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.

Crunchbase

• BUBBLE MOTION

Company: Bubble Motion

Website: bubblemotion.com

Launch Date: 2005

Funding: $45M

Bubble Motion is pioneering social communication for mobile phones. Bubble Motion’s Bubblyâ„¢ is a social messaging service where people share SMS and voice updates with friends, family, fans and followers. Bubbly is like ‘Twitter with a voice’ and brings social networking to mobile phones. Bubble Motion’s innovative operator partner network includes telecom leaders in ‘mobile-first’ countries including India, Japan, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Partners include Bharti Airtel, Reliance Communications, Tata (Docomo and Indicom), XL Axiata, Globe, Telkomsel, Indosat, DiGi, Vodafone,...

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