Say it aloud, with Bubbly

Amitabh Bachchan, one of Bollywood's biggest movie stars, writes a blog and is widely followed on social media. The Big B, as he is affectionately called, started blogging in 2008 and has more than 1.5 million followers on Twitter.

And while some celebrities opt to let their managers write posts for them, fans can be sure that Bachchan's posts on at least one media site are his — because they can hear his voice.

In July 2010, Bachchan started using Bubbly, a voice-based messaging service, and he now has just over one million followers in India. Each one pays 30 rupees (about Dh2.14) a month, or about 60 cents, to hear his sonorous voice.

Social voice messaging, or voice microblogging via cell phones, is still in its infancy. Some companies see great potential, but many analysts remain sceptical.

So far, the markets where these voice messaging services have gained traction are big adopters of cell phones and text messaging, says Krishna Baidya, an Industry Manager for Asia-Pacific information and communication technologies at Frost & Sullivan, a market research company.

"Voice SMS technology is one-to-one communication and has existed for some time," says Baidya, referring to short message service. "But voice-blogging, one-to-many, is newer."

He says that he thought this could be appealing for celebrities, politicians or spokespeople for well-known organisations "because it's a good way to connect to your target audience. And for the user, they feel like, ‘They're just talking at me'."

In May last year, Singapore-based social messaging service provider Bubble Motion introduced Bubbly in India. People who use the service can send a text message to followers that contains a link to a short audio message. The audio is played back as a voice call. This year, it expanded Bubbly to Indonesia, the Philippines and Japan, and has been adding about 100,000 new users a week, says Thomas Clayton, the company's Chief Executive Officer and President.

Bursting the bubble

The company now has about 12 million users in the four countries, but Baidya says Bubbly needs to overcome several obstacles if it wants to become as popular as Twitter. According to an estimate by eMarketer, a digital marketing research firm, Twitter will have 21 million users in the US alone by the end of the year.

"First, it's not easy to find the person you want to follow," Baidya says. "In Twitter or Facebook, you can search a person by name and once you find them, you can follow them; but here, to follow someone you need to know their phone number." The second shortcoming is that "you might not be able to follow someone you want if they're on a different mobile operator network than you are."

Finally, it is easy to filter out the things you do not want to look at on Facebook, even if you are following a lot of people. It is not as easy with voice messages. "You could be getting a lot of junk that is not possibly of your interest," Baidya adds.

Clayton says that to be successful, social voice messaging needs to be available to any cell phone user, "as most people do not know what network their friends are on." That would require Bubbly to reach deals with every telecom operator in each country.

In India, Bubble Motion is available on the country's seven major operators, which allows the company to cover 85 per cent of the cell phone subscribers in the country. Because smartphone use is growing rapidly, the company hopes to introduce applications that can be downloaded from the internet for Apple's iPhone and devices using Google's Android system by the end of the year.

Increasing reach

These applications will make it much easier to reach out to new customers in developed countries, where smartphone penetration is higher. According to recent research by Nielsen, the media analysis firm, fewer than 20 per cent of Asia-Pacific cell phone users have smartphones, while smartphone penetration is 38 per cent in the US and 40 per cent in Western Europe.

Pamela Clark-Dickson, Senior Analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media, a market research company, says that while services like Bubbly were successful in emerging markets, she was not convinced that there would be similar demand in developed markets.

"Voice-SMS platform providers have been trying to sell their platforms to mobile operators in developed markets, but they have not had as much success as they have in emerging markets," she says. "This is primarily because the mobile operators in developed markets often don't see a compelling business case for plain old voice-SMS in their markets — particularly as the penetration of smartphones, mobile broadband and the use of the mobile internet and applications increases among mobile subscribers.

"However, if voice-SMS/voice messaging vendors can develop applications that do provide significantly more utility than voice-SMS, like Yiip or Qwips, then it's possible that these applications could do better in developed markets," she adds. "But that's what is untested at the moment."

Yiip, a new app by the start-up Qwip (no relation to Qwips), was introduced in San Francisco in September. Like Twitter, it limits the length of its messages to make them easily digestible — in the case of Yiip, 10 seconds for public messages and 25 seconds for private messages. It also allows users to add photos and sound effects. You can record the message on an iPhone and share it with your followers.

Private groups can be set up to keep messages between friends, and sound clips can be distributed on Twitter and Facebook.

Qwip Chief Executive Taylor Bollman says the app has been downloaded around 60,000 times. "We don't yet have any celebrities or journalists," he says, "but we will be pursuing this aggressively once we've incorporated the core functionality we envision for the app."

The app is available for the iPhone, but the company plans to move to Android, the world's most popular mobile operating system, and other platforms.

Qwips, a New York start-up, introduced a voice app last month that allows people to add 30-second voice messages to existing social communications like photos, email, SMS, tweets and Facebook posts.

The app allows users to "better express" themselves and add "emotion, personality and authenticity to those communications," says Jeffrey Stier, Founder and President of Qwips.

Simplicity is essential

Clayton says Bubble Motion plans to expand Bubbly's features, but he also adds that he does not believe photos or videos are necessary for social voice messaging. He believes that simplicity for the user is extremely important.

With many new entrants providing voice-messaging services, the competition is likely to intensify, with a race among vendors to attract users who can then attract other users. "The more users you have, the more people use it," Clayton says. "People are going to migrate toward a winner-takes-all, whether it's us or them. We're just trying to run as fast as we can and get as many users as we can to attract more and more celebrities, and we've got a pretty good snowball going right now."

— New York TimesNews Service