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.

After reminding the nation that “South Korean homes now have greater Internet access than we do,” he went on to call for a national wireless broadband network.

Within the next five years, we’ll make it possible for businesses to deploy the next generation of high-speed wireless coverage to 98 percent of all Americans. This isn’t just about–(applause)–this isn’t about faster Internet or fewer dropped calls. It’s about connecting every part of America to the digital age. It’s about a rural community in Iowa or Alabama where farmers and small business owners will be able to sell their products all over the world. It’s about a firefighter who can download the design of a burning building onto a handheld device; a student who can take classes with a digital textbook; or a patient who can have face-to-face video chats with her doctor.

It’s the latest attempt by Obama to try to solve the difficult problem of broadband penetration in America. In many places, most of them rural areas with low population density, cable and telco companies can’t make back the investments required to build out network infrastructure, and so they don’t build at all. As I’ve said here before, for Americans in those places, the options for participating in the digital culture the rest of us take for granted are few, and it often means the difference between participating and not in so much of the daily discourse that occurs online.

Part of the answer lies in taking back some radio spectrum that’s used for other things. In June, Obama signed a memorandum calling for the freeing up of certain radio frequency spectrum in the 500 MHz range. This is a block of spectrum largely owned by TV broadcasters for free over-the-air TV transmission. Broadcasters have been under pressure–and so far they are resisting–to voluntarily give those licenses up so that the spectrum can be re-auctioned off.

Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, essentially telegraphed that this is going to be the commission’s major policy priority in comments at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month. He has said he’d like to offer broadcasters incentives to give up their spectrum, but this would require a new law passed by Congress, and those in Congress have their own ideas about how this should be done. You can expect a lot of debate about this in Washington this year, but probably not a lot of progress.

Intel didn’t say much about what he’ll actually do. Intel’s statement on the partnership says he will “collaborate with Intel on many creative and technology endeavors across the ‘compute continuum,’ which reaches across traditional notebooks and into smart phones and tablets.” It’s on those last two where Intel has tended to struggle with market penetration, mainly because most device manufacturers favor chips built around the ARM architecture.

The company did reveal that he’s already working on music for Intel. He did say in an Intel press release that “nearly everything I do involves processors and computers, and when I see an Intel chip I think of all the creative minds involved that help to amplify my own creativity.”

Meanwhile, it’s not Intel’s only promotional endeavor in the world of pop music. The company teamed up with the Korean girl-group sensation Girls’ Generation, which our friends at The Wall Street Journal profiled last week. The video below is supposedly inspired by Intel’s “Visibly Smart” 2nd Generation Core processors, and, if nothing else, you can hear the word “core” throughout the lyrics. However it’s worth watching if only for the last few seconds, when the group does its take on the well-known Intel chime from its TV commercials.

Verizon (VZ) quietly announced last week that it was done seeking out new markets for Fios, which means that cities like Boston, Baltimore and Alexandria, Va., won’t ever get access to the service. But the company will continue to expand its footprint in cities it’s already in, like New York.

The telco says it had always planned on winding down its expansion after spending $23 billion to upgrade its network. But its competitors are certainly treating this as a victory, and the halt will fuel speculation that Verizon will end up buying satellite broadcaster DirectTV (DTV) in order to compete with cable guys like Comcast (CMCSA) and Time Warner Cable (TWC) coast-to-coast.

More from The Wall Street Journal:

FiOS is Verizon’s counter to the cable companies’ Internet phone service, which has been successful in nabbing away telco customers. Despite FiOS’s presence, cable providers such as Cablevision Systems Corp. have weathered the competitive storm. The other telcos have also been upgrading their networks to deliver more services, but they haven’t been as aggressive…

For Verizon, it’s still unclear whether the bet will pay off. Mr. Kula said that in markets that FiOS is available, it has achieved 25% penetration for television service and 28% for Internet.

Growth in FiOS appears to be slowing. In the fourth quarter, Verizon added 153,000 customers each for FiOS Internet and TV, which was down sequentially and from a year ago. In total, the company has 3.4 million FiOS Internet and 2.9 million TV subscribers.

Make no mistake, that surge has been massive. Says AT&T (T): “Since 2008 AT&T’s network in the San Francisco area has experienced a 3G data traffic increase of 2,000 percent.”

Wow. No wonder my calls kept dropping at that last Apple (AAPL) event in San Francisco (yes, an iPhone 3G repeatedly dropping calls at Apple’s Sept. invitation-only music gathering). In any event, the upgrade, which includes the bolstering of backbone infrastructure, should result in better coverage, 3G performance and in-building penetration.

“More than ever before, customers look to wireless communications to stay in touch with family, friends and business colleagues,” said Terry Stenzel, AT&T vice president and general manager for Northern California/Reno. “The additional spectrum helps to enhance the 3G network so that our customers have the best experience when they make a call, check an e-mail, download a video or song, access applications or surf the Internet on their AT&T device.”

As a new weekly feature, BoomTown is calling all those who make cool graphs, charts and stats done prettily about tech to send them to me pronto.

I am–truth be told–a secret stats fanatic. A bargraphaholic. Yes, even a closet pie-charter.

Last week, it was graphs comparing app stats for the Apple (AAPL) iPhone and the Google Android smartphone.

This week, I decided to mash up two different and interesting surveys, both from comScore (SCOR), about the search market.

When you do this, you find that while the new Bing search engine from Microsoft (MSFT) is showing some impressive growth–up a half-point in July from June to an 8.9 percent share, as you see below (click on images to make them larger)–the software giant still has a long way to go to get some true love from consumers.

That’s because, according to an earlier report, while some think Google (GOOG) is just a habit, it turns out to be an obsessive one.

As you can see from another bunch of recent comScore data in the table below–comparing search penetration, share of searches and searches per searcher in the U.S. in June–even combining Microsoft and Yahoo (YHOO) is unimpressive compared to Google.

The search share for Google is much higher and its users do double the searches, even though penetration levels are closer among Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

Plus, the Googley ways seem to prompt more loyalty, as the next table shows. In fact, even users of Microsoft and Yahoo sites conduct double their searches on Google.

And, while Microsoft search execs will tell you off the record that this kind of stickiness is hard to dislodge–sort of like gum on your sneaker–given Bing’s recent search gains, it’ll be interesting to see them try.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

The alliance will see the four cable and tech companies investing $3.2 billion in the nationwide wireless network that Sprint and Clearwire have been struggling–with profound unsuccess–to roll out. Comcast (CMCSA) will contribute $1.05 billion, Time Warner Cable (TWX) $500 million. Intel (INTC) will invest $1 billion, Google (GOOG) about $500 million. The new venture will be majority owned by Sprint, but it will take the Clearwire name and be run largely by Clearwire execs, among them cellular industry pioneer Craig McCaw.

For the cablecos, which have yet to settle on a clear wireless strategy, the deal is a quick and dirty way to establish the high-speed wireless network they need to compete with telcos like AT&T (T) and Verizon (VZ). For Sprint and Clearwire, it’s a chance to make their non-starter of a WiMax network viable and something happy to talk about when conversation turns to Sprint’s stock price, which has fallen nearly 60% over the past 12 months.

That said, the deal is not without its problems–top among them WiMax itself. As Craig Moffett, an analyst with Bernstein Research, explained in a note to clients earlier this year, the 2.5 GHz spectrum upon which Sprint and Clearwire are building their network isn’t nearly as good as the spectrum Verizon and AT&T just purchased in the FCC’s 700 MHz auction. “Serious questions remain about penetration through walls and windows,” Moffett explained. “Elsewhere in the world, operators have also raised questions about WiMax’s real-world bandwidth, latency and non-line-of-site coverage. How competitive the offering would be versus Verizon’s or AT&T’s planned LTE broadband service therefore remains to be seen.”

That it does–though there have been some indications that it may not be quite up to par. Speaking at an international WiMax conference in Bangkok in March, Garth Freeman, CEO of Buzz Broadband, Australia’s first WiMax operator, described the technology variously as a “disaster,” “miserable failure,” and a standard “mired in opportunistic hype.”

So will that prove true for Clearwire as well? We won’t know for some time. Building out a massive network like this will take some doing. “We’ll likely to see early trials in 2010, but a full-fledged build-out will take longer,” Clearwire CEO Benjamin Wolff said during a conference call this morning. “Building faster is a matter of logistics. The build plan we’ve laid out will be one of the largest and fastest build-outs ever done. We have the capability to do it, but it’s a massive undertaking.”

The alliance will see the four cable and tech companies investing $3.2 billion in the nationwide wireless network that Sprint and Clearwire have been struggling–with profound unsuccess–to roll out. Comcast (CMCSA) will contribute $1.05 billion, Time Warner Cable (TWX) $500 million. Intel (INTC) will invest $1 billion, Google (GOOG) about $500 million. The new venture will be majority owned by Sprint, but it will take the Clearwire name and be run largely by Clearwire execs, among them cellular industry pioneer Craig McCaw.

For the cablecos, which have yet to settle on a clear wireless strategy, the deal is a quick and dirty way to establish the high-speed wireless network they need to compete with telcos like AT&T (T) and Verizon (VZ). For Sprint and Clearwire, it’s a chance to make their non-starter of a WiMax network viable and something happy to talk about when conversation turns to Sprint’s stock price, which has fallen nearly 60% over the past 12 months.

That said, the deal is not without its problems–top among them WiMax itself. As Craig Moffett, an analyst with Bernstein Research, explained in a note to clients earlier this year, the 2.5 GHz spectrum upon which Sprint and Clearwire are building their network isn’t nearly as good as the spectrum Verizon and AT&T just purchased in the FCC’s 700 MHz auction. “Serious questions remain about penetration through walls and windows,” Moffett explained. “Elsewhere in the world, operators have also raised questions about WiMax’s real-world bandwidth, latency and non-line-of-site coverage. How competitive the offering would be versus Verizon’s or AT&T’s planned LTE broadband service therefore remains to be seen.”

That it does–though there have been some indications that it may not be quite up to par. Speaking at an international WiMax conference in Bangkok in March, Garth Freeman, CEO of Buzz Broadband, Australia’s first WiMax operator, described the technology variously as a “disaster,” “miserable failure,” and a standard “mired in opportunistic hype.”

So will that prove true for Clearwire as well? We won’t know for some time. Building out a massive network like this will take some doing. “We’ll likely to see early trials in 2010, but a full-fledged build-out will take longer,” Clearwire CEO Benjamin Wolff said during a conference call this morning. “Building faster is a matter of logistics. The build plan we’ve laid out will be one of the largest and fastest build-outs ever done. We have the capability to do it, but it’s a massive undertaking.”

According to the World Economic Forum, Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland are the three most networked nations in the world. In its annual Global Information Technology Report, the Forum ranked 127 countries according to network readiness and found that Denmark, followed by Sweden and Switzerland, had not just the highest average broadband-Internet speeds, but the highest broadband penetration rates as well.

The countries also received high marks for their tech-friendly regulatory environments, something the United States apparently lacks. The US ranked fourth in the survey–up three places from last year–because of its (surprise!) poor scores for “Burden of Government Regulation,” “Effectiveness of Law-Making Bodies,” and “Total Tax Rate.”

According to the World Economic Forum, Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland are the three most networked nations in the world. In its annual Global Information Technology Report, the Forum ranked 127 countries according to network readiness and found that Denmark, followed by Sweden and Switzerland, had not just the highest average broadband-Internet speeds, but the highest broadband penetration rates as well.

The countries also received high marks for their tech-friendly regulatory environments, something the United States apparently lacks. The US ranked fourth in the survey–up three places from last year–because of its (surprise!) poor scores for “Burden of Government Regulation,” “Effectiveness of Law-Making Bodies,” and “Total Tax Rate.”