So you may have already seen the news, but Vodafone 360 is what we have been working on over the past months. Vodafone 360 brings your world together like never before. A single address book for all your contacts from your phone, Facebook, Windows Live and Google. One place to get status updates and stay in touch with your friends. And a wide range of Apps, Games and Music for you to enjoy. All in one experience, accessible from your phone, PC and Mac.

Vodafone 360 will be available in late October, you can see more details here: http://www.vodafone360.com/

Thanks,
The ZYB Team

We have just released some pretty nice improvements to ZYB. Here are a bunch of them:

Free SMS
Free SMS for everyone! Yes, we’re serious. Starting today, you can send 100 SMS text messages each month - for free. All it takes is to connect to the person you want to send your text messages to.

If you’re a Vodafone customer you might be in for an even bigger treat. More about this in about a week.

Introducing the “Me bar”
The Me bar (as we call it) is all about, yes, you. Enter your contact details, set up your phone, change your profile picture. It’s all available in the new Me bar that you can access from anywhere on ZYB.

Share your location
Update your location. Enter your address or the city you’re in, and allow your friends on ZYB to see where you are right now.

(What’s even more cool, we’ve added the Geode support for Firefox so all you have to do is click a button and be localised. Read more about Geode on our geek blog).

Tell your friends what you are up to
Also in the me bar, we’ve added a quick way for you to change your status line, telling your friends what you are up to (this is what we used to call “shouts”)

Good news for new users
Yet another reason to get your friends on ZYB: Signing up is easier than ever. We’ve simplified, improved, fixed bugs and then simplified a bit more.

Manage your groups
As of today, labels are called groups. We’ve also added an easy way of managing your groups - look for the Groups tab in Settings.

Better contacts overview
Managing your contacts is now a lot simpler. The contacts overview also holds three new, big round buttons: SMS, Email and Call - making it easy for you to contact your friends directly from ZYB

We can’t wait to show you what we’ve done the last few weeks, so let’s take a quick sneak peak of what’s coming up on ZYB this week.

The friend player
Sit back and get the latest updates on what your friends have been up to. The new friend player on the home screen of ZYB also lets you jump straight to Flickr photos, tweets, Facebook profiles, etc.

Need to organise your friends? Put labels on them.
Edit a contact and enter them directly - or wait for the dropdown to suggest labels you already use.

To show people with a specific label, use the phonebook button right above the list of your contacts

… and look for labels:

or, when viewing a contact with a label, click the label and see who else has this label:

Hyves
You asked, we put it in. You can now import your Hyves contacts into your ZYB phonebook.

As always, let us know what you think, need and dream of by sending your comments to

UPDATE: For a geeky version of the above, and more, check out Mads’ tech post of the new stuff including  API and performance updates.

I’m happy to announce that we have bought Imity. I’m impressed with the things Imity has achieved and glad to welcome both the team and the ideas to ZYB.

We have known the guys over at Imity for a while and discussions have been ongoing for almost as long. We both feel that this is the right time to make Imity a part of ZYB. Imity has been pioneering the area for Bluetooth-based mobile social networking and have built a great concept and a strong team. Their skills, technology and team are a great fit with ZYB now that we are adding the location-dimension through the ZYB Phonebook, where we will tie together information from Online Social Networks, GPS, Cell-Towers and Bluetooth etc and provide the best mobile address book ever.

Welcome onboard, Imity.

Ed Bussey (COO), Christian Birk (Business Development Manager) and Adam Homfray (Operations Manager) landed in London from Barcelona, Copenhagen and Berlin respectively, to open up ZYB’s London office early this morning. They will soon be joined by a new Marketing Manager and a Marketing Assistant. The London team will be leading ZYB’s global marketing and operational activity and working closely with London based PR and marketing agencies.

The advantage of working for a web-mobile business is that we can work pretty much anywhere in the world provided we have an internet connection and a mobile phone. So whilst the office was freezing cold and looked pretty bare this morning we were able to get the London business up and running in a matter of minutes of walking in the front door.

The office space is on the top floor of the Media Centre on Bolsover Street, not far from Great Portland Street tube. If you happen to be in the area, feel free to drop by. We always like to hear from ZYB fans.

PS. Christian and Adam are having to sleep under their desks. If anyone has a flat available to rent in London, they would be delighted (relieved) to hear from you.

This year at the World Mobile Conference in Barcelona ZYB will introduce “The Social Phonebook” – a groundbreaking tool that significantly enhances the experience of the mobile phone address book by providing new, real time and interactive content on your contacts.

As a special bloggers treat we’re happy to offer you the opportunity to take part in Live Phone Conference with CEO Tommy Ahlers and Runar Reistrup including an intro and Q&A about the Social Phonebook. If interested, please RSVP February 5th, 2008 at anton@zyb.com.

ZYB is also going to be present at stand D23, Hall 7, where you will be able to:

· Be of the first to experience the Social Phonebook Demo

· Meet CEO Tommy Ahlers, COO Ed Bussey and other key executives

· Attend our private party with tapas and cocktails in Barcelona, February 12th

We hope to see you all in Barcelona!

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

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!

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!