Bubbly was a social voice service working across

feature phones A feature phone (also spelled featurephone) is a type or class of mobile phone that retains the form factor of earlier generations of mobile telephones, typically with press-button based inputs and a small non-touch display. They tend to use an ...

and

smartphones A smartphone is a portable computer device that combines mobile telephone and computing functions into one unit. They are distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, which ...

. For feature phones, users can record their voice by dialling a short code and speaking, as well as listen to popular posts. Subscribers get a text with the

short code codes, or short numbers, are short digit sequences, significantly shorter than telephone numbers, that are used to address messages in the Multimedia Messaging System (MMS) and short message service (SMS) systems of mobile network operators. I ...

number for dialling into Bubbly's servers to have the voice message play back. To cater to smartphone users, Bubbly was made available on iOS and Android platforms in April 2012.

History

Bubbly was developed by the Singapore-based start-up previously known as Bubble Motion, which was founded by Sunil Coushik in 2005. The company has since changed its name to Bubbly. In 2006, the company raised $10 million in its Series A from

Sequoia Capital Sequoia Capital is an American venture capital firm. The firm is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, and specializes in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. , Sequoia's total a ...

US and India. In 2008, they received $14 million in Series B funding from Sequoia Capital,

Comcast Ventures Comcast Ventures was a corporate venture capital firm headquartered in San Francisco, California. History In early 2011, Comcast and NBCUniversal combined their two venture arms, Comcast Interactive Capital founded in 1999 and the Peacock Fund, ...

and North Gate Capital. In 2010, total subscribers on Bubbly surpassed 2 million. The most recent Series E funding in 2012 took the company's total funding to $50 million from a range of backers including JAFCO Asia, SingTel Innov8, Infocomm Investments and Palomar Ventures. Bubbly exceeded 25 million users in February 2013. In July 2013, Bubbly announced having a user base of over 30 million subscribers. The investors decided to liquidate the company in August 2014, but it was instead acquired b
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later that month. Forbes listed it as one of the 15 most successful social networks to watch in 2015.

Features

Bubbly was a social voice platform that allows users to create their own voice blog in 90 seconds and subscribe to celebrities. The latest release of Bubbly app on iOS and Android enables users to apply voice filters, effects, and background music to their voice posts. Users may also add photograph and text up to 140 characters, and share their post to other social networking services such as

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

and

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

. Bubbly has a payment engine that lets users on all of its platforms use carrier billing for Bubbly's premium products and services, which include subscriptions and in-app purchases. Bubbly also has a platform that lets users share voice messages on featurephones, smartphones, and its website, called Bubbly360.

Noteworthy

In January 2013, English footballer

Rio Ferdinand Rio Gavin Ferdinand (born 7 November 1978) is an English former professional footballer who played as a centre-back, and is now a television pundit for BT Sport. He played 81 times for the England national team between 1997 and 2011, and was ...

joined Bubbly.

References

External links

Official Website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bubbly (social network) Singaporean social networking websites Companies established in 2005 Companies of Singapore