Ben Keighran moved from Australia to Silicon Valley to position his company, Bluepulse, for big gains among the youthful crowd here that’s likely to embrace the service.
A bit of trivia: Bluepulse has something that YouTube no longer has – its original office space. Bluepulse CEO Keighran hopes some of that magic carries over to his firm, as they continue to gain members.
Murdok chatted with Keighran about the company’s approach to the mobile market. He explained how the platform, developed in university, supports a wide range of phones (though not smartphones, currently).
Across that range, Bluepulse has maintained an agnostic approach to carriers. Viral distribution and word of mouth, not carrier or handset maker partnerships, have pushed Bluepulse to the point where they deliver 100 million pages to users per month.
A key to Bluepulse’s appeal comes from the desire people have to personalize their phones. Communication and personal expression walk together, in Keighran’s opinion, and is important to mobile phone owners.
That influences how Keighran wants their ad-supported model to work. They have been testing ad delivery based on time, location, and profiles of their users. Someone who’s an Avril Lavigne fan may have been offered the opportunity to be her “friend,” and gain access to certain extras through Bluepulse.
As they continue their ad tests – the Avril Lavigne one was part of a test with Sony BMG – Bluepulse will keep reaching out for their target audience with features like group chat and mobile widgets for services like Flickr or Blogger.
In a way, that has been a challenge for Bluepulse. We asked Keighran about expanding in the US, where inferior data networks as compared to Japan and Europe could be an obstacle. He acknowledged that, but expressed confidence based on US users showing up in enough numbers now to put America in the top five of countries using Bluepulse.
