Last week I attended Nimbuzz bloggers meet. It’s a service that does chat, games and other stuff from within the app. I wouldn’t blame you if you don’t remember this company but it was launched in 2007 and was quite successful in the Symbian era of smartphones. It had gained popularity as it also catered to those java phones. Quite useful at that time.
When I met the marketing manager last week, I got a feeling that the company was still stuck in its last years of prominence. I’ll explain why I felt so. Feel free to disagree.
Nimbuzz as I understand is predominantly a mobile app. Only 3% of their 150M users access the service through their desktop apps. Yet they haven’t understood how mobile apps work. Mobile apps, at least on smartphone, just do one thing and they do it right. Take for example Instagram. It takes photos, adds filters, post them, and let’s you browse others feed. This is again one of the reason why Facebook has come up with multiple apps, Facebook app to browse your feed, messenger to chat, Paper to read news. Nimbuzz tries to do everything from their app.
The marketing guy again talked of multitasking within the app. I understand where he’s coming from. Back in 2005-7 internet on mobile were accessed from non smartphone, which used to take time to connect to the net and disconnected when one closed the app. Those days! However, these days with smartphone we can easily switch between apps. Our smartphones are always connected and switching between the apps is extremely easy. While writing this post, while I’m commuting, I’ve tweeted, sent an email, made a call, and have got back to writing. All seamless.
In my opinion, Nimbuzz needs to find their USP, the one that’s making them money and stick to it. I recognize their voice chat service is quite good and the cheapest. I’ll be giving it a try over the next month to make international calls. Will write about my experience then.
Leave a Reply