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

I have good news for all of you ZYB users. Today we are joining the Vodafone Group. The ZYB team is very exited about this opportunity and we are all looking forward to working with Vodafone in pursuit of our vision – to create a new mobile experience by connecting your phone to your real life social network of friends, family and colleagues. In the discussions we have had with Vodafone it has become clear to all of us that Vodafone shares our vision and is eager to support us in our endeavours. Ahead of us lies a great opportunity to continue our innovation at an even greater pace than was possible before. As for the service, ZYB will stay open and free for all users all around the world, regardless of whether they are customers of Vodafone or any other network operator. I want to use this opportunity to thank all of you out there who have used ZYB in the course of these last two years. Your feedback has been an absolutely invaluable asset for us!

-tommy

Read more in the press release from Vodafone

When we started ZYB more than two years ago there were many obstacles to building an independent, direct-to-consumer brand in the mobile services sector. The mobile industry was known for its lack of standards, walled gardens, and closed attitude towards “outsiders” trying to offer new services directly to mobile users. Despite this, we’ve established an innovative brand, added sexiness to a boring space, and created a free, useful service for several hundred thousands mobile users. And we continue to strive to deliver the best solutions for real problems - we tend never to be satisfied!

The good news is that the mobile industry is now changing and in really positive ways. Operators and handset vendors are embracing the internet and independency as we have never seen before. And by opening their doors, they’re making it easier for smaller, innovative companies like ZYB to offer better mobile services for people. These are very exciting times and ZYB is right at the forefront of the rapid changes taking place in the internet-mobile space. This could not have been illustrated more clearly by the level of interest shown by the industry in what ZYB is doing at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February – i.e. Business Week rated ZYB one of the 10 most innovative mobile companies at the show.

The bad news though is that the change is happening too slowly. There is still too much friction in the industry and that friction is making it much harder for people to get the full benefit of their fancy new mobiles and from the data packages they’ve just subscribed to. Our dream is to make services for mobiles just as fluid and free as they are for any online web application. There is still some way to go - but everything is (finally) moving in the right direction. We’re continuing to work around the obstacles and vested interests, to create an even better mobile experience for people in the future

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!

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.

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!