Fortumo hits the road again – meet us at the Mobile Games Forum in London
Branimir 
Hey Friends! 2012 is already off to a great start for you and Fortumo with new countries and improved solutions coming your way. We like to know what is your experience in the mobile space, so we plan to continue being close to you at all industry events during the year. The first one is the Annual Mobile Games Forum which will take place in London this week (25th & 26th January at Hilton Tower Bridge). Just drop by our stand or send us an email and we would be glad to meet you. And do not forget to mark in your schedule the interesting presentations that you should visit.
Fortumo Featured on Japanese Television
Kristel We are excited to have been recently shown on NHK WORLD TV– the English language news channel of Japan’s national public broadcasting organisation NHK.
NHK visited Fortumo office and inteviewed our co-founder Martin Koppel for a piece on Estonia’s thriving IT scene. The clip also covers Skype and the bubbling local start-up scene, and outlines the recipe for Estonia’s success in the IT field: a mix of talent, ambitious young entrepreneurs and lack of national red tape.
Check out the video below.
Fortumo is Now Live in South Korea
Triin 
South Korea has earned a place among the world’s 20 largest economies. With its forward thinking approach and keenness on technological advancement, South Korea was one of the fastest growing developed countries in the 2000s. Along with Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan it is known as one of the Four Asian Tigers.
Seoul, the capital of South Korea, is a megacity with a population of over 10 million. It was also the first city to feature digital mobile TV technology and wireless high-speed mobile internet service.
Mobile penetration in South Korea is more than 105%. This makes South Korea an attractive location for mobile payments. It’s no wonder South Korea has officially been labelled as the world’s most developed economy in information and communication technology. For two consecutive years it has ranked number one in the ICT Development Index (IDI).
Interesting facts about South Korea:
- Mobile operators: SKT (SK Telecom), KT (Korea Telecom), and LG U+ (LG Group)
- Mobile penetration: >105%
- Household Internet connection rate: 96%
- Language: Korean, English (widely taught in junior high and high school)
- South Korean residents download the most apps per capita (via Google infographic)
Bring your mobile payments to South Korea today!
Fortumo In-App Payments Library v 7.2 – Offering Better Deals & 11 new languages
Jaana Everybody loves a good deal. We tend to take an extra chocolate bar at the supermarket register to reach the magic total granting us extra loyalty points or a bigger discount. Now in Library v 7.2 using Volume Discount and Credits Multiplier you can offer those better deals to your users as well. We also added 11 new languages to make the user experience even smoother, bringing the total number of languages to 32!
Volume Discount
Volume Discount is very common in the retail world – the price tends to drop when you buy in bulk. To offer such deals for in-app purchases you can now in addition to setting the exchange rate also define how much is added to each purchase based on volume. Let’s say the exchange rate is 1000 x credits ~ 1€ and with every 1000 credits bought the user will be given 200 extra credits. Now looking at the prices, the end-user sees instantly that the higher price points offer better value.
Credits Multiplier
Credits Multiplier can be used for special offers, without the need to change the service parameters. In the following example the user has reached a new milestone in a game and for that earned a special one time offer to get twice as many credits for the same price.
PaymentRequestBuilder builder = new PaymentRequestBuilder();
builder.setDisplayString("Get 2x more credits for same price!");
builder.setCreditsMultiplier(2.0);
makePayment(builder.build());
Now in 32 Languages
Mobile application marketplaces are very competitive and it is getting more difficult to rise to the top, especially in emerging markets. Recent analysis’ by companies like App Lingua, App Annie and Distimo show that TOP 100 apps in marketplaces are localized to many languages.
We’re constantly adding new languages to make the end-user experience smoother. To the latest release we added 11 new languages and Fortumo In-App Payment solution can now be used in a total of 32 languages: Greek, Croatian, Hungarian, Indonesian, Hebrew, Lithuanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Thai, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Chinese – simplified, Chinese – traditional, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portugese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish.
You can download the latest Fortumo In-App Library from your Fortumo Dashboard and read more about the changes in our In-App Library Change Log.
Looking back to 2011
Branimir 
2011 is at its end – successful for one and not that lucky for others. A new and shiny year is ahead and whether it brings us more good times or the end of the world (oh those Mayans), it is a nice time for everyone to look back and see what has changed. Here are just few things you and us achieved together:
- Following your desires and direct needs, Fortumo expanded to 13 new countries. This allows the staggering number of 3,5 billion subscribers pay through their mobile devices in 61 countries!
- Thanks to you, our awesome customers, Fortumo won the prestigious Estonian Entrepreneurship
Award 2011 and was a Red Herring Top 100 Eruope finalist. - In the global world we all strive to be able to communicate with as many people as possible. In payments business localization has even bigger role- it increases the conversion significantly. That is why Fortumo payment services support today 32 languages.
- Taking us one step closer to our users, Fortumo’ US team moved to a new office in San Francisco.
- Always answering the needs of all developers at the market, Fortumo was the first payments provider to release mobile payment solution for HTML5 apps and games.
- Believing that you need the best, we worked hard on scaling the system for better stability by connecting new servers and bringing intensive components to cloud.
- During 2011 the number of service-providers registered with Fortumo reached more than 60 000 and what is even more astonishing is that they have created over 206 000 mobile payments services.
- We tried to get personal attention and help every developer – big or small – that is why Fortumo’s team was always with you in over 40 industry events all over the world.
In the last hours of 2011, share with us some of the moments that you liked the most during the year.
And Happy new year, everyone!
Meet Fortumo at FlashGAMM in Kyiv
Andrei If you are passionate about Flash, Social or Mobile games and you are in Kyiv this weekend, then you’re definitely attending FlashGAMM conference. So is Fortumo.
We invite you to come by our stand and have a chat about game monetization strategies and future of mobile gaming. We strongly believe that mobile platforms are great for expanding your player audience.
Fortumo at Appnation III in San Francisco
We’ve just wrapped up the first day of Appnation III and had a great time learning about the status of the mobile world, seeing what problems developers are facing and how Fortumo can help them!
One major issue we’ve heard is monetization — especially on Android.
Of course, if you’re looking to monetize your mobile app, especially in emerging markets, or just want to chat about the status of mobile payments, make sure to visit us at our booth.
And of course, if you can’t make it to Appnation this year, you can still talk to us! Just send an email to: partnership@fortumo.com.
Announcing Android In-App Payment Library v7.1 – Making Developers Happy
Jaana 
We are glad to announce a major update for our Android In-App payments library. Version 7.1 is here to make developers’ lives easier by simplifying integration and payment status tracking.
In previous versions developers needed to manage payment status changes themselves to handle rare cases where the payment wasn’t successful instantly but went to a pending state (for example, when the user had no reception due to being in a lift). For an excellent end user experience developers had to periodically check pending payments and give users the virtual goods they were waiting for once the status had gone from pending to billed. Although the pending state is a rare case, this meant extra work for developers.
In this version, if you add the code to make a payment and receive the response, you will instantly have the logic for managing payment statuses in all situations – no reception, the user quit your app during the payment or anything else. Version 7.1 of the library uses Android broadcasts and intents to notify applications of payment status changes. This will occur even when your app is not running.
3 Hot Tips From Our Visit to Social Gaming Summit
Stanislav Last week we were exhibiting at Social Gaming Summit in London. This industry-professionals conference covered everything about social games and we would like to share some of the key points with you:
- The Social Game Market still has room for new players 
You can still build a social game from ground up and it can rise to top positions in the highly competitive and saturated Social Games Market. As Julien Codorniou from Facebook pointed out in his keynote opening speech, the overall number of players remains nearly the same. Big parts of users are changing their game of choice though, as more and more niche targeted social games surface. According to data from Facebook, two of the Top 4 Facebook game developers today, got there in the last 12 months: Wooga (#3) and King.com (#4) succeeded in attracting users who were looking for something new. In this sense maybe a cool game we saw at SGS was Strip Two One by Slovenian Neonardi will be the next big thing. Read more »
Fortumo Will Speak at Social Gaming Summit in London
Martin 
Couple of weeks ago at Socialize West I was talking about cross-platform user acquisition and monetization. On Tuesday in London, I’m looking into slightly bigger picture and talk about success strategies for small and medium sized social games developers.
Of cource I’ll be talking a lot about mobile as it is the future of the industry. What is the right platform strategy, what business model to use, how to monetize, how to handle fragmentation etc are just a few questions I plan to answer.
Don’t miss the panel on 15th at 2.15pm and follow the guys in red if you have any questions regarding in-app and mobile payments.