This Christmas over 100 million people will receive a new mobile phone – and they will struggle to transfer their data from the old to the new one. Luckily ZYB announces a FREE Christmas present for everyone who receives a new mobile phone!

www.igotanewphoneforchristmas.com

This unique online tool allows people to easily and securely transfer all of the Contacts and Calendar information from their old mobile phone to their new mobile.

The tool is available for free and it works entirely over-the-air. It saves people the hassle of using cables, CD’s or downloading software and the time that would otherwise be spent re-entering all of the mobile data by hand, one entry at a time. Time that would be better spent enjoying their Christmas holiday!

The service works for over 400 mobile phones, including all of the most popular brands, and you don’t have to sign up to ZYB to use the tool. Just go straight to www.igotanewphoneforchristmas.com and enjoy a merry mobile Christmas.

Are you interested in joining us at ZYB!? We’re always looking for the best people in the industry - and right now we have three positions open that might interest you! See the short summary below and click on the link for further details.

PR Manager London

Be a founding member of our London Office, that opens up in the beginning of the new year. Are you an innovative, dynamic and results-oriented PR Manager, with a track-record of having successfully developed “stand out” PR campaigns and an online buzz around a consumer brand!? You will have full responsibility for ZYB’s on- and offline PR activity, including managing agency relationships, and the opportunity to influence the development of ZYB UK beyond your responsibilities.

• PR Manager London
  

Information Architect

Is Product Information Architecture and User Experience the best thing that ever happened to you, then here’s a job that will make you smile. You will be leading the definition and implementation of core parts of the ZYB service together with some of the best people in the business. The position requires experience defining the perfect online information architecture and user experience, preferably on multi-platform interfaces.

• Information Architect

Interaction Designer

Are you passionate about optimising the user experience!? We are looking for an experienced Interaction Designer to join our team, focusing on ensuring consistency and usability across multi-platform ZYB interfaces. You will be planning and designing the interaction throughout the site and on different mobile platforms and you will lead the definition and design of key new functionality. You possess an entrepreneurial spirit and you want to participate in the definition of a future mobile killer app.

• Interaction Designer

We’re proud to announce that Tommy Ahlers and Ole Kristensen are kicking off the 2007 LeWeb3 Start-up Conference in Paris today sharing their vision, knowledge and know-how on what we call the Social Phonebook.

Since most online social networks are starting to resemble a crowded nightclub instead of a tool for real time interactions, an increasing number of people have started to come closer to the inevitable conclusion that you simply can’t make real friends online, you merely just engage with a lot of real friendly strangers.

So what triggered this social network fatigue, how do we reach a mass that no longer wants to manage multiple identities on several different websites and who is going to rise with the next dawn of social networking?

When answering these questions it becomes obvious that the people that matter the most to you are not the ones you meet on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Bebo or any other online universe. Your real friends are offline and you meet them out there in real life.

One way these real life relations are recorded is on your mobile phone’s address book. Not only does this turn your mobile phone and all its content into your single biggest and most valuable social network available, The Social Phonebook could potentially also solve a huge business problem for the phone companies when it comes to customer commitment.

Apparently Australians are some of the worlds most clumsy people when it comes to caring for their mobile phone.

Driving off with the handset left on the car roof is the most common excuse for a damaged mobile, according to a survey of Telstra customer service staff. Number two on the excuse list is damage by water, which includes dropping it in the toilet (!) and taking calls when in the rain. Others at the top of the list are sitting on the phone, dropping it on the footpath and throwing it to a friend or on a hard surface.

On the more lighter scale some have reported damaging their phone by accidentally running over it with a ride-on mower, leaving it on a window sill or car dash in direct sunlight and using it while in the shower with the speakerphone activated.

Well, what to say!? Let’s just hope more of our Aussie friends down-under start backing up their mobile contacts with ZYB on a more regular basis ☺

YES! We did it again – ZYB has been nominated at yet another international competition this time at the 2007 LeWeb3 Start-up Conference held in Paris, December 11th-12th.

LeWeb3 is a great platform for all new start-ups to present their business and technology to some of the most influential players in the technology market and with more than 120 submitted applications we’re pretty excited to be part of the final list of only 30 global start-ups.

2007 has already been an winning year with ZYB accepting both the acclaimed Red Herring 100 Europe Award, an award recognizing the 100 “Most Promising” private technology companies driving the future and the prestigious Danish Nystarterprisen 2007 at the his year E-handelspris. Crowning it all December 12th in Paris is just going to be fantastic!

Thanks to the committee at LeWeb3 and congratulation to our fellow finalists – may the best one win!

The danish general election is only 24 hours away - but even before the end result, one of the major top politicians has already won the first round, the Text Message-election. In just 3 weeks more than 500 people has signed up to ZYB Shouts! from Naser Khader, leader of newly formed Ny Alliance, in order to get a closer insight and more personal look behind the scenes at one of the most followed and anticipated campaigns. During his tour around the country and through endless public debates, Mr. Khader has demonstrated a steady stream of quick “live” updates and pure team spirit to his supporters, who in return has posted several notes on his ZYB profile.

“I chose to use microblogging in order to get a more personal contact with my hardcore supporters - communication is of extreme importance throughout a general election like this and I’m convinced this initiative has proven to be a smart move during my campaign. I hope everybody has been as thrilled as I have been for all the Shouts! I’ve been sending out” explains Naser Khader before going into the final 24 hours.

Using text-messaging during an election has also been used with great success by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards during the U.S. presidential election and compared with their number of supporters, Naser Khader can be more than proud of his efforts.

This week we’ve passed a truly magical number! Since launching our service our ZYB users have uploaded and stored more than 10 million contacts through the service. To be exact today’s number is 10.683.118 – that’s approximately the same number of people living in Seoul, the world’s largest city! We are of course thrilled to see that people all over the world appreciate our backup services and hope you all continue to store and connect to your friends on ZYB.

So what’s the buzz turning everyone’s mobile contacts more and more popular? At ZYB we believe users like you realize that the people who matter the most to you are not the ones on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo or any other online universe. The ones who matter the most are the ones you meet out there in real life - and those real friends are the ones you store and guard on your mobile phone.

In order to put action behind our belief, ZYB is launching a brand new “Real Friends” ZYB Facebook application. The app allows your profile visitors to add their contact details to your mobile phone’s address book turning your Facebook friends into real friends – friends who you can call or text message from your phone.

Remember that you can store pictures from your phone on ZYB. Once a picture is stored, you can share and tag it with the people who are in the picture, using your phone’s address book. People who are tagged in a picture will be notified about it and will probably go to your ZYB profile to see the picture.

That’s all for now, but we will soon be adding more cool stuff and we hope you’ll continue to find ZYB as exiting as we do!

Tim O’Reilly had a great post on Radar last week. The topic is about not being able to use Jaiku on his iPhone but it’s followed by a statement that any zybber believes in. It’s one of the reasons why we started ZYB: “I continue to think that the address book is one of the great untapped Web 2.0 opportunities, and that the phone, even more than email and IM, and certainly more than an outside-in, invitation-driven “social networking application” represents my real social network.” This is also supported by Om Malik from GigaOm back in August writing about Facebook Fatigue: “Tip: The best way to ensure the fidelity of your social network is by taking a look at the names and numbers in your mobile phone’s address book. It kind of tells you who matters the most to you!”

Both Tim and Om gets it. The people you that matters the most to you are not the ones on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Bebo or any other online universe. They are offline and you meet them out there in real life. Those relations have been recorded in mobile phone’s address book for a decade. ZYB stores these relations, take them online, and adds value to them by letting users do some basic activities with their existing network. All these activities are linked to the offline world by people and by the unique link ZYB has back to the phone.

A social network is not something you create - it’s something you have. You have it on your phone - and soon on ZYB.

TechCrunch is one of the most important media in the current web 2.0 landscape. The guys (with Michael Arrington as the light tower) does a great job in keeping up with an industry on ecstacy while staying sober and ironic. When TechCrunch decided to do a conference it pretty fast became one of the most talked about conferences this year. After having been covered/mentioned 4 times by TechCrunch the last 4 weeks ZYB was offered a spot in the DemoPit.

It was a great conference with both good things and bad things. The good thing was (as it always is) the people that participated. It offered a great opportunity for us to meet with some potential partners and investors and also get more people excited about ZYB. It’s great to see how people get impressed with both what we have done and what we are going to do. It really gives energy for continuing the journey despite all the obstacles. The comments we received during the conference both proofed that the very core of our service (storing your phones data) and the social networking opportunity offered by ZYB is understood and demanded. The greatest moments were when ZYB-users stopped by and thanked for a great service. That feels good.

Everyone I spoke to agreed to the statement that ”A social network is not something you create. It’s something you already have. And it’s stored on your phone.” It started a couple of interesting discussions about social network fatigue. I think the coming year will show some adjustments on how people are using online social networks. ZYB is an opinion in this development. We think that people want to connect online to the people they care about – not some stranger on the other side of the globe.

So what was the bad thing about the conference? For me there were too many demos and the quality of some presentation was simply too poor. I think they should have kept it at 20 companies presenting and then a bit more of panel discussions or keynote speakers. Mint won the competition among the 40 presenting companies. They made a good figure but wasn’t my personal favorite. In my opinion the guys from Xobni (inbox spelled backwards) should have gotten the prize. I love their product and Matt Brezina was without doubt the best presenter at the conference. Go check them out – I’m convinced they’ll do good!

There were quite some discussions about hype at the conference. Is it a proof of a hyped industry that 1,000 people paid USD 2,000 for a two day conference? I don’t think so, because the network people get out of it can justify it. Is it a proof of hype that a normal edition of New York times have 4 pages covering internet companies? I don’t thinks so, because it’s an important part of the economy and the innovation going on. The only evidence of hype was that MC Hammer was part of the expert panel at the conference. But that’s seem more like MC Hammer being hyped.

We finally got an iPhone to Denmark, and while waiting for it to be unlocked, it struck me that I wouldn’t even be able to call anyone on it, because it had no contacts. I tried syncing it through iTunes, but that way it’s only showing half of my numbers, for some reason.

We sat down and started looking at the work of the brilliant Joe Hewitt and his iUi framework. Within hours we had our first working prototype that was able to display all your ZYB-contacts on your iPhone, in a native-like interface.

Over the last couple of days we’ve been tweaking it a bit, and you are now able to see all the details of your contacts, call them directly from the interface, look them up on the integrated Google Maps and so on. Basically all that the native client supports - only this time, with all of your contact details. I basically had an old Nokia, and now I seamlessly transferred all my contacts to my iPhone, with no effort except from one sync with ZYB.

We were also missing an option to search for contacts in the native address book on the iPhone, so we threw that in there as well..

The strategy of Apple making the plugin-work happening inside the Safari-browser makes perfect sense. They educate the users to actually start using the Internet from a mobile device. A thing that will surely revolutionize the so called ‘mobile web’. Just imagine 100 million internet capable devices in the pocket of every teenager.. On top of that, they allow for rapid deployments of plugins and a very short learning period, since everyone with some web-experience will be able to work with it.

The flat-rate dataplans on the iPhone and the increasing number of wireless hotspots everywhere, take away the ‘have to be online’ barrier of using web for plugins.

When someone like Joe Hewitt then launches the iUi framework, it makes it a real breeze to make stuff look nice on the iPhone quickly. We’ll probably be spending some time tweaking the design of it, and iron out some of the kinks still in there, but it’s a great start, and I’ll be sure to submit our various changes to the project so others can benefit.

If you’re one of the lucky iPhone users, be sure to check out the new ZYB for iPhone interface at iphone.zyb.com

-Ole