Nimbuzz Hits 150M Emerging Market Users, Puts The Heat On Facebook In Asia | TechCrunch

Free messaging apps are a dime a dozen these days. There’s everything from Viber, to Skype, to WhatsApp to GroupMe. But while these startups concentrated on smartphone apps, it has been in the emerging markets that messaging over data has made a huge impression, and that has required paying attention to feature phones which use Java apps. We saw Saya.im appear only last year in Africa for instance. So starting way back in 2006, this is exactly what Nimbuzz, a startup originally from the Netherlands, did. And that strategy is paying off. Today it announces that it has just passed 150 million users globally and is doubling its users year on year.