I’m thrilled to announce that Zong has reached an agreement to be acquired by eBay (PayPal) — full announcement, and PayPal CEO Scott Thompson’s thoughts on the PayPal Blog.

Getting to what I like to call this “acceleration moment” didn’t happen on its own. This journey has always been about people. People make great products, and companies. Nothing else. Every battle we had to win, every challenge we had to overcome, every product we had to launch, carrier to connect, and client to win wasn’t the result of any individual, it was the result of an amazing, collegial team working days, nights, and weekends, and having fun in the process. Even in the toughest times, you, team, made it feel so much easier. We were one, a pack, bringing down obstacles standing in our way, one after the other. Now, it’s time to accelerate what we’ve built!

I am so excited by the unique combination of PayPal’s 8 million merchants, brand power, risk management expertise, and financial stability, with Zong’s Carrier DNA, its largest direct carrier payments network, product innovation, and best-in-class carrier billing technology. This industry first is going to allow us to scale what we’ve built over the course of the past 3 years (and then some) in a massive way!

I’d like to thank all of our merchant partners. Over 2 ½ years ago after chasing them for months, Facebook accepted to start testing mobile payments in the now defunct Gift Store. We then worked very closely with its amazing teams to build the ideal experience for Facebook Credits. This whole experience has been nothing short of amazing. Experiencing the rise of the biggest social network over the course of the past couple of years to over 700 million users has been phenomenal. For having seen it from the inside over a sustained period of time, I can now say that Facebook’s success has nothing to do with luck. It’s all about vision, sheer talent, energy, and culture. Other key partners along the way include amazing companies and leaders like IMVU, Sulake (makers of Habbo Hotel), Big Fish Games, Sony Online Entertainment, Zynga, Playdom (now Disney), Bigpoint, and thousands of other amazing companies we have the privilege of serving. To all of you: thank you for trusting us at face value, when we were a tiny team in our cramped Spartan office. Stay tuned for a lot more innovation and scale, now that we’ve joined forces with PayPal. You won’t be disappointed with what we have in store for you!

To our 250 carrier partners around the world, thank you for letting us leverage your unique, and amazing capabilities to build a global mobile payments business. We’re all very excited at PayPal, and at Zong, to massively scale this business for you in the months to come.

Building a great company is also a factor of great investors. Starting with our early Angel Investors such as Eric Babecoff, and  later Ossama Hassanein from Newbury Ventures, who believed in us way back when in 2005 with Echovox. Frederic Court from Advent Venture Partners, who became our BD arm in Europe, sending us leads like a machine, and supporting us all along the way. Then finally when Zong was spun-off from Echovox, Dana Stalder from Matrix joined us, and was so instrumental in scaling our business, becoming my mentor, and guiding us in this amazing transformation that happened in the past 12-months.

I really can’t wait to join Scott Thompson’s team over at PayPal. The energy, passion, and drive of the team combined with PayPal’s unique scale and capabilities in payments convinced me this was the right way to accelerate what we’ve built. Most of e-commerce will shortly become m-commerce, and I genuinely believe that PayPal, hand-in-hand with wireless carriers around the world will win in a big way. We’ll be working very hard on things that will blow your mind. So stay tuned for a lot more mobile payment awesomeness!

—David Marcus (@davidmarcus)

Viva la revolucion de movil!

We’re now live in Mexico and Chile, giving you the ability to accept mobile payment from over 90 million consumers. But we’re not done yet, Papi. Stay tuned for Colombia and Brazil and also some more gems in Eastern Europe. Checkout our Coverage to see where we’re live and where we’re going.

Que les vaya bien!

We’re excited to be processing mobile payments in two more countries this month. Same as in most every other country, we have 100% mobile carrier coverage to maximize your payment conversion rates. Contact us if you want to turn on these markets for your account.

Other news: check out our May Newsletter for a smattering of Zong news, humor and other tidbits.

Yesterday we launched coverage in Australia across all wireless carriers.  Just like in the US, Canada and Europe, we are connected with over 95% of all wireless subscribers wherever we’re live.  It’s something we think is really important.  After all, as a user, it’s a crumby experience to be led to believe you can make a payment only to find out your carrier isn’t supported.

We’re rolling out lots of new countries in the coming months.  Check out our coverage page to learn more about where we are and where we’re going.

One final note, check out our latest edition of the Zong Newsletter.  If you like it, subscribe.

Come and meet us at the Virtual Goods Summit this Friday in San Francisco. This is going to be a great conference focusing on monetizing web audiences through virtual goods and virtual currencies. I’ll be on a exciting panel about building a dominant payments and billing strategy with execs from great companies such as Habbo, Spare Change, GMG Entertainment, PayByCash and Vindicia. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Thanks to l’Atelier US for this nice interview!

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.

Come and meet us September 8-10 at the Techcrunch 50 event in San Francisco!

As exhibitors, we will be showcasing our new Zong based hosted mobile payment solution that enables any Web publisher or Facebook application developer to add frictionless mobile payments to their app in less than a day.

We will also have a lot of exciting news to announce and few good surprises for the TC50 audience!

If you want to setup meetings and book demos in advance, please contact your trusted mobile monetization guru, Tamer: tamer[at]zong[dot]com.

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

Help us win the competition! Vote for Zong!

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!