{"id":297682,"date":"2010-02-09T12:00:50","date_gmt":"2010-02-09T17:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=97731"},"modified":"2010-02-09T12:00:50","modified_gmt":"2010-02-09T17:00:50","slug":"bubbly-a-voice-twitter-for-the-billions-who-don%e2%80%99t-have-internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/297682","title":{"rendered":"Bubbly: A Voice Twitter for the Billions Who Don\u2019t Have Internet"},"content":{"rendered":"

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With more than 4 billion<\/a> mobile phone users and some 1.7 billion<\/a> Internet users, there’s a market opportunity to provide web-style services for people who aren’t online. That’s what Bubble Motion<\/a>, a\u00a0Mountain View, Calif.- and Singapore-based\u00a0startup with some $30 million in funding from\u00a0Sequoia Capital, Palomar Ventures and Comcast Interactive Capital, wants to do with its new service Bubbly<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Bubbly is an extension of 4-year-old Bubble Motion’s BubbleTalk, which helps users leave short voice messages for each other (like a text, but with voice). For Bubbly, the company is going from one-to-one communication to a Twitter model, which allows users to follow celebrities and friends alike, receiving SMS alerts when they’ve dialed in a new voice update.<\/p>\n

Bubbly is being released in partnership with mobile operators, starting last week in India (Bubble Motion declined to identify its carrier partner, but it has previously worked with Bharti Airtel<\/a>). Inspired in part by participation from Indian celebrities, Bubbly already has some 150,000 users in the country, according to David Still, VP of product management.<\/p>\n

The benefit of working with mobile operators directly — and more are coming soon in Southeast Asia, said Still — is that the service is tightly integrated and charged through users’ normal billing. Bubble Motion takes a cut of revenue directly from the carriers. That’s different from the standard practice of buying text messages in bulk. On the consumer side, in order to leave a Bubbly message, people just dial *7 and speak on a live phone call and hang up. Then subscribers get an SMS message and dial *2 to listen. All of this can be done without a Bubbly account, and at the cost of text messages or slightly more.<\/p>\n

Right now the key is to grow Bubbly by partnering with more carriers, said Still, but other future projects for the 40-person Bubble Motion may include a web interface or video support. I can see how inbox management, archived history and search functionality could really help — while voice may be accessible and expressive, parsing through piles of voice mails is not<\/em> my idea of fun. But I’m not the target market.<\/p>\n

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With more than 4 billion mobile phone users and some 1.7 billion Internet users, there’s a market opportunity to provide web-style services for people who aren’t online. That’s what Bubble Motion, a\u00a0Mountain View, Calif.- and Singapore-based\u00a0startup with some $30 million in funding from\u00a0Sequoia Capital, Palomar Ventures and Comcast Interactive Capital, wants to do with its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":673,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-297682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mobile","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/673"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297682\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}