Interview with Ben Keighran, CEO of Bluepulse

Bluepulse is a mobile only messaging application and we refer to it as a social messenger that allows you to do group messaging and status updates from the one application on your mobile phone.

It was launched in 2006 and in the last fourteen months has attracted users in 198 countries, that send over 200 million messages per month.

It is now a mobile web browser based application but there are also Java and simian versions of the app as well and that’s actually where it comes from. It originally was only a Java and simian application, but now it’s predominately a mobile web based application.

That is correct, but we actually also had that capability with the Java application as well. Bluepulse is based on a platform that I started working on in university quite a few years ago, and the goal for the project initially was just to build an app that would work on the huge range of Internet enabled phones that were out there.

It’s based on a really robust platform, that was working on a huge range of handsets and was allowing for, consumers to get access to the service directly on their phones, and not directly through the carrier.

The reason for the shift to the mobile web browser, is really based on the fact that even though we’ve got users in 198 countries, our target audience is here in the U.S. and that’s where our biggest user base is, and the type of the handsets that people are using to access the Internet, are mainly the smart phone devices which are the ones that have sort of the qwerty keypads, you know built into them such as the I Phones or Blackberry’s or Trios, and these sorts of devices.

Really the browsers that are being built into those phones are absolutely fantastic, and mean that we don’t have to have different custom and tweaked versions of a physical application based on the different handsets, we can build once and it works across all those different browsers that are built into those handsets.

Though we are starting to see a shift in the carrier mindset. Personally, I believe this is driven by the success of the iPhone and the launch of Google’s android.

They are really encouraging handset manufacturers to build great browsers into their handsets. I believe that anyone building a mobile application should start thinking about leveraging that mobile browser, for all the reasons you just said. I think that that’s a great direction for people to move in.

You get similar trade-offs to what you get with web-based messaging applications and applications that you would install on your actual computer.

So if you think about Outlook or Mac Mail or something like Gmail on your desktop computer, you get those similar sorts of trade-offs. So, if I’m on like an airplane or something, and I don’t have Internet connectivity, I can’t log in and access my client right then and there, because it’s web-based.

You miss out on a mobile of some of the functionality built into the handset of maybe being able to upload a picture or video, although there are a lot of browsers that now allow you to do that anyway, through them.

If you’re building games, or something along those lines, that’s pretty resource-intensive, and requires clients to actually load onto a handset or a platform of some sort for particular resources, that’s where you need Bluepulse. It’s the similar sort of trade-off between building a web-based app and a client app on a PC, that you have on a phone.

That’s correct. There’s a toolbox that allows you to put an email address, a phone number, a friend’s name, a group name, or even, you can write the name ‘Paulsen’, and therefore update your status with all your friends. All in the one toolbox. What we’ve tried to do is create that universal way of sending out all messages from one interface on your phone, to one standard interface on your phone.

That’s a really good question. Look, I don’t think so, but I think that the notion of one application to check all of your different messages on, or to send all of the different types of outgoing messages you want to send, is there. I think that the concept of IM and email and social networking messaging and SMS, and all those different things, all serve different purposes, and the contact data also serve different purposes.

I think that in some cases you do need to have different addresses, to allow people to contact you only in certain ways, and certain mediums. For having that sort of one universal contact name, I think that, that limits the different types of messages that are being set free. You’ve got all the different messages from everybody you know, coming into that one central main and there’s no way to break it up, between your business or your personal life and those sorts of things.

With an email I don’t expect you to get it immediately. I’d suspect you to get it some time soon, and therefore I will write you a much longer, richer message, whereas if I’m sending you a text message, then I know that you’re dying to get that pretty much immediately and it’s obviously a much shorter message and it might be just a quick 160 character note.

It’s great to have this one app to be able to receive all the different types of communication and to be able to send out to all the different places. I think that empowers the user to control how they’re going to send and receive their different types of messages.

Having that sort of one, sort of singular address that everybody contacts you on, that, I think creates a situation where, I don’t know whether I’m going to send you a text message, or an email, or whether I, the receiver, wants to give you the capabilities in sending me a text message or an email, because I just think that they’re two different mindsets for when you send somebody a message.

So I think that in that sense, those different types of platforms are good, like, for example, in our organization I know that there’s a portion of the team, that would only want to have their email address on their business card, because that is the way that they want to get contacted by business people.

Now, if they wanted to be able to send and receive messages instantly, from their phone using a special part of apps such as Bluepulse, then that’s sort of their own prerogative.

Originally, Bluepulse started as a hobby project for me where it was originally a widget platform and had sort of IM widgets, email widget, it had about news, horoscopes, a whole sort of widget. The vertical or the widgets that people were really coming to use on the platform were all the communication widgets that were there.

Bluepulse has evolved and was started as a business at the end of 2006 to build a communications app, a new communications application for your phone, was really driven by what users wanted to do, which is to have a better way of communicating.

That makes sense because the driving force behind Bluepulse is that it’s the app that allows you to stay connected with your friends, wherever you are in a much better way than any of the other communications apps on your phone do it. It makes communication really efficient between you and all the people you know.

It addresses the biggest, possible market on the phones. I think about the three billion phones that are around the world today, people would prefer to leave their wallet at home than their mobile phone, because they always want to be able to be connected, but with their friends it’s really, really important to them.

I think that when I think about what became sort of the starting point on the computer, it was search, because it makes browsing and exploring concept really efficient, and even though if you look at the billion PC’s users out there, with an Internet connection, people may use search only one percent of the time or some people might use it 50 percent of the time.

It’s the one thing that is made more efficient that addresses the biggest possible market size, and if you think about Bluepulse, the one thing that people want to do with their phone is to be able to always be connected, in a really efficient way with the people they care about and that’s exactly what Bluepulse does.

And, we basically got into the position we are, by just really listening to the user base and following what they want to do with their phone, which has allowed us to come up with this really unique and cool way of always staying connected with your friends is messaging application.

I think there’s some really interesting businesses today that have built businesses around communication.

It’s a combination of advertising and transactional revenue. I think that the value of a mobile user is significantly higher than a web based user, because you are a lot closer to doing a transaction and people are prepared to pay a premium for here and now.

You know, there have some data recently released by Matrix showing that mobile advertising is yielding high, quick troughs and people, are more susceptible to buying things on their mobile than any other medium to date that have recently come out.

Our business model is based, first of all, in advertising for sponsor deals and running banner ads and text ads, but in the future we want to be distributing digital goods through the servers, as well as a whole other range of premium and transactional services, transactional products on Bluepluse.

We want to connect users with what they need, wherever they are.

I would say every person with a mobile phone wants to have a killer messaging app for their phone, whether they know it or not.

They’re carrying around the phone to stay connected with their friends today, and if you can give them something that improves the way that they stay connected with those people, with the people they care about, then I think that the market opportunity for that is every person that owns a mobile phone which is almost three billion handsets.

In terms of then being able to bring interesting content, whether it’s in the form of digital goods, like, avatars or digital goods like gifting, and these sorts of things, or whether it’s simply telling you about things based on what they’re doing with friends, ongoing or concert, or they want to buy tickets to an event or, I simply just want to get information sent to my handset everyday from various services.

I really think that the mobile messaging space is really the next multi-billion dollar opportunity on the mobile phone.

There’s three reasons why I moved from Australia to Silicon Valley: The first thing is, is that, having an engineering background and building a product, I get huge excitement from seeing someone use that product and get enjoyment out of using it.

After starting a project and getting 20-30,000 users around the worldwide, using this platform I was using, and thinking about taking the killer widget and turning it into what I thought was going to be the killer mobile application and hopefully have hundreds of millions if not a billion people.

I want them to wake up every morning and reach for their phone using an application that I’ve been involved in creating to stay connected with the people they care about. That was sort of the driving passion behind starting Bluepulse and that is the intensity, almost the fire in my belly, every single day while startup to work.

The second reason was I wanted to build a killer team and the sorts of people I thought needed to be on that team are people that had built phenomenal messaging products on the Internet.

And then the third reason I came over here is because I wanted to find investors that could help us build the firm. I wanted to find investors that had backed these sorts of businesses before that started off really small and became really big.

Australia has a much smaller population than the U.S. of about twenty-million people as opposed to three-hundred million people over here. Just by nature of the population, it’s a much smaller, entrepreneurial spirit in Australia than it is over here. But either way you look at it they are some the three big driving reasons why I came over here.