Indian giant Airtel deploys Bubble TALK Voice SMS over fixed line

Details: Michael Schwartz; Category: Consumer Ecosystems; 14 September 2007; 12026 views

Voice SMS specialist Bubble Motion has been selected by Indian service provider Airtel to deploy Voice SMS over fixed line. The deployment will means that Airtel customers will be able to send Voice SMS messages to any mobile or fixed line customer.

Contracts, SMS, Fixed Line, India, Asia-Pacific: Voice SMS specialist Bubble Motion has been selected by Indian service provider Airtel to deploy Voice SMS over fixed line. The deployment will means that Airtel customers will be able to send Voice SMS messages to any mobile or fixed line customer.

To use the new service, Airtel customers dial * followed by the mobile number of the customer they wish to send the Voice SMS to. The recipient receives an SMS alert on his mobile phone, notifying them that they have a new Bubble message. The recipient then retrieves the Voice SMS by dialling *0* from their mobile.

Voice SMS is a phenomenon which has gained a great deal of market share in recent months as service providers deploy BubbleTALK services. The ability to include more “emotional” content in a short message than other messaging services such as IM, SMS and email, has made Voice SMS messaging a popular channel amongst the youth market. Voice SMS has also proven very popular with many groups who find SMS inconvenient, as well as those whose first language is not supported by text entry on a phone keypad.

Bubble Motion, a Sequoia Capital India investee, was recently honoured as being the Best Consumer Application Award at the Mobile Messaging Awards. The BubbleTALK implementation at Vodafone Egypt was also recently named as being one of the top ten non-voice revenue-generators by telecoms analyst group Analysys.

Bubble Motion claims that it allows operators to create a new revenue stream within three weeks, using their existing infrastructure with no cannibalisation of existing services. This allows operators to create a new core service.

BubbleTALK has eight mobile operator partners in six countries and local points-of-presence in an additional 31 countries. In addition it is available to over 1 billion people with local-dial access.

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