Nimbuzz sees huge jump in Blackberry users from Saudi Arabia

Following the ban on Blackberry services by the Saudi Arabian government (due to go into force today), Dutch startup Nimbuzz said new registrations from that country have increased dramatically — from 200 a day before the announcement of the ban to 35,000 per day today and Thursday.

Nimbuzz gives users access to free mobile calls and instant messaging via services like Skype, Facebook, MSN, Yahoo, and Google Talk. Unlike BlackBerry-maker RIM, Nimbuzz does not offer any additional security on top of the services it aggregates, supposedly dodging the issues that that caused Rim’s troubles in Saudi Arabia. RIM encrypts email and Blackberry messenger communications and routes the data via its own servers in Canada. This brought RIM into conflict with the Saudi Arabian government which wants to monitor communications for security purposes.

We asked Nimbuzz if this means Saudi Arabian users’ communication could be spied on by the country’s government. US general manager Tobias Kemper responded:

We use the same protocols as Google for Gtalk and Facebook for FB Chat, since we are using XMPP as our messaging platform. Our users trust us with their login data and we are protecting this accordingly and are not selling any of the information.

It is in our best interest to keep it this way as we depend on our user’s trust to use our service and for us to stay in business. Since we do not encrypt our data with our own protocol like RIM do it, we comply with government demands, just like Google Talk, which you can use on your BB in Saudi.

There are about 700,000 Blackberry users in Saudi Arabia, of whom 80 percent are consumer rather than business users. Nimbuzz couldn’t give me a precise figure on the total number of Blackberry Nimbuzz users in Saudi but estimated that is it now more than 100,000. The company is also seeing a jump in registrations from other countries that have imposed or considered a ban, such as the United Arab Emirates.

RIM is currently negotiating with the Saudi government to resolve the issue by, for example, siting some of its servers in the country. The United Arab Emirates will block Blackberry email and text messaging from October 11. Algeria, Lebanon, India and Indonesia are among other countries said to be considering a ban.

Nimbuzz has 23 million users worldwide and is popular throughout the Middle East. The company is based in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, has 100 employees and funding of over $25 million dollars from various VCs.