Bubble Motion's voice blogging service is gaining traction in India.
Unlike free social networking services like Twitter and Facebook, people are paying to use Bubble Motion's voice messaging service BubbleBlog. It gets about 40 percent to 70 percent of the revenue, depending on the country - and the mobile operators pocket the rest.
Thomas Clayton, the CEO & President of Bubble Motion, said it took BubbleBlog five months to get two million Indians in the habit of leaving voice messages.
"We are bringing social media to places that don't have Internet connection," Clayton said.
Bollywood stars like Kareena Kapoor and Aamir Khan have embraced the service and can leave audio updates for their followers in India.
The term "followers" is commonly used with the microblogging site, Twitter, to describe someone who chooses to follow someone else (friends, celebrities, or news organizations) to get text updates from that particular Twitter account. For instance, singer Justin Bieber has 5.5 million followers, so 3 percent of Twitter's services are dedicated to keeping up text messages directed at him.
BubbleBlog works in a similar way. Clayton describes it as a voice version of Twitter. For example, Bollywood star Lara Dutta can leave her fans a voice message while she is out clubbing.
"It's way more intimate and real," Clayton said. You'd hear the music of the nightclub. Plus, it doesn't give her PR person a chance to send messages for her.
"We started to look back at the charts, and realized the stars have more followers on BubbleBlog than Twitter," Clayton said. "Without a doubt, when the Bollywood stars started using it, others realized they could use it for their own purposes. Now it has taken a life of its own."
The cost of using Bubble depends on the country. Users can pay up to seven cents every time they listen to a message. It may seem far-fetched to think that Americans would pay anything at all to listen to a single voice message, but in most countries outside of the U.S. where Bubble Motion operates, it's normal for people to pay per text message. Carriers collect money for additional usage and split it with Bubble Motion.
Besides India, Bubble Motion has its eyes on Japan, as it is an early adopter of mobile phone services.
Plus, the company is looking at Indonesia and the Philippines to expand its reach. Not only do these countries have a large mobile base, people often rely on their cell phones to connect to the Internet instead of PCs. Social networking is popular in the four regions as well.
But most importantly, Bubble Motion has already established relationships with mobile operators in those countries. It is working with operators such as Airtel, Reliance, Vodafone, KDDI, and Telkomsel.
Working with mobile operators is really the key to deploying BubbleBlog in a smooth fashion.
The functionality has to be put into the mobile operators' network. So basically, if you want to leave a message like "OMG this new Justin Bieber song is amazing," then you would hit *7 on your phone and leave that message. All of your followers, can choose to listen to your message when they get a text alert that you left one.
To listen to someone's message, you'd need to dial in the -person's phone number. But for high profile individuals, Bubble Motion gives them a short code so their fans can use it to access their voice messages while masking the star's mobile number.
But the scale of this network is huge. You can't exactly just put of a fail whale like Twitter does and expect it to be okay. People depend on their phone for emergencies. For instance, if someone sent out a message out 100,000 times, it would clog up the mobile network if the networks didn't integrate BubbleBlog properly.
The popularity of Twitter was the best thing that could have happened to BubbleBlog. "Given the engineering complexity and the backend of the service, we began building this service nearly two years ago – back when Twitter was just a cool service that tech geeks in the Bay Area were raving about. As Twitter took off, we saw a light bulb go off with all the operators we were pitching BubbleBlog to. They finally got it," Clayton said.
BubbleBlog is the latest iteration of the service called Bubble Talk, which was a voice version of texting. But this was limited in scope because whatever message you left, it would only reach one other person.
"However, we felt like it could be so much more if we allowed users to send messages to many followers instantly rather than just one-to-one. We started down the social networking type of model to enable any number of followers. This is when the service really took off," Clayton said.
Jack Dorsey, the creator of Twitter, was inspired by AOL's instant messaging service. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are all in the instant messaging business too.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt said at the Mobile World Congress that in two years, smart phones will overtake PC sales. The web on mobile phones is growing eight times faster than the Internet on PCs.
In an increasingly mobile world, it will be interesting to see if the BubbleBlog service catches on in Japan and in other areas where mobile phones are all the buzz.