MWC: The Buzz Around Nimbuzz

Just out of a meeting with Nimbuzz VP of Business Development, Geoff Casely, who was looking very pleased with himself. And well he might, as the company’s social messaging application has just been selected for pre-loading onto Toshiba’s TG01 handset. I had not seen Nimbuzz at first hand before and it is a very neat application. As Casely puts it: “You put your life into Nimbuzz”. That includes your address book, and all the various types of messaging you use, from Instant Messaging to email and social networking. When you call up the address book, it tells you which of your contacts are online, and via which network/device (PC/mobile, IM, Nimbuzz etc). It also geotags them, so you can see where they are. Users can turn this feature off, but Casely explained how it could be used by parents to check that their kids are where they say they are. If they’re not, or if they have turned the feature off, the parent can ‘buzz’ them. This makes their phone ring once, then gives them a message saying that you want to talk to them, or communicate with them some other way. Nimbuzz runs an Ambassador programme in which real people get early access to new features in return for feeding back to the company on what they and their friends think of them. “We’re trying to learn from some of the mistakes that other companies in this space” have made,” Casely told me. “You have to constantly ask yourself what more could you do, what’s the next thing.”Nimbuzz is on something of a roll. In addition to the Toshiba announcement, it is also being used by two social networks, one in Germany, StudioVZ, which has 12 million users, and another in Italy, Giovani, which has 2 million. It was also recently named in the Red Herring Global 100 list of tech companies, and has a new iPhone client out this week, updating the one launched towards the end of last year, which was very well received. Whatever that next thing is, chances are that it will be worth watching.
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