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!
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!
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.