Nimbuzz, a Rotterdam, Netherlands-based Internet telephony company, says it has signed up 50 million registered users across the globe. That’s minuscule when compared to big daddy of Internet telephony, Skype, but it’s still significant milestone for the upstart company.
In less than a year ,the company has doubled its registered users, adding about 100,000 every day. Nimbuzz got into a tiff with Skype last year when the bigger company stopped giving the upstart access to its service. But that hasn’t had any impact on the company’s growth.
Nimbuzz was smart to latch onto the smartphone trend faster than most of its competitors. It launched an iPhone app quite early. Even though I was a skeptic, the availability of an iPhone app made me a convert. I use it few times a week to call my far-flung family members and friends. Nimbuzz claims its users “talk more than 3.7 billion voice minutes per year and spend on average two and a half hours per day communicating via the mobile app.” Many of these folks are in emerging markets such as India and Indonesia, where there’s a preponderance of feature phones.
Below is an infographic the company shared with us:
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