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.

The World Mobile Conference is closing up and so is our ZYB Barcelona Team after four exhausting but very successful days demonstrating ZYB and introducing the brand new Social Phonebook.

A lot of interesting people from the industry and the press dropped by for an update - even Robert Redford was there (well, at least he passed the stand). The positive response was overwhelming which confirms that ZYB is heading down the right mobile track with the recent announcement of the Social Phonebook.

In short the Social Phonebook significantly enhances the experience of the mobile phone address book by providing new, real time and interactive content on your contacts. I.e. the new features allows you to:

· See if you friends are available for a call or when they will be

· Get alerted when your friends are in town or just around the corner

· See what your friends have been up to lately and what they are doing right now

Tuesday night ZYB hosted a well-attended party at the Dostrece Nightclub. It was a time of good music, great fun and some serious mingling sparked and sparkled by the now famous 2.0 cocktail of Absinth, Tequila and Blue Curacao. Yeeha…

Also Zybberman, our beloved mascot and fellow swedish graphic designer Chris, caught a lot of attention especially from the female crowd, who were rather… mesmerized by his appearance and obvious star quality.

We’re already looking forward to rock Barcelona once again next year!

We just deployed a new version of zyb.com this morning, and it’s looking good! We’ve added some very cool new features, that I hope you will like. I know I will!

In our all-new Contacts page, it is now possible to select all of your contacts, and have their location displayed on a nice little map and get an overview on how your friends and contacts are distributed around the globe, or around your local town.

Another cool little feature, that may be more of a techie-thing, is the addition of XFN-tags to the Online Life items in your profile. Whenever you enter a new link, for instance your Facebook profile, we will add XFN data to the link, to allow you to use that info on other sites supporting XFN. Steps like this is important to allow you to control your data, and keep it open and in your hands. Next step, will be to utilize the XFN data on other sites, and help you gather all of your online life links automatically.

Speaking of your profile-page, we’ve added a Lifestream to it, that will help you and your friends keep track of your activites on ZYB. All at your control, of course.

I hope you’ll enjoy the new stuff, and be sure to leave us your comments, good or bad!

-Ole

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!

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.