Voice Blogging Service, Bubbly, Up By 1 Million Users Since Last Month

Bubbly, which recently just launched an iOS app for its Twitter Voice service, has yesterday launched its Android app. That’s not quite the big news though. What interests me is that Bubbly claims to have increased its user count by one million over just one month ago, hitting a total of 16 million users.

A representative from Bubbly declined to comment on download stats on its iOS app. But I’m guessing that it has made quite an impact. I gave its iOS app a try and found it pretty easy to use, with an active community. The same rep also told me that 75 percent of postings are audio-based content. The rest are mainly text. On average, users are logging onto Bubbly three times each day.

Bubbly’s community of users are mainly made up of feature phones users, spreading primarily across India, the Philippines, Japan, and Indonesia (not China unfortunately). To post an update, a user will dial a short-code, get the message recorded, and send it to his or her followers. A follower will receive an SMS update whenever there’s a new recordings from the people they follow. Bubbly’s reach is quite extensive thanks to the long list of mobile carriers it is working with. It needed to work with the mobile carriers for the short code to work.

So with the iOS and Android app, smartphone users can also now enjoy voice blogging without the hassle of dialing any short code. It should be fun observing Bubbly’s growth as it “frees” itself from the mobile carriers with its smartphone apps — especially in China, where Android is actually quite popular. If marketed properly, Bubbly could be popular in the middle kingdom too.