Bubbling to emulate texting's success

The company has just revealed that a mere two months after the launch of the Bubbletalk service in Eygpt, Vodafone has seen an impressive 25 per cent of its subscriber base embrace the technology.

What's more, it has lifted the company's Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) by 1.5 per cent. That's the sort of revenue increase most operators would die for.

What Bubbletalk does is enable users to send a voice message (lasting about 30 seconds long) in place of the text message which SMS provides. It's extremely simple to operate.

All you do is prefix the recipient's number with a star (*) and that automatically connects you to the Bubbletalk system. Notification that a 'bubble' has arrived is sent via SMS. It's then just one keypress to listen to the bubble message.

Bubble Motion founder, Sunil Coushik, revealed that the first country Bubbletalk took off in was Malaysia. One of the reasons is that Chinese is one of the languages spoken there and texting in Chinese can prove both time consuming and complex.

By contrast there is no skill involved in being able to send a bubble. From an operator's perspective the huge advantage is that no changes need to be made to the existing infrastructure.

Indeed, Bubbletalk makes good use of the spare voice capacity which most mobile networks enjoy. Coushik claims his company can deploy Bubbletalk across a network in three weeks - faster than most operators can dream up a suitable campaign to launch the service.

Bubbletalk's critics suggest that it will cannibalise existing SMS services. Coushik's reply is that he'd be proud to be the man who actually managed to cannibalise SMS but that simply isn't the case.

None of Bubble Motion's customers has actually seen a drop in their SMS traffic. In Egypt, Bubbletalk has succeeded where push-to-talk, picture messaging (MMS) and consumer email have all failed to make any kind of dent.

One of Bubble's biggest markets is rapidly becoming India, so the company is establishing POPs (Points of Presence) in 40 places - most of which have large Indian communities. That enables users to exchange international bubbles.

Coushik wouldn't say how soon he expects Bubbletalk to arrive in Canada or the UK. However, he did hint that moves are afoot to create a bubble 'standard' so that voice SMS messages could be exchanged between systems from different suppliers.

Significantly, he revealed that voice notification of the arrival of a bubble message doesn't work. Imagine, for example, a Quebecquois receiving a voice message in English to say that a bubble has arrived. That wouldn't work, would it?

If Coushik is right, then bubbling will become as popular as texting. And Bubble Motion's backers - including its US based VC - will make a very pretty penny indeed. µ

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