Sequoia-backed Bubble Motion, which offers a popular a Twitter-like voice blogging service in India, Japan, and Indonesia, is expanding to include social media services today with Twitter and Facebook integration and SMS alerts.
Bubble Motion’s Bubbly platform is a voice-blogging phone service that allows people to 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.
Now users can send notifications of newly recorded “Bubbles” to Twitter with a link to the message on Bubbly. Celebrity Bubblers also send an update to Facebook friends whenever they update their Bubbly status, alerting their Facebook friends that new voice updates are available. And Bubblers can post text updates on the platform.
While Bubble Motion certainly doesn’t match the scale of Twitter and Facebook, the company has been able to grow steadily in areas where use of mobile phones outweighs use of the web via computers. Since debuting in India in February 2010, over 5 million users have adopted the service across Asia. Of course, with Facebook’s massive growth in India, it makes sense for Bubble Motion to tie their platform to the social network.
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.