INTERVIEW: Bubble Motion on being 'Twitter with audio'

What's the background to Bubble Motion?

The original idea was a peer-to-peer voice messaging service. So, I record a message and then send it to you as if it were an SMS. But we soon realised there was more interest in a one-to-many service, where I record a message and put it out there for any of my friends or followers to listen in to. We called it Bubbly.

And that worked, right?

It took off pretty quickly, first in India. But we've launched it in other Asian markets. The Philippines is the latest. I think what makes it work is the same desire to share that's propelled Twitter and other social networks. Bubble Motion brings this to any mobile user. You don't need a smartphone. That's why operators like it. We're aiming to be the social graph for operators.

How does it work in practice?

We work with an operator to embed the service into the network, and once it's integrated users just press the * button followed by a 7 to record a 30 to 60 second message. They press * followed by a mobile number to follow another Bubble user, and * 0 to check their inbox. A text gets sent to all followers when someone records a new message.

So it is a lot like Twitter.

In many ways it is. In India, where we're working with Bharti Airtel and Reliance, there's a strong celebrity dimension. We've got around 450 stars using it and Amitabh Bachchan has 1m followers. For these kinds of stars, there's a shortcode you can use to follow them. But in Indonesia, it's more about friends than celebs, so it varies by territory. In general there's a broad range of user cases. We've had schools, churches, community organisations and so on setting up Bubbly accounts.

And does it cost to follow other users?

There are different business models available – you can pay to retrieve a message or a set number of messages, or you can have a subscription.

What about advertising?

It's not straightforward embedding ads in an audio message, not just technically but in terms of user experience. Users don't like it. And anyway, we have a revenue stream. Having said that, there is an opportunity to send commercial messages to a closed group. BMW has done this. And Citigroup.

Are any celebs taking money to endorse products, like they are on Twitter?

I'm not aware of it. But of course one of the tricky things about an audio service compared to text is that it's difficult to scan and search it. You have to remember that a Bubbly audio file is 10,000 times bigger than a 140 character Twitter message. Handling that amount of data and routing it smartly around the network - that's what we're good at.

One of the received wisdoms about Bubbly is that it works well because most  of its users can't read. Is it true?

We get that all the time, and it's nonsense. Around 98 per cent of users can read. They have to, because of the SMS notifications.

As it's so operator centric, do you rely on operators to spread awareness of the service?

That would be nice! But it's easier to get celebs to do a lot of the promotion and then rely on the viral component of the service to do the rest.

Any plans for a western roll-out?

The strength of the operators in Asia means it makes more sense for us to focus our energies there. We're aiming to quadruple our footprint this year so that we can address 1bn potential users by the end of the year.