the phone.
Having helped design a number of Mobile 2.0 services over the last few years, and looked at this area in some detail, I wish these guys luck - but the pitfalls are still quite problematical:
(i) There is no standard phone “operating” system, so just because an app works on one phone does not guarantee it will work on the next - and that really turns off potential buyers (Nick’s problems above are fairly typical, as are the convoluted solutions you need if it doesn’t work)
(ii) “Sticker shock” - big bandwidth downloads cost money over mobile - for example the music market over mobile has virtually collapsed and been taken over by Internet models like iPod fairly easily. £1.50 for the song may be OK, but the download price can add up to several £ on top….and once bitten, your users blame you - even if you were just the conduit - and become very shy!
(iii) Unified Messaging over fixed/mobile services has been the holy grail of large Telcos for at least 10 years…but it has proven very difficult to get it right technically, especially when these services scale.
I will watch with interest……
Nimbuzz a johnny come lately.. mxit have been going over a year. Already over a million daily users..
They should test-market in the Philippines. We send more SMS messages than all of Europe combined.
As has been mentioned mxit has been going for a while and they are getting subcribers at a very big rate, and they are scaling without problem.
I myself live here and did some consulting for them, they have a few problems, but nothing that IM doesn’t have aswell. And if nimbuzz can add “@mxit.co.za” then they’ll gain a big audience, I personally do not like using mxit, #1 it doesn’t work on my Sony Ericsson V800i and it just doesn’t look right. (personal view)
Goodluck to both.
Mxit is a very slick chat application indeed, but that’s just what it is, a chat application.
The main feature of Nimbuzz is not the chat facility, but the very inexpensive global calls you can make. And you can chat with it also.
Another thing I like very much about Nimbuzz is that you can alert (buzz) an offline friend to get him online. I’ve never seen anything like that. You normally have to wait for somebody to get online in order to chat with him/her. Now you can ‘force’ somebody to go online (if he/she lets you ofcourse).
Nimbuzz plain roxx! Everybody should check it out and experience how easy and reliable it is to make phone calls across the globe, and only for local minutes! The interface on my Nokia is straight forward and actually features practical options. Seriously, the last time something like this came out and I told everybody of how convinced I was, the application was called Skype.
Just try it with a couple of friends …
Buon luogo, congratulazioni, il mio amico!
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