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Your advert here!!! Technical Editors:
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Bubble Motion offers voice SMSWhile youths talk about 'texting' each other. Well, the next craze will have them
'bubbling' each other instead. Bubble Motion's new technology – voice SMS – is
catching on like crazy. The company has just revealed that a mere two months
after the launch of the Bubbletalk service in Egypt, Vodafone has seen an
impressive 15 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.
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