Our Technology

Our neighborhood communities are built on our own proprietary BubbleCommunities software platform. BubbleCommunities addresses the specific needs of a “hyperlocal” community based on some of our own research into how neighborhoods work.

What is a Hyperlocal Community?

A hyperlocal community brings together highly relevant content and interactions around a very specific neighborhood. Not just limited to a single group, a hyperlocal community is its own ecosystem of overlapping, competing and/or unrelated groups or “bubbles”. These groups often have their own news, discussions, calendars and content. However, their geographic location makes them of common interest to the neighborhood reader. Within the radius of the neighborhood, hyperlocal content is highly relevant. Outside the radius, relevance drops off sharply.

How Does BubbleCommunities Address Hyperlocal?

BubbleCommunities automatically assembles hyperlocal content from a wide variety of sources and contributors and then “bubbles” this content out using a combination of web, email, mobile and social media delivery. It both aggregates content and then pushes that content out in any way that readers prefer. In this sense, BubbleCommunities replicates the neighbor-to-neighbor “word-of-mouth” that has typically defined neighborhood news distribution.

BubbleCommunities supports all major content types organizing everything into groups or “bubbles”. Businesses, community groups, discussions, newsletters are all different groups. Each group is highly customizable to address the wide range of needs found in the different group users.

Is This Citizen Journalism?

Early pioneering hyperlocal sites were often based on the premise of citizen journalism, where local residents would be both writers and editors. However this model failed because the need for commercial success depended on unpaid volunteers who were expected to contribute for esteem rather than profit.

BubbleCommunities is based around mutual benefit not altruism. Contributors are those that benefit by communicating with the neighborhood. People sponsoring events, local businesses sharing their expertise, news sites seeking additional traffic provide content that is both of high quality and high relevance. When filtered and moderated, this content provides a high quality and hyperlocal approach to neighborhood information that is unavailable for any other single source.

To support this model, BubbleCommunities includes a solid base of back-end features to support business-to-customer interactions and to support advertising that complements these interactions. So, rather than depend on the whims of local banner advertising, BubbleCommunities provides the tools that continue to generate results for businesses irregardless of whether they are running website or email advertisements.

Fully Connects a Neighborhood

BubbleCommunities is designed to be fully integrated with a business’s website and in-store efforts. As such, it is designed from the ground-up for 24×7 reliability and is hosted in a fully-redundant configuration so that it is not dependent on any single hard drive or computer for operation. BubbleCommunities is much more than just a daily email. It embraces the full hyperlocal ecosystem of neighborhoods and seeks to connect everyone together in a wide variety of ways.