This summer we were honored when IMVU, the leading avatar-based social network and industry pioneer, chose us to be their mobile payments partner. With over 40 million users all over the world, IMVU built their own in-house mobile payments solution. After operating their own platform for a couple years, they decided to try us on for size.
We think the fit is nice: IMVU is seeing a 50% lift in revenue after switching to ZONG. Learn all about the background and how they did it in our IMVU Case Study.
We’ll be at the NY Games Conference this Wednesday, Sept. 30th. Hill Ferguson, our head of Product and Marketing, will be on a monetization panel discussion at 4 pm. Richard Borenstein (richard [at] zong [dot] com), our head of sales, will also be around. Send him a note if you’d like to meet up while we’re in NY from the 29th-1st. See ya there!
This time the votes are being cast by investors. The recipient? Beijing-based Changyou.com, the game developer behind the wildly popular MMORPG Tian Long Ba Bu (”Novel of Eight Demigods”). Changyou’s (CYOU) stock price jumped 25% on it’s opening day of trading on the NASDAQ, confirming investors optimism for the company’s future prospects. In 2008, it generated over $200 million in revenue, most of which is derived from the sale of virtual goods. Still, they have a ways to go to catch up with virtual goods behemoth Tencent. These guys rang up $1 billion in revenue last year, about 70% of which is derived from the sale of virtual goods. Here’s to the rest of the world waking up to such an enormous opportunity!
Today at Techcrunch50 we will unveil what kept our relentless team of coding ninjas from sleeping in the past months: our brand new hosted payment solution for Web apps.
Zong is now the first and only mobile payment system enabling Facebook application developers and Web Publishers to seamlessly bill 95% of the US and European wireless subscribers on their phone bill.
This new solution converts web visitors into active buyers up to 10 times better than any other payment mechanism such as credit cards. It is already live on leading Facebook virtual currency solutions providers and we have a strong pipeline of deployments that will be completed in the coming weeks.
Implementation in an existing web application takes no more than 2 days including testing.
This hosted payment solution has been developed on top of Zong’s existing platform and API, with the same tools that are available to any developer setting up a free account.
Customers cannot provision themselves for this service yet. But we can setup new accounts on our backend. If you’re interested in implementing it for your service, please contact Tamer: tamer(at)zong(dot)com. We will provision an additional 10 to 20 partners before opening up self-service configuration on Zong.com, so please provide us with as much detail you can about your app, traffic and unique users in order for us to get back to you quickly.
For live demos of the solution and live services using Zong, please visit our “booth” at Techcrunch50 in the exhibitors area located in the demo pit room.
The iron-clad gates to the mobile world in the US have been infiltrated- Zong has officially launched in the United States!For the first time in the history of the US and mobile, a true Open Mobile Platform for ”monetization of web content on mobile devices is readily available to everyone”. Better yet, we have formed relationships with all major US mobile operators, reducing the time for validation and launching of mobile services down from several months to several minutes, as well as expanding the reach of our platform to over a half a billion mobile subscribers! The Zong Open API is the first application immediately available, with our other turnkey solutions to follow shortly.To see the official press release, please click here.
This summer we were honored when IMVU, the leading avatar-based social network and industry pioneer, chose us to be their mobile payments partner. With over 40 million users all over the world, IMVU built their own in-house mobile payments solution. After operating their own platform for a couple years, they decided to try us on for size. 