Bobble, a keyboard technology to facilitate highly personal self-expression, and Indus OS, the second most popular smartphone operating system(OS) in India, on Thursday announced a partnership.
Currently, Indus OS is available on more than 50 devices across India including on Micromax, Celkon, Swipe, Intex and Karbonn.
It has more than five million users and is available in 12 Indian languages including Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Telugu, Tamil and Urdu. Given the pace of Indus OS's adoption across OEMs in India, Bobble expects to reach a large number of regional users in India.
According to researches, 90 percent of the Indian population does not consider English as their first, second or third language. Going forward, the next 300 million Indian Smartphone users in the next three years will all be regional language users.
The Bobble keyboard technology in combination with the Indus OS keyboard, enables users to send Bobble content even while chatting on WhatsApp, Facebook etc.
Bobble's technology will adjust the expression on every face to match the emotion of the sticker or GIF in real time.
Bobble and Indus OS will add in-content branding on their platform to enhance the user experience and monetize impressions during interpersonal messaging, the most intimate communication medium on mobile. This is a first of its kind partnership, expected to be a significant monetization opportunity.
"We have huge respect for? Indus OS's success. We are in total agreement with their focus on regional languages to harness the growth in Smartphone usage, especially in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities in India. Indus OS is a natural partner for us, as the input text for Bobble stickers and GIFs can be in any Unicode character," said Co - founder and MD of Bobble, Mohd. Wassem in a statement.
"No other product in the world offers this technology. We are confident of adding value to the user experience of Indus OS devices, and very sensitive about striking a balance between user engagement and in-content branding. We are in the early stages of a more visually expressive culture. All major social and messaging platforms now support rich communication like images, rich links, stickers and GIFs. Within the next month, we will roll out more features for our target audience of 13-29 years," he added.
"Indus OS is built on three pillars - Simplification, Innovation and Content. Content being a key piece in the mix, we are consistently exploring partnerships with app developers across utilities and segments to enable regional language speakers to access best-in-class technology freely," said Co-founder and CEO of Indus OS, Rakesh Deshmukh.
"We have had successful partnerships so far and helped many apps solve the discovery problem as well as empowered users to access a robust offering. We always aim to cater to the Indian user's needs. This partnership with Bobble, with its innovative technology that enables instantaneous personalization of content offering regional language stickers will surely be a huge hit in the Indian market," he added.
Bobble's functionalities will roll out across all Indus OS devices within 2016," he added
Bobble is an Android and iOS app to make mobile conversations more expressive and personal. Users can click a selfie, and get unlimited stickers with their face. Bobble has an iMessage app too.
Disclaimer: No Business Standard Journalist was involved in creation of this content
