As LinkedIn’s IPO establishes the market value of a strong social graph, BubbleMotion is finding that “community blogging” over its voice messaging platform continues to log impressive growth in both users and message volumes. As the chart below depicts, the company saw impressive growth through the first quarter of 2011 on its way past 8 million unique users today.

In April, the company raised $10 million from a group l;ed by SingTel Innov8, (SingTel Group’s corporate venture capital fund), along with Singapore’s Infocomm Investments and previous investors: Sequoia Capital, Palomar Ventures, and NGC. Total venture capital behind the firm is now approximately $40 million.

A couple of weeks ago, Opus Research reached Tom Clayton, CEO and President, to get a better understanding of the company’s growth and strategy. As we noted in this post last year, only time would tell whether Bubbly would be a the voice version or Twitter or just a Bubble. Performance, to date, points to the former. The company continues its explosive growth and has plans to continue to expand its geographic footprint. India remains its biggest market, followed by Indonesia, the Philippines and Japan.

Over time, the company has seen the share of traffic driven by “Community Blogs” (rather than from “Celebrity Posts”) grow from 10% of traffic a couple of years ago, to 45% today. The company defines this sort of communications as “friends calling friends” or “peers calling peers.” As Clayton explained, “It was key to transitioning from celebrity broadcasting to part of everyday life.” Just as it moved into voice-based initiation of text among friends, the company looks to adding photos and even video as it transforms into a mechanism for originating a tweet on Twitter or posting to Facebook.

As the company seeks to grow into North America, it expects to take an “Over The Top” (OTT) approach by developing mobile apps for iOS or Android based devices. At the same time it plans to grow beyond SMS-based message origination. It is targeting heavy Twitter users, as measured by number of followers. The company understands how to use celebrity posting as a springboard, while keeping its eye on the larger community as the real engine for traffic. Over its years of operation, it observed retrieval rates and “engagement rates” among community networks to be “four times” those for celebrity posts while, at the same time, the user population is growing twice as fast.

The mobile applications are expected to make full use of the real estate “on the glass” of today’s smartphones. Content – be it audio or text – will appear in bubbles that move dynamically on the screen. At the same time subscribers will be able to log their own comments, which appear simultaneously. Community members can choose to participate or, like many frequenters of Facebook or Twitter’s sites, they may choose to scroll through the scads of other people’s content.

Categories: Articles

Tags: mobile services, Voice Services, social networking, Ventures