Bubble Motion CEO on why voice blogging is skyrocketing in Asia

We wrote about Singapore-based Mig33 and its 40 million users last month. This time around, we’ve got a similar story with Bubble Motion, another Silicon Valley firm transplanted to Singapore that’s gaining millions of users for its mobile service called BubbleBlog.

You can think of BubbleBlog as the spawn of voicemail and Twitter. You get messages on your phone from people you choose to follow. Like voicemail, you don’t need an app to access these messages. The idea seems to work, because a top-tier firm like Sequoia has sunk money into Bubble Motion. The company has raised US$30 million in all.

The twist with BubbleBlog is the way its marketed itself to users. It gained traction in India because it signed up big-time actors and musicians to broadcast their personal messages to fans.

We did an email interview with chief executive Tom Clayton about Bubble Motion’s “mobile first” strategy, its business model across different Asian markets, and  how it views Twitter.

Is BubbleBlog “Twitter with a voice”?

Our company has been building cutting-edge social messaging services since our inception several years ago, and in fact we’ve recently confirmed that ours was the original patent issued for ‘voice SMS’ technology dating back to early 2002. Our core technology has to do with making it simple for users (and scalable on the network side) to record and send messages using a mobile phone.

A couple of years back, we saw what was happening with the social Web, and we essentially re-invented ourselves to become a social communications company, focusing on our BubbleBlog service which applies the social communication norms that have become common on the Web, and brings them to mobile through voice and text.

BubbleBlog, which has sometimes been described as “Twitter with a voice”, is a social messaging service where people share SMS and voice updates with friends, family, fans and followers. The service allows people to update their status in their own voice, with their followers getting notified instantly by SMS to click to listen to the update.

With BubbleBlog a message can go to any phone without anything installed on the phone and can be delivered instantly to millions of followers with the click of a button. Best of all, our service works on any mobile phone.

Can you just briefly walk us through how a typical user would use BubbleBlog?

Sure. You should think of BubbleBlog users as being either ‘bloggers’ or ‘followers’ (or, both in fact). Bloggers can simply dial a short code (like *7*) and then record their status update. Followers then get notified with a free SMS that a new update is available. To follow someone, you would simply type *PhoneNumber*. Therefore, anyone can subscribe to anyone else (we do have privacy settings) – and everyone’s username is simply their phone number.

BubbleBlog is also popular for following celebrities. For famous bloggers, we protect their privacy by masking their actual phone numbers, and give each of them a unique 4-digit short that users can dial to subscribe to them. For example, India icon Amitabh Bachchan’s number is 5000, so fans in India can simply dial *5000* to subscribe to his blog. Users pay monthly or weekly subscription fees to follow celebrity bloggers.

How many users does BubbleBlog have? How many users in your major markets like India?

BubbleBlog is currently available in India, Japan and Indonesia, launching soon in the Philippines and beyond. In all, we have surpassed 5 million unique users with over 2 million users paying to follow celebrity bloggers.

Currently, the user base is the largest in India where fans have rapidly embraced the ability to follow their favorite Bollywood stars. India has about an eight-month head start on Japan and Indonesia, where the service is ramping up quickly.

Sequoia is one of your investors. How much have you raised in total and from whom?

Since inception in 2003, we have raised US$30 million in all from our investors. The majority of the early investment was applied toward the building of our core messaging platform deployed for our Voice SMS services (“BubbleTalk”).

In re-inventing the company as a social messaging services company early last year, we raised a US$6 million round that has funded our R&D and venture into mobile social media with the launch of our BubbleBlog services. Our investors include Sequoia Capital, Palomar Ventures, Comcast Interactive Capital and Northgate Capital.

Your business depends on working very closely – even at a technical level – with telcos around the world. How did Bubble Motion get those connections and close those deals with telcos?

Bubble Motion has been working with a wide range of telecom operators at a deep technical level for several years now, so our relationships have evolved over time. As our BubbleBlog service has gotten traction this year, we’ve been fortunate to be able to draw on these relationships, as well as forge new ones with operators who are excited about our service.

Our recent focus now has been on launching with the market leading operators in our key markets, and facilitating inter-operability of the service between multiple operators in a single market. This way, bloggers and followers can easily connect through our service, regardless of which telecom they use. This ubiquity will allow the ‘network effect’ to really take hold and make the service more valuable for everyone.

How did Bubble Motion end up with India as its major market? Bollywood stars use it, for example. Who was the first star to sign on, and how did that happen?

As we built the BubbleBlog social messaging service, we naturally introduced it to our existing customers, and Airtel immediately saw the opportunity and signed on to bring the service to the market. From there, we built relationships with content companies and celebrity agencies, and rapidly the Bollywood community jumped on board, seeing how easy this was as a way to connect with their fans across India with the click of a button from their mobile phone. Musician Sonu Nigam was the world’s first voice blogger, and from there it has grown to more than 100 Indian celebrity bloggers.

How are users responding to the service in Japan? And what about Indonesia?

Our geographic focus is on “mobile-first” countries, where mobile phone usage is far greater than fixed-line PC usage. We’re focusing primarily on such countries initially – specifically India, Japan, Indonesia and the Philippines. For example, in India, there are only 70 million internet users, but there are nearly 700 million mobile subscribers. Or in Japan, internet usage via mobile phones far outstrips fixed line PC access. Additionally, all of these markets have very large subscriber bases, which are extremely social networking savvy.

We launched with KDDI in Japan in October, and so far the results are looking great. The Japanese model is slightly different, as subscription services are less common there, and so the pricing model is modified there to adapt to the market. We’ve seen great metrics on call volumes, call durations, and best of all, monetization per user. Japan is truly one of the world’s most exciting mobile markets, and we’re excited to have gotten started. Look for more from us in Japan.

Meanwhile, we just officially announced our launch in Indonesia with XL Axiata. The service went live just a few weeks ago, and it’s already starting to explode. Aside from paid subscriptions to top local celebrity bloggers (lots of musicians, bands, entertainment celebrities), the community blogging (peer-to-peer) is really taking off, with active participants and overall engagement metrics off the charts. I guess it’s true what everyone is saying about Indonesia being such an active user of social media.

Why would someone use BubbleBlog instead of Twitter? Does BubbleBlog appeal to a certain type of user?

BubbleBlog and Twitter are actually very complementary services with different use-cases for each service. Twitter and text updates are great for impersonal and short bursts of thoughts or information. The beauty of BubbleBlog is that voice is authentic (you can’t fake it being from someone else), voice conveys emotion and nuance (tone can be hard on email or text), and voice isn’t constrained by character limits.

So, while someone might tweet a dozen times a day, or more, we see that people only bubble once or twice a day. This quality over quantity is a good thing, as it ensures that followers aren’t inundated with meaningless bubbles.

One of the big differences between the two services is that with BubbleBlog, everything is done from your mobile – any mobile – without the need for an application on your phone. It’s very quick and easy and works on any phone. No apps required.

But, we love Twitter, and in fact are making progress toward deep Twitter integration, but let’s save that topic for another time.

What do you have planned for BubbleBlog?

Being a leader in bringing social communications to mobile phone users is just an incredibly exciting place to be. To see this phenomenon go from nothing to 2 million paying subscribers in India, and then launching in Japan, Indonesia, and soon Philippines and beyond is so very gratifying while knowing that our service is enabling millions of people to connect and communicate with each other.

I get excited when I think about where things will be a year from now, when tens of millions of people are relying on the BubbleBlog service as a daily part of their lives, to share updates ranging from voice to text to photos to even video. That’s the vision. For now, it’s about execution. Which reminds me, any great local technology talent, please email us at contact@bubblemotion.com.

Link to full article