The application for the iPhone and iPod Touch the company is announcing today has quietly gone live in the App Store last week (iTunes link), but hasn’t been promoted in any way since until today. It brings a very strong competitor to the likes of Nimbuzz and fring, both of which have had native iPhone applications for a while now. Where eBuddy differentiates is in its support for Apple’s Push Notification Service, which allows a third-party server to ping the service in order to push out notifications to your device over a persistent IP connection.

You can see how that comes in handy for an instant messaging tool, since it basically acts as a replacement for text messages. When you exit the app, you’ll still be able to receive incoming messages from your contacts regardless of which IM client they choose to use (apart from Skype, but that’s another story), for 30 minutes initially.

At a later stage, the company expects to prolong this push notification window but strives to maintain a balance between a longer time and not putting too much strain on the device’s battery life.

I’m told that eBuddy already saw about 2 million people using its product from the iPhone or iPod Touch before the app actually hit the App Store, thanks to the web-based eBuddy Lite Messenger tool, but the free native application that was just released will likely convert most of those users to it in a short period of time.

In fact, many seem to have already done so despite the lack of a marketing push: according to stats provided by app store analytics startup Distimo, the eBuddy for iPhone application is currently already ranked #1 in 21 countries, within the top 5 in 31 countries, and within the top 10 in 37 countries in the free social networking application category.

Of course, a massive user base doesn’t equal massive revenue streams, especially not when you’re giving away a product for free. I asked eBuddy how it expects to make money from its mobile applications (they’re already doing quite well on the web version, I’m told), and CEO Jan-Joost Rueb said he wants to see an aggregate mobile app user base of 10 million uniques before they roll out monetization efforts like advertising and paid premium apps.

Rueb expects to hit that milestone by the end of this year based on its current growth path, so basically if the company can attract 4 million more mobile app users on top of its current 6 million ones, they’ll start deriving revenues from them in Q4 2009.

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The eBuddy application for Google’s open mobile OS is now available for free on the Android Market, and users can thus benefit from a single ID to chat with their friends on third-party communication platforms such as Facebook, Gtalk, Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, ICQ and more.

No Skype chat yet, which is a bit of a bummer, but apparently the startup is looking to add that functionality in their mobile clients in addition to all the other ones currently supported. I wonder which startup will be the first to bring Skype chat to Android, since neither Meebo nor eBuddy currently support it and both Nimbuzz and fring, competitors that do support Skype IM through their mobile clients, have yet to make their way to the open platform.

What I like about the eBuddy application is that it has the ability to run in the background, so when you receive a phone call the IM service will keep running and even reconnect you automatically when the internet connection is lost. If you maintain multiple friend lists on instant messaging tools, eBuddy neatly organizes all your contacts in one list so you don’t even need to think about which third-party service you should be connecting to, and lets you seamlessly jump from one chat conversation to the next.

On a sidenote: I can’t grasp why Android Market doesn’t offer a search function on its regular website – only on mobile – but if you ever want to look for applications that are available on Android you might want to check out Cyrket.com. The eBuddy app is listed here.

I got eBuddy, which is backed by a healthy €11.5 million (which currently converts to approximately $15.6 million), to share some numbers to get a feel of the traction it’s getting in the market, and came away fairly impressed.

These are the numbers they pitched me: 20 million mobile downloads of the J2ME mobile client since its launch in June 2007, 5+ million unique monthly mobile users on eBuddy Mobile, and with almost 14 million downloads of eBuddy Mobile Messenger on GetJar the top ranked mobile program on the platform.

Stellar upwards-pointing trends indeed, but this type of hockey stick growth is of course no guarantee that all these new users will be efficiently monetized over the long run. Only time will tell if eBuddy finds a way to turn its successful product into a profitable business.

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The actual amount raised was not shared, but we’re told that the third round is pretty much on par with the Series B round the company closed in August 2007 (estimated at $12 million when we reported it, but more in the vicinity of $10 million according to information we received later) and that it’s “most definitely not a downround”.

Fring markets an entirely free, ad-supported mobile application that allows users to engage in Web-based social activities, including VoIP calling, instant messaging and social networking. The startup says it intends to use the extra funding to make the app compatible with more mobile environments (Android, anyone?), support more Web-based community services, introduce a couple of new features and make some usability improvements across the board.

When the economy started crumbling last Fall, fring let go 20% of its workforce, although at the time it stated revenues were actually on the upside but it needed to cut costs to extend its runway through 2009.

The company is up against a slew of well-funded startup rivals, including Nimbuzz, Truphone and eBuddy, but also increasingly against Skype, which is eyeing the mobile handset market more and more.

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Of GetJar’s free offerings, 3 out of 5 of the most downloaded applications are IM clients. Later this morning, one of of these IM clients, eBuddy Mobile Messenger, will be announcing that they have surpassed 10 million downloads on GetJar’s app store.

eBuddy is easily the most heavily downloaded application in GetJar’s catalog, pulling in roughly 375,000 downloads each week. In the 72 weeks since their November ‘07 launch, eBuddy has claimed the #1 download spot for 34 of them. At the time of announcement, they’re already well on their way to 11 million (Currently at 10,783,054).

According to eBuddy, much of their success is due to GetJar’s in-house advertising system, which they call “Get Traffic”. Through this system, developers bid for above-the-fold placement in GetJar’s search and browse pages, only paying when a user downloads their application after clicking through the advertisement. While they aren’t sharing exactly how eBuddy’s download numbers have improved since they began advertising, GetJar does tell us that the ad system generally improves an app’s download rate by roughly 200%, with eBuddy CEO Jan-Joost Rueb saying they’ve grown “exponentially”. No word on how much eBuddy’s campaign has cost them, but we do know that bids begin at $.01 and occasionally go upwards of $.50 per download.

While this Pay-per-download model seems quite beneficial for developers, some of the ads do seem a bit misleading to us. Partnered applications are often placed within a box labeled “Selected”, which our consumer-side would have assumed meant “Apps we’ve manually chosen to highlight”, not “Apps that pay us money to be here”. As far as we can tell, the user is not told that the application is being highlighted due to a paid partnership.

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eBuddy, the instant messenger startup that we’ve likened to a European meebo (though eBuddy has been around for much longer), has released the latest figures for its mobile instant messaging client, and it looks like business is booming.

Since July, the mobile J2ME eBuddy client has been downloaded over 5 million times, and has seen 10 million total downloads since launching in summer 2007 (current download rates are pegged at around 1 million per month. The company reports 1.5 billion message exchanges monthly across an average of 3 million users. On application repository GetJar, the application is the top most downloaded app, ahead of notables like Google Maps. The application’s reach is also global, with availability in 195 countries and 37 languages.

While smartphones like iPhones and Blackberries may get most of the attention, the vast majority of mobile phone users are using more basic phones which support applications on the J2ME platform. eBuddy’s explosive growth is a testament to the size of this market, as well as the increasing trend towards using third party applications and data plans on mobile phones, even those that aren’t as advanced as smartphones.

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Swedish startup Twingly, for instance, wants to come up with spam-free blog search by starting with the best 450,000 blogs and letting users share blog posts with each other. ParisBrussels-based Zilok is creating an eBay for renting things such as drills and digital projectors. London’s Fav.or.it makes a feed reader with extra powers—you can leave comments on blogs within the reader, it ranks posts based on how much they are actually read, and it lets you filter posts by tag, rank, or category. In Munich, andUnite has created a service that allows you to collect your search terms and share them with others.

And a handful of companies are even gaining substantial traction. I was surprised to learn that the social network Netlog claims 30 million unique visitors and four billion page views per month (comScore counts 11 million visitors, but five billion page views). Netlog operates in 15 different languages, and 20 countries. Then there is eBuddy, the Meebo of Europe, which boasts 12 million Web users and 1.6 million mobile users of its Web-based instant-messaging service.

Most of the startups I encountered, however, are still operating under the radar—in Romania, Sweden, Holland, Ireland, France. But a cross-border Web 2.0 culture is definitely gaining steam across Europe. Technology itself is helping to break down borders. A VC showed me the landing page on his mobile phone. It wasn’t his e-mail. It was Twitter. Another startup founder told me that Twitter helps him keep a dialogue going with other entrepreneurs and VCs across Europe, and even with contacts in the U.S.

Europe is still a mosaic of employment law, tax regulations, and cultural habits that can influence where it makes the most sense to locate different parts of a business. One Dutch CEO, for instance, told me that it costs you need a minimum of 18,000 Euros in starting capital just to incorporate in the Netherlands. And that is just the government’s fee.

When I asked which region was most likely to emerge as Europe’s Silicon Valley, the answers were all over the map: London, Munich, Berlin, Zurich, Geneva, even Barcelona. The money is in London, cheap office space is in Berlin, the mobile expertise is in Helsinki, the weather’s nice in Barcelona, and the inexpensive engineers are in Estonia (which may not even consider itself part of Europe, but is close enough to manage from Berlin or Amsterdam).

As Europe searches for its Silicon Valley, it may turn up as a state of mind rather than a specific place. The truth is that Europe may not need a single Silicon Valley because business is becoming so distributed. While some Silicon-Valley chauvinists may disagree, the idea of concentrating all the talent and capital in one region seems so last century to many Euro 2.0 entrepreneurs.

(Photo © Pieter Baert).

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There are three key changes of note. First they are now embracing services that they previously tried to stop – multiheaded clients and websites that allow users to access all of the major instant messaging platforms in one place. These are desktop services like Pidgin (open source), Adium (Mac) and Trillian (Windows). And web based services like Meebo and eBuddy. Today those services have to hack in to MSN, Yahoo and AOL services (Google Gtalk is open). Now AOL is giving them unfettered access, too.

What that means is that AOL goes from being in a position of half ignoring services like Meebo and half vaguely threatening to sue them, to fully embracing and supporting the services.

Second, AOL is also removing the usage restrictions that were put in place two years ago that restricted big services from using them (again, forcing Meebo, eBuddy and others to hack in).

Third, AOL is saying they’ll soon be giving partners who build software on top of AIM the option to run AOL-served advertisements with a revenue share. AOL says more details on advertising will be coming next month, and will be powered by their Userplane group, which AOL acquired in 2006.

There are a number of additional changes to OpenAIM as well, including more robust tools for third party add-ons (see gallery of existing add-ons here) and for mobile applications. And they are documenting their protocol for accessing AIM, called OSCAR.

David Liu, AOL SVP of Social Media, Messaging and Homepages, said in an interview that they want to remove all the friction and hurdles to third parties who want to leverage the AIM service, and welcome them with open arms. “To that end, we’ve come together with third-party chat services such as meebo and eBuddy to enhance the experiences of our users who access the AIM platform from these web-based services. We’re also giving developers the tools and flexibility they desire to build innovative and meaningful applications around instant messaging for web users around the globe.”

AIM has 27.3 million monthly users (plus another 30 million at ICQ, which is not part of this announcement), according to recent Comscore data. MSN has 235 million and Yahoo has 97.6 million. Gtalk has 4.9 million.

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eBuddy and Meebo are roughly equivalent according to worldwide Comscore numbers (4.8 million unique visitors for Meebo in December 2007, 4.5 million for eBuddy). Ebuddy says their internal stats actually show 12 million monthly uniques, with 1.5 million new users being added monthly.

eBuddy users can log into AOL, Google Talk, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo Messenger from their website, without the need to download any additional software. The company was originally called eMessenger, but relaunched as eBuddy in June 2006.

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FlickIM is letting applications integrate right into chat messages or as widgets along a sidebar. For instance, a Yelp widget will let users search for restaurants and send the reviews to friends through a chat message. Similar to Facebook, users will be able to add and remove the applications and notify their friends about what apps they have installed. Another startup, Imified, integrates web applications into IM, but does this for desktop chat applications through commands to chat bots. Facebook is also a company to watch for this functionality.

For now Flick.IM has launched with a handful applications, but will soon let developers add their own widgets and services to the platform through an API released in the next two to three weeks. All the new applications and information will be available at Flickapps.com. While the depth of the API is still under scrutiny, it may even let developers provide contextually based services by scanning user’s conversations (with permission). For instance, if you’re talking about a movie, a Flick.IM application could automatically provide links and times for that movie.

Their starting applications included six widgets and two integrated services. The integrated services allow you to embed photos and videos right into chat messages. Photos are shared by uploadeding them directly, while videos can pulled from a YouTube video search by typing “/video VIDEONAME”. Non-Flick.IM users will get links to the pictures and videos instead of an embed. Widgets include restaurant search on Yelp, Google Gmail, Last.fm radio, LiveNation, Yoink’d video search, and a beercam for kicks. The Yelp widget has the greatest amount of integration right now. It lets you run a quick restaurant search and send the link to your chat box.

Flick.IM has broader ambitions than this IM client, with an overall focus on real-time social networking. The chat client will eventually be one of many services incorporated in a new domain to be launched in the coming months.

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eBuddy now supports MySpace IM, AOL, ICQ, GoogleTalk, MSN and Yahoo. Log in to some of all of these services from the eBuddy home page.

MySpace says they now have over 18.5 million users of the service, which soft launched in September 2006. By comparison, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ and AIM have 224 million, 93 million, 30 million and 30 million users, respectively (Comscore worldwide – July 2007). GTalk trails the rest, with just 4.8 million users.

Rumor is that Trillian, a downloadable piece of software that also accesses all major IM networks except Skype, will be adding MySpace support soon, too.

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Today, Mundu, an Indian web chat provider threw their hat into the ring with Mundu for the iPhone. Like other web chat clients, it connects the big guys: ICQ, AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and Google.

The application consists of three different pages: log in, contacts, and chat. Clicking on a contact opens up a new conversation tab in your chat pane. It worked well enough, with a reasonable response time and legible text. It’s better than eBuddy (load time issues) and FlickIM (AIM only).

So why in the world will they eventually charge $11 for it?

There are way better ways to monetize software. Offer a free version and drop an advertisement into the conversation every once in a while, for example. But if Mundu wants to get a lot of users fast before Apple adds their own apps, they can’t be screwing around with charging customers. The marginal production cost of software is zero. That’s what the price should be.

Here’s a look at the other guys:

• Meebo – They don’t have a optimized application, however, Meebo’s web application works. Unfortunately chatting on it is like using the site through a key hole. You have to constantly zoom in and out to pick your contacts or chat in a specific window. It also crashed my browser from time to time.
• FlickIM – If you just want to get on AIM, I strongly suggest FlickIM. It’s a no frills chat app that lets you get online and easily start chatting. It also maintains your user session even if you exit the browser. The only drawback is that they use a drop down menu to select a chat contacts instead of an easy to scan list that takes advantage of the iPhone’s scrolling.
• eBuddy – They have the fanciest iPhone chat application with a lot of the full application functions. On eBuddy you can chat with your contacts, send smilies, change and change your text color. Unfortunately it only connects to MSN, Yahoo, and AIM.

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Like Meebo and eBuddy, Snimmer is a web-based instant messaging service. Unlike those services, however, Snimmer is also a social network, allowing users to upload bio information, photos, and other information about themselves and share it with others. If you find people you want to chat with on the service, you can create a chat room on the fly using Jabber (or GTalk) – they do not need to have previously been added to your instant messaging friends list.

When you use the service and sign on there is an opt-out to tell all your friends about the service. I caught it the first time and unchecked it, but on a second login I forgot and all of my GTalk friends were IMed with a message about Snimmer. I then spent thirty minutes apologizing to everyone who IMed me with “WTF” or something similar.

I like the idea a lot – looking at people’s pictures and other information while chatting with them is a great idea. Try it if you dare – but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

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The company, which competes head on with Meebo, has completely overhauled its web based IM platform with the three separate AOL, Yahoo and MSN clients being now integrated in to a multi network Ajax based platform.

A new mobile J2ME client that supports the top 300 phones worldwide provides a quick and easy to use mobile experience.

Amsterdam based eBuddy took funding of €5million in funding from Lowland Capital Partners in October 2006 and competes directly with the Sequoia backed Meebo. The service currently has in excess of 25 million registered users and 6 million mobile users.

New features coming later this year include support for more networks (including Icq and gTalk) and an improved feature set with support for drag and drop contact management, group chat and custom emoticons.

Previous TechCrunch coverage here.

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eBuddy’s primary competition is Mountain View’s Meebo, a startup backed by Sequoia Capital. That investment was for $3.5 million based on a pre-money valuation of about $9 million.
eBuddy serves web chat sessions in a pop up window, Meebo in the primary browser window or in an embedded frame on other pages via their MeeboMe service. See our previous coverage of eBuddy here and of Meebo here. See also upcoming challenger Geesee.

You can see VentureBeat’s coverage here.

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E-messenger (now eBuddy) has been around since 2003, offers chat in a pop-up box and added Ajax functionality in February. It’s been challenged by upstart Meebo since late last year. Meebo requires chat to go on in a browser window. Both services support MSN, AIM and Yahoo, but Meebo also supports Jabber/GTalk.

These appear to be the two major players in the field, Meebo from the US and Ebuddy from Europe. Both now have VC funding, Meebo having received money from Sequoia Capital in December.

Earlier this week e-messenger fired back with an ajax implementation of its own. At this time it only works for MSN IM. Implementation is via a pop-up, whereas Meebo places the chat box within the page. There are pros and cons to this approach. With e-messenger the popup looks and feels like a normal instant messenger client, although with Meebo the page can simply be resized to achieve the same effect.