We’re happy to announce that Zong was nominated for MobileBeat 2008: VentureBeat‘s top mobile companies competition.

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Each registered voter can cast up to 5 votes. Help us win the competition and achieve our goal to make the web and mobile worlds collide faster! We appreciate your help!

We’re happy to announce the launch of a new Zong plugin for WordPress! If you host your WordPress blog, then you can start monetizing your posts by enabling mobile micro transactions. You can find the plugin in the WordPress plugin directory. Follow instructions to install the package and configure the pricepoints per country. No development needed!

Everyone on the web feels content should be free, but let’s face it’s not. Someone’s got to pay for it sooner or later. The consumer always pays, either by clicking on a sponsored link or banner and buying some other company’s products or by willfully deciding to pay because the service or the content is of value to him.

The more time I spend talking to “Web 2.0″ companies, the more I realize how tough it is for them to monetize their sometimes huge user-base. Some early Facebook application developers faced the reality of extra-low CTRs and had a bitter pill to swallow when ad networks went from inventory acquisition (a time where any publisher names its dream CPM level and gets it), to ongoing operation, where they need to make money. Some app developers saw their monthly revenues plummet from $50,000+ to $5,000 while doubling their traffic! Well guess what… If no one buys a product or service or anything that’s ad-driven, then advertisers stop buying ad-space. The web is not TV or billboards or even magazines where advertising agencies can cuddle the ego of high-powered P&G marketing execs with cutting edge branding campaigns. The web is about measuring every single interaction, cost and ultimately ROI. Branding dollars, where ROI doesn’t matter, are not going to the web and they won’t anytime soon. My point, and advice to any new or seasoned entrepreneur is that you need to figure out a business model! Don’t build a business thinking that you’ll find an easy way to monetize your user base if it’s big enough and that this will be easy by simply adding advertising, it won’t!

I’m not pretending or even assuming that anything is monetizable with a bona fide transaction. I’m saying good quality content, time-sensitive services and specific features of a given web service can be monetized and if the price point is below $10, mobile is the best way to do it. Let’s imagine you’re house-hunting on Craigslist, and let’s assume these guys decide they want to make money, which is another story. Would you pay $2 a week to instantaneously receive on your cellphone new listings matching your search criteria, with immediate access to pictures and contact details of the seller? I bet a good 50% of the people looking for a house in a competitive area would pay for that.

So is Loren/1938 Media going to become rich by selling a few posts at 99¢ a pop? Probably not. But he will get some transactions and it’s a good experimentation to measure take-up. Would any of you type in your credit card details to watch any of these videos? No you wouldn’t.

Precisions on the video below: although we’re working on covering the globe and 3 billion mobile subscribers sometime in 2009, we now cover a little over 500 million mobile subscribers across the US and Europe. Our target is to reach 1 billion+ by the end of the year.

Here at Zong, we’re proud to be associated to the launch of a very promising social media service, Twitterfone. 

PRESS RELEASE 

Twitterfone inaugurates voice-to-Twitter service

    * Allows anyone to send updates to Twitter by calling a number

    * Voice is automatically transcribed to text

Twitterfone www.twitterfone.com  – an Internationally backed voice to text message service launched today in the US, UK and Ireland.

Twitterfone voice-enables Twitter, a text message rebroadcast service and the hottest social networking service at the moment. With Twitterfone, people can dictate text messages via their mobile to be sent out to everyone on their Twitter social network.

Twitterfone investor and Cubic Telecom President Pat Phelan stated “Right now the million active users of Twitter use cell phones or computers to send and receive short bursts of texts to each other. Millions of messages each day are sent like this but while Twitter is one of the truly mobile social networks out there, there are times when users on the move cannot stop what they are doing to key in a message.

Twitterfone improves upon Twitter by allowing us to make a voice call which is turned into text and sent out to our network of friends. This only costs the price of a local call, no matter how many it is sent to. With hands-free kits common in cars it now means we can text each other without taking our eyes off the road and our hands off the wheel.”

How Twitter works:

Once people sign up to Twitter, they can subscribe to receive updates of users and receive them via the web or a text message. Web gurus Jason Calacanis and Robert Scoble have over 20,000 subscribers each and even the Los Angeles Fire Department and the English Government are now sending out text updates to people via their Twitter account.

An alliance of international high-tech and telecom companies provide the technology platform behind Twitterfone. Geneva-based VOX telecom provides calls routing, Redwood City, California-based Zong powers mobile enrollment and transactions, MAXroam powers the telephony intelligence system and Dublin firm Dial2Do supplies the core speech recognition which is at the heart of Twitterfone. Dial2Do CEO Ivan MacDonald stated

 ”We’ve been involved in the space where the phone system meets the web for a long time now, and naturally we’ve been fascinated by the rise of Twitter. Increasingly, we’ll see “web 2.0″ services that people use primarily from their phones. Projections are that mobiles will become the dominant way of accessing the Internet, and a lot of this will be done via voice interfaces. We are very pleased to see Dial2Do add even more value to an already extraordinary service.”

Phelan added “We built this because we are all avid users of Twitter and have made some excellent business connections and friendships from it. We decided to see what we could contribute to the service and with our telecoms backgrounds the Twitterfone idea fitted perfectly”.

Twitterfone is in invite beta at the moment meaning that only those that have been sent invites can join up. There will be regular releases of invites and Twitterfone says they have planned for a million sign-ups over the next year.

Twitterfone, Inc. is a privately owned corporation. Its investors are Pat Phelan, David Marcus, Florian Seroussi, Sean O Sullivan and Ivan MacDonald.