Aussie mobile 'social networking' developer bluepulse scores $US6m US funding

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 29 August 2007 06:34

Your IT - Home IT

Bluepulse claims that, since release of the product in beta in December 2006, the software has been downloaded more than two million times by users in more than 150 countries. "Bluepulse is one of the fastest growing mobile social networking communities in the world, due in part to the fact that it works on more handsets than any other application the company is aware of."

The company claims that: its web site is getting close to 100 million page views per month; it is adding thousands of new users each day; and is well positioned "to be the major player in the mobile social networking space."

A key component of the bluepulse offering is that it enables the creation of a wide range of widgets, "the best of the Internet, repurposed specifically for mobile and built by the enthusiastic bluepulse community." It says that over 1000 have been written so far.

According to bluepulse, "These widgets are fully integrated into the bluepulse platform and further enhance the community and sharing user experience. Bluepulse users can easily toggle between messaging, chatting, their mobile Place and widgets, and because of the caching and compression of data that the platform provides, the experience is fast and the data charges are kept very low. This means that bluepulse users can be in frequent - or even constant - contact with their friends while consuming minimal amounts of data."

This mobilised web content includes "Flickr, Blogger, the local TV and movie guides, traffic cams, weather, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and email widgets which allow users to access any POP3 account including Gmail, Yahoo mail and more."

Today's funding announcement gave no indication of how the company intends to generate revenue from its offering. Keighran told this writer in December 2006 that "Over the last 12 months we have aggregated this really big audience, predominantly in the US. It has just been by word of mouth. The next phase is driving customer adoption. How we monetise that - ourselves or partnering with aggregators, time will tell...There is enough revenue from helping people mobilise content to keep our head above water but not enough to move the business forward."