Interview: Jan-Joost Kraal of eBuddy about mobile IM
August 7, 2007
One of the sharpest instant messaging services for mobile phones is eBuddy, which lets you chat with your MSN, Yahoo and AIM buddies on every mobile device that supports xHTML or WAP, even the iPhone. Earlier versions of eBuddy has been popular on web browsers for years. This week we talked with Jan-Joost Kraal, who is responsible for the mobile division of eBuddy.
How is your product different from services such as meebo?
Kraal: We are available on a lot more devices: mobile phones, Playstation Portable, Nintendo DS.
What makes your mobile service unique?
Kraal: We are the only one to provide a good working conferencing service.
How do you make money?
Kraal: Advertisement revenues from our website.
Do you expect that to change in the future?
Kraal: Yes, for mobile there are several possibilities: monthly fee/one off fee, also advertisements, white label, etc. This will be in addition to the revenues from our website.
How well is your iPhone product working so far?
Kraal: Very well. We were quoted yesterday in TechCrunch as the “fanciest iPhone chat application with a lot of the full application functions.”
What needs to change in the mobile landscape in order to make your company even more successful?
Kraal: Mobile operators need to step off the walled garden approach to mobile Internet.
- Mobile Internet needs to be priced flat-fee and more affordable.
- Implementation of J2ME on mobile phones must be optimized so that it is fully consistent across all mobile phones.
What has been the most challenging thing about developing a mobile product?
Kraal: The variety of mobile phones and their specific implementation of
J2ME, causing long porting and test-cycles
Do you think your Dutch background gives you a different perspective in the mobile industry?
Kraal: No. It does make a difference in the Internet industry since we’re not located right in the Silicon Valley (less heat). But for mobile it makes no difference.
Other iPhone chat products include meebo (though we hear its iPhone service has some technical problems) and FlickIM (AIM only). Of course, if you want to send AOL instant messages, you could try AOL’s Mobile AIM (AIM only, obviously), but on the iPhone, AT&T charges if you send more than 200 SMS messages per month.
Michael M.
Entry Filed under: Jan-Joost Kraal, ebuddy, mobile applications, mobile content, mobile messaging. .
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1.
John | August 8, 2007 at 7:23 am
I appreciate that eBuddy is available on so many devices etc. But for my SE 750 the best IM application I could find was MovaMessenger. I recommend you give it a try and download it to your mobile at http://movamessenger.com. Its feature reach, and most importantly the performance is reliable and fast.
There are a lot of factors that come into play when addressing performance… but MovaMessenger has been hands down the best.
JT
2.
mctelecom | August 8, 2007 at 8:23 pm
Thanks for the tip. I notice that MovaMessenger works with CQ as well, which is the leading IM network in China. We’ll investigate further and report on what we find out.
3.
Interview: BeeJive’&hellip | September 12, 2007 at 12:33 pm
[...] has a really clean UI, but doesn’t handle networking problems very well. Mundu is very good. eBuddy is probably our least favorite. Competition is a good thing, it gives users more choice and pushes [...]