Bubble Motion Brings Voice Blogging To Indonesia

Leena Rao

Leena Rao is currently a Senior Editor for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... → Learn More

Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

Sequoia-backed Bubble Motion, which offers a Twitter-like voice blogging service in India and Japan, is bringing its service to Indonesia today via a deal with Indonesian mobile communications company XL Axiata. The service, which has seen considerable traction in India, will be dubbed ‘XL CUAPS.’

Bubble Motion’s BubbleBlog platform delivers a voice-blogging phone service so that people can share status updates in their own voice with fans and followers. It essentially takes Twitter’s model and applies this to voice blogging and mobile phones. These ‘bubblers’ record their voice update into their phone, and their followers everywhere are notified by SMS and prompted to click and listen. BubbleBlog has more than 2 million users in India.

Similar to the Japanese and Indian services, service is catered towards allowing Indonesian stars such as actors, musicians, comedians and other celebrities to record updates for XL’s 38.5 million subscribers. Users can become a voice blogger on XL by dialing *1* on an XL mobile phone, recording a status update, and followers everywhere are notified by SMS and prompted to dial and listen.

Social networking in Indonesia is a huge market, so it should be interesting to see if voice blogging can take off.

Bubble Motion, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., has raised a total of $35 million in funding since the company’s launch in 2003. The company also plans to extend its services to Philippines and Malaysia.

Company: Bubble Motion
Website: bubblemotion.com
Launch Date: 2005
Funding: $50M

Bubble Motion is a pioneer in mobile social media. Bubble Motion’s “Bubbly” is a social messaging service where people share text and voice updates with friends, family, fans and followers. Bubbly is like ‘Twitter with a voice’ and brings social networking to all mobile phones across Asia - and now with their latest iPhone and Android app version, Bubbly is finally available globally. Bubbly has quickly grown to 20M+ users across Asia and is now quickly expanding past that...

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