Homegrown startup introduces 'Twitter with a voice'

The social media service called Bubbly has grown to more than 20 million since 2010 - nearly twice as fast as either Facebook or Twitter achieved in their first 2 years.

Bubbly is brought to you by Bubble Motion, founded by entreprenuer Thomas Clayton. The company which started operation in 2007 is pioneering socialcommunication for mobile phones. In 2010, it launched Bubbly, a social messaging service where people share SMS and voice updates with friends, family, fans and followers.

"Bubbly is like ‘Twitter with a voice’ and brings social networking to mobile phones," said Clayton.

Bubbly was first launched in India, Japan, Indonesia and the Philippines then expanded to Korea, Thailand, Vietnam and Saudi Arabia. The company recently launched iOS and Android versions of its app to reach users on smartphones worldwide.

"We started as we saw the rise of social media – with Facebook and Twitter taking off. However, for Asia, we knew that while the concept was solid, it could be improved even further to reach the masses. Therefore, we made it 100% mobile centric, as mobile penetration and usage is far higher in Asia than fixed-line Internet usage and connectivity," noted Clayton.

"Second, we wanted something that was more personal and didn't require data connectivity, so we decided to focus on a voice and SMS only solution to the concept of microblogging. Thus, Bubbly was born," he added.

Company Profile:

Name of the company: Bubble Motion
Founder: Thomas Clayton
Website: www.bubblemotion.com
Major Investors: Sequoia Capital US, SingTel Innov8, Infocomm Investments Pte. Ltd., Sequoia Capital India
Comcast Ventures, Palomar Ventures, Northgate Capital,
Total funding at hand: S$68.4M
Target fund: N/A
Start of operation: March 2007 in Singapore

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