Nimbuzz – mjelly.com mobile 2.0 service of the week

Happy Friday – james from mjelly here and welcome to another mobile 2.0 service of the week where we’ll be looking at Nimbuzz – one of the hottest next generation mobile applications out in the market right now.

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Nimbuzz is a unified communications application for your mobile

Nimbuzz is an application which connects your mobile to a range of different communications platforms:

VoIP services like Skype and other SIP telephony networks
all the major instant messaging services including Yahoo messenger, gtalk, MSN, AIM and ICQ
social networks (myspace, facebook, Studi VZ)

The app is one of the easiest ways to access Skype over your mobile via either Wi-Fi or your 3G data connection. You also get a single combined view of your contacts and buddies across your various accounts. Personally, Nimbuzz has been really useful many times in the past when I’ve needed to access something like Skype chat when out and about.

They launched in May 2008 and have raised two major funding rounds of $10m (2007) and $15m (2008) from some interesting investors including Mangrove (funded Skype), Naspers (own a stake in Mxit) and the German VC Holtzbrinck Ventures. The company is based in Amsterdam with a number of other offices around the world.

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Range of distribution approaches to drive growth

One thing which Nimbuzz is doing very well is developing a range of distribution channels for its app:

partnerships with online services like StudiVS
a successful presence on the iphone app store
use of cross-platform software aggregators like getjar
partnerships with telephony services
developing apps optimized for specific devices including the Nokia 5800
offering a basic version of the service on the mobile web at m.nimbuzz.com
web-based widgets for blogs, social profiles etc

This has enabled them to rapidly grow their user-base and establish critical mass for their platform.

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Nimbuzz getting good traction and winning awards

Nimbuzz has really taken off with users and is currently driving 20k new users a day, that’s 1 new user every 4 seconds. At the current run rate they will have millions of users by the end of the year. One thing Nimbuzz are great at is continuously pushing out new, improved versions of the software and communicating with users – as a result there are a lot of fans out there and they claim that 95% of users would recommend the service to a friend.

They are also winning a load of awards including the Red Herring Global 100 award, the AO Stanford Summit as part of the Global Top 250 technology companies, and won Best Mobile Startup in its category at Mobile 2.0 Europe.

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With this kind of growth Nimbuzz have a great chance of building a really powerful position in the mobile value chain. They are definately one of the mobile 2.0 startups to watch and are providing an application that is genuinely useful and user-friendly.

See you next week for another great mobile 20 service of the week here at Mobile Zeitgeist.

You can download Nimbuzz on mjelly which is a directory of free mobile software and the best mobile websites

Author: James Coops has worked in the mobile internet industry since the dark days of ‘wap’ all the way through to the present day. In 2001 he developed one of the first mobile web sites to allow downloading of content over the mobile internet (previously this was done over SMS). He then spent 7 years working all over the world as a consultant for mobile operators, media companies, service providers and investors including the likes of O2, Vodafone, Telecom Italia Mobile, Discovery Networks, FIFA and Goldman Sachs. James has also written for Techcrunch UK, Mobile Industry Review and New Media Age Magazine and runs a directory of mobile sites and applications at http://mjelly.com (PC) and http://m.mjelly.com (mobile) and blogs at http://blog.mjelly.com. He loves Germany, especially the Weiss bier!