Bubble Motion, which is funded by Sequoia Capital and others, is now launching Bubbly in the Philippines, after releases in India, Indonesia and Japan (chosen because of their deep mobile phone penetration). Its launch partner in the Philippines is Globe Telecom.

By the midway point of this year, Bubbly will be rolled out to all major carriers in those four countries, for a total potential audience of 800 million.

Bubbly allows users to send each other voice-based status updates. People who follow a user receive an SMS each time a new status message is posted, and pay to listen to the status message with a fee added to their regular phone bill. This can be used both for communicating with friends and family and for subscribing to updates from celebrities.

Users pay either a monthly subscription fee for celebrities in India and Indonesia, or per message in the Philippines and Japan, following the carrier billing styles in each country. The average user gets one to two messages per day.

Celebrities on Bubbly often have two to three times as many followers as they have on Twitter, bragged Bubble Motion CEO Tom Clayton on a phone interview on Wednesday. And that’s despite the fact that Bubbly costs money and Twitter is free.

Part of the reason is Bubbly has more reach than Twitter in the four countries it has launched in, Clayton said, given it is a mobile service and Twitter is often accessed over the Internet.

But grooming a stable of stars might not be defensible in the long term, given Twitter is ramping up its mobile efforts and celebrities may want to have a broader reach than they can achieve with local phone carriers and voice updates. Clayton said another edge his company has is the infrastructure it has built to deliver voice files–250 million of them since Bubbly was first launched–without overloading carrier networks.

Clayton said Bubble Motion, which has raised about $30 million in funding, is not profitable yet but is growing revenue with a direct correlation to its traffic, which is to say, doubling every quarter.

Today’s the day we find out whether Cisco has successfully navigated the turbulence, and how bad the air pockets truly were. So far, the indications suggest that Cisco is starting to fly clear of the trouble. The consensus of analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial calls for Cisco to report per-share earnings of 35 cents on sales of $10.24 billion.

Barclays Capital analyst Jeff Kvaal wrote in a research note issued Monday that Cisco’s end markets look healthy. Telecom carriers and Internet service providers are spending, and you see that reflected in reports from Juniper, which show sales to service providers up 24 percent, and in AT&T’s optimistic capital spending outlook. Meanwhile, growth in enterprise spending is holding steady as companies improve their networks. And in the end, Cisco’s guidance for sales to grow 3 to 5 percent may prove a tad conservative, meaning those air pockets may not have been as entirely bad as originally thought.

Disney posted 68 cents per share versus expectations for 56 cents; revenues came in at $10.72 billion, versus expectations for $10.52 billion.

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Eric Hippeau (pictured here), longtime Yahoo board member and one of its earliest investors, will be stepping down as a director, according to sources close to the situation.

In a related move, sources said Akamai President David Kenny will be joining the board of the Internet giant.

The changes become official at Yahoo’s regular board meeting on Tuesday, although Hippeau will not step down until the summer.

Rather than quit immediately, as previous board members have, he will not stand for election at its annual shareholder meeting in June.

The departure of Hippeau and the arrival of Kenny comes at a critical time for Yahoo, which has been under great pressure from investors to revive its growth and re-ignite innovation in the face of more nimble competitors.

Under CEO Carol Bartz, the company is still in the midst of a turnaround, and Wall Street has been losing patience with her and also its somewhat ineffectual board.

Hippeau has been on that board since 1996, which is approximately 132 years in Internet time.

The longtime Web investor and publisher–at Softbank and Ziff-Davis–has a lot of online experience.

Sources said Hippeau felt he had been on the board long enough and it was time to go. It has certainly been a wild ride, from insane Web 1.0 hypergrowth to a bruising takeover fight with Microsoft.

The addition of Kenny to the board is a welcome one. As BoomTown has previously reported, Yahoo had tried to bring him on before and he declined.

With both tech and advertising experience, Kenny is also a natural possibility for a board leader, as well as a potential top exec if Yahoo keeps going sideways.

According to his bio at Akamai, which he joined last fall, he is “responsible for leading Akamai’s business operations, including the company’s product groups; global sales, services, and marketing; engineering; and networks and operations.”

Before Akamai, he ran VivaKi and was a member of the management board of its parent, Publicis Groupe, the huge ad and marketing company.

Kenny ran Publicis’s overall digital and interactive strategy. He came to Publicis after it bought Digitas, where he was chairman and CEO.

Before that, the Harvard Business School graduate worked at consulting firm Bain & Company and also in marketing and strategy at General Motors.

A Yahoo spokeswoman declined to comment and Hippeau did not respond to an email query. And an email to my new bestest friend Kenny also got no response.

That’s the question of the day for the TV and Web video world, prompted by a blog post Jason Kilar published last night.

It’s a lengthy read about the TV business and where it’s headed, and most people I’ve talked to today think it’s smart and well-written.

Some of them also believe Kilar wrote it so that his bosses–executives at News Corp.’s Fox, Disney’s ABC, and Comcast’s NBCU–will give him the hook.

That’s because a lot of what Kilar wrote challenges the TV networks’ existing business model: He argues that there are too many ads, and that consumers want to be able to watch their shows on demand, not on a linear schedule. And, crucially, he argues that the cable network bundle is on its way out.

In other words, change or become the music labels: “History has shown that incumbents tend to fight trends that challenge established ways and, in the process, lose focus on what matters most: customers.”

And all of that makes perfect sense. Except for the part where he says it in public, while working for a company owned by three TV networks.

Kilar’s post began making waves immediately last night, and the Financial Times’ Matthew Garrahan was able to quickly find several network executives who are agog at the post.

Most tellingly, he got a Disney rep to officially distance the company from Kilar’s post, stating that his views (published on the official Hulu blog) were “personal and clearly not shared by anyone at Walt Disney.”

In fact, his views are almost certainly shared by some Disney executives, and others at Hulu backers News Corp.’s Fox and Comcast’s NBCU. (News Corp. also owns this Web site.) It’s just that they have no intention of changing their business anytime soon. Especially now that they’ve gotten cable providers to start paying them for content they used to give away, via “retransmission” fees.

“80, 90 percent of what he says is right,” says an executive at one of Hulu’s network owners. “But why print that? Does he think we’re going to say, ‘Oh, thank you! You’re right! We’d never thought of that! Let’s give away retrans!’? I can’t see what he thinks will happen.”

So here’s one possibility: Kilar knows he can’t win. And his post is supposed to be his “Jerry Maguire moment”, as Garrahan puts it–a fireworks display you put on because you don’t want to work at your current job anymore.

The other possibility: Kilar genuinely thinks he can win.

Up until now the former Amazon executive has done a marvelous job of building a site everyone was convinced would fail, and then sustaining–and expanding–a joint venture everyone thought would collapse.

Kilar has pulled some of that off with brinkmanship. As last week’s well-reported Wall Street Journal piece notes, Kilar threatened to quit last fall, when he was trying to get the networks to agree to cut their monthly price for Hulu Plus. He didn’t get the 50 percent cut he’d been pushing for, but he still managed to get the networks to agree to cut the price by 20 percent, to $8.

Also note that Kilar’s post quite clearly argues that the path he’s pushing for will be better for the networks in the end: “We believe content owners are in a strong position to make higher returns from TV content distribution in the future than they have historically.”

But if Kilar thought his arguments would carry more force in public, he may well have miscalculated. This could all blow over with time, but for now, at least, he has some very bummed backers.

“Here’s the irony. Jason is probably best to lead Hulu. But he is also too righteous/robot to do it ‘the wrong way’ or a way he won’t agree with,” says an industry executive.

Another reports that network executives are “crazy, angry” over the post. “I’d be stunned if Jason was still there in 60 days.”

I’ve asked Kilar for additional comment. I don’t expect to get it.

Netflix’s dramatic growth in user base and market cap have had a lot to do with the company anticipating market changes and making audacious bets, but it has been relatively plodding and hesitant about getting social.

Netflix explained in the shareholder letter (PDF) accompanying its quarterly earnings report that its Facebook integration will accompany an effort to split household accounts into multiple personal accounts.

In part because of the company’s history as a DVD mailing service, a Netflix account is affiliated with a particular address. That’s also the way traditional television providers measure their market: In terms of households.

But online video, Netflix notes, “is more naturally individual, since it is watched on personal screens like phones, tablets, and laptops, as well as on shared large screen televisions.”

In addition to helping identify discrete people within a household, Facebook integration would presumably allow Netflix to help users do things like share their personal viewing history in their newsfeed and recommend videos to friends. Understanding social networks could improve Netflix’s famously honed recommendation algorithm. It might also be an opportunity for Netflix to create social viewing experiences.

Currently, Netflix lacks much in the way of social features; it had yanked a previous effort to offer social sharing last year after saying that relatively few subscribers used it.

However, the company has recently staffed up for a renewed social effort.

Mike Hart, previously Netflix’s director of engineering for APIs, is now director of engineering for social. Hart told Fast Company in November that Netflix sees social as an international user acquisition strategy and an opportunity to avoid disruption by a competitor that is more social.

Netflix also appears to view personal accounts as an opportunity to charge more money. The company said in the shareholder letter that later this year it will start offering new account options that include multiple simultaneous streams. (So, for instance, you could stream TV episodes in the bedroom on your iPad while your spouse watches a movie in the living room through the Roku.) The streaming-only plan Netflix recently launched costs $7.99 (which some industry watchers say is too cheap) and allows just one stream at a time.

Netflix noted in the letter that its new grand internal vision is to target the number of active mobile phones in an area, rather than the number of households (though that might be a bit ambitious in places where it’s common for people to have more than one phone!).

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

The Pasadena, Calif.-based company also acquired the independently developed BlackBerry application UberTwitter, adding to its acquisition of Echofon (the Twitter client for iPhone and other Mac devices) at the beginning of the month and Twidroyd (Twitter for Android) in September. Update: On Monday UberMedia said it had acquired an additional company, Mixx, the former competitor to Digg that now curates social media channels for brands.

UberMedia, despite its seemingly perpetual identity crisis, has particular notoriety because its founder and CEO, Bill Gross, first popularized paid search advertising with his company GoTo.com in the late ’90s. When Gross first launched the company last April, he said he’d do the same thing for Twitter.

Since then, Twitter has launched its own ad system and tightened up on permissions for rival ad networks.

UberMedia has let its Twitter account recommendation widgets languish, but says they will be relaunched soon as a new product called FollowMe. Meanwhile, the Twitter clients the company has acquired have a combined three million active users. They are some of the leading independent options, despite somewhat precarious positioning now that Twitter has launched its own official clients for most every platform.

Gross is traveling in Europe this week, but UberMedia COO Jon Kraft got on the phone with NetworkEffect over the weekend to say that there is indeed a method behind all this name-changing and client-acquiring madness. Here’s an edited transcript:

NetworkEffect: Why the name UberMedia?

Kraft: Obviously we’re very excited about the acquisition of UberTwitter, and we felt like our mission had expanded a bit since we first launched. It was really all about this paid search platform, and PostUp was a great name….

And before that you had another name, TweetUp.

Yes, but as we started to grow our business on the client side, we saw ourselves increasingly as a media company. We’re not crazy about the fact that we’ve changed our name twice now, but hopefully we’ll build a company around that brand.

How did this acquisition strategy come about?

We first bought Twidroyd seven months ago, and we really loved what we learned about the way consumers use Twitter.

What is the involvement of the founders of the companies you bought? Are they all running their respective apps?

Obviously a big part of what makes those companies exciting is the passion of the founders, so we encourage them to operate fairly independently.

Who is the staff of UberMedia?

We have some business development to create partnerships, but the vast majority is engineers. We have a little over 40 employees as a distributed team.

And what’s happened to the sponsored Twitter accounts and tweets?

We’re still very excited about what we’re doing with the marketplace, but there are a number of other innovations that we’re planning. The bigger vision is to innovate inside the Twitter ecosystem.

What does that mean in the context of Twitter competing within its ecosystem, especially through Twitter clients? That doesn’t seem like a category other start-ups and investors are investing in as much today.

It’s not easy to organically grow a new Twitter client from scratch, it’s a real challenge. But I think the Twitter platform is still greatly under-leveraged, and there’s surprisingly low penetration of Twitter users today.

But it’s not as if Twitter allows application makers to just make whatever money they want on its platform.

Twitter has been understandably conservative about wanting to protect the user experience across their platform, so we’re being conservative as well and thinking of other ways to innovate and monetize.

What is your company’s relationship with Twitter?

It’s a great relationship. I can’t talk details about what we’re discussing, but the relationship is quite good.

Are you raising more funding? [UberMedia, which launched out of Gross's Idealab, had previously raised $3.5 million from Index Ventures, Betaworks, Revolution, First Round Capital and others.]

We’re not talking about our funding right now, but obviously you have to raise money in order to grow aggressively.

Will you keep acquiring? It seems like you have Twitter clients for most of the major platforms now.

It is possible, but not top of our priority list.

One things you have not had is a problem with agility.

That’s a concise way to put it.

What about Bill Grosss involvement? Is he still CEO or is he doing other Idealab stuff?

Absolutely. He’s head-down 100 percent on this project.

Supply chain sources tell China’s Economic Daily News that Apple has lined up four new component suppliers for the iPhone 5, which they claim is scheduled for a summer launch. Meanwhile, Taiwanese trade pub DigiTimes is reporting that Apple recently bolstered its printed circuit board (PCB) supply chain in preparation for the next iteration of the iPad. Where the company once used just three PCB suppliers for the device, it’s now using seven. Not a surprise, really, given the 14.8 million iPads Apple sold in 2010. DigiTimes’ sources claim they’re scheduled to begin small-volume shipments next month, before going all out in April. Which jibes nicely with that annual refresh cycle I mentioned earlier and rumors of a spring launch.

As I’ve noted here before, the iPad 2 is expected to be thinner than its predecessor and manufactured with the same unibody approach Apple’s been using for the MacBook. It’s also expected to feature an LCD backlit display, a front-facing camera and Facetime video chat support. Finally, some reports suggest it is powered by one of Qualcomm’s multimode chips and will run on both GSM and CDMA-based networks around the world.

According to Mashable, Google is close to launching “Google Offers,” a service that will compete with Groupon, LivingSocial and their hundreds of clones.

In a fact sheet sent to Mashable, it says users will receive a daily email offering a local deal, and as with other sites, the discount will be activated once enough people have made the purchase. The deal will be promoted throughout Google’s ad networks.

Google confirmed the service at a very high level: “Google is communicating with small businesses to enlist their support and participation in a test of a pre-paid offers/vouchers program. This initiative is part of an ongoing effort at Google to make new products, such as the recent Offer Ads beta, that connect businesses with customers in new ways.”

To be sure, early providers have proven that the business can scale.

For instance, just yesterday LivingSocial sold 1.3 million $20 Amazon gift cards for $10 each to ring up a one-day sales total of $13 million. Groupon’s run rate is close to $2 billion, although about half of that is passed on to merchants.

It’s not surprising that Google is kicking off the service without acquiring a company in the space. Groupon would rather seek an IPO than sell, and LivingSocial has already teamed up with Amazon–and after those two, it’s slim pickings.

Google’s challenge won’t be in attracting a large audience but in executing the business.

Traditionally, Google has focused on a self-service advertising model, where merchants can go online to buy an ad without having to interact with a salesperson. But Groupon and LivingSocial have approached the business differently and have put hundreds of feet on the street. Groupon has roughly 3,000 employees, while LivingSocial has about 600–and both are growing extremely fast.

Google could try the approach it knows best, by automating the process and putting at least some of it online. After all, one of the reasons it was reportedly willing to pay so much for Groupon was for its local sales force.

So far, Google’s local track record has been spotty. Getting mom-and-pops interested in buying keywords online has been notoriously hard, as they have continued to prefer working with other mediums like newspapers and yellow pages (which do have local sales forces).

But if it is successful at automating any part of the process, Google could take a smaller cut of the deal than others do today, which could push down margins for everyone.

Photo Credit: Mashable.

The rich clients of Goldman Sachs, who are poised to grab a $1.5 billion piece of the company?

The venture investors, as well as Microsoft, who funded the social networking site when it was not the behemoth it has become?

Co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who owns 25 percent of Facebook?

Of course they all do. But in the midst of this investor frenzy around Facebook, it is critical to keep in mind that the most important “owners” of Facebook are its 600 million users.

Not many of them have been invited to invest in the Goldman deal, but without their active support, uploading of all kinds of personal information and their friend networks, Facebook would be worthless.

Those users–whether or not they are being acknowledged by the company and the markets–are the real shareholders in Facebook.

And if they left, Facebook would become irrelevant. Such a thing has happened before (see: AOL). It’s Facebook’s contract with and service for those users that gives it that massive $50 billion valuation.

This particular deal might not be eyebrow-raising enough to get a ton of people up in arms, but it was specifically structured to consider Goldman investors a single entity, which some think is being done to circumvent shareholder limits that Facebook has historically avoided (although it does not have to any longer, as long as it goes public by the end of April of 2012).

But given the events of the last few years, the public and the government have developed an emphatic mistrust of tricky Wall Street accounting. It’s kind of a sore topic.

And potentially sorer still for Facebook and its consumer image. As the social network has no real competition in most regions and demographics, many users have developed a deep relationship with the service.

Facebook has tried to make its offerings be (and feel) egalitarian, but working hand in glove with Wall Street bankers to freeze out average investors is definitely not that.

Thus, it might be time for the company to think about who its most important constituents are.

Because the only thing that really matters in the long term is if users stick with Facebook or leave it behind.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.