Fortumo Goes Live In Canada
We are happy to announce that starting today, direct carrier billing with Fortumo is now available for payments in Canada. With all of Europe and North America covered by Fortumo, our list of supported countries has increased to 74.
Roughly half of Canadians claim to be gamers, with 36% of them preferring to play games on their computers and 25% on mobile phones. From mobile platforms, Android dominates with a 40% market share.
The game industry is booming in Canada as well – based on the number of employees, Canada is the third largest video game development country in the world, with games contributing approximately 1.7 billion USD into the economy annually.
Useful facts about Canada:
- Population: 35.1 million (2012 est.)
- Number of mobile phones: 26.5 million (Source: CWTA, Q3 2012)
- Official language: English, French
- Official currency: CAD (Canadian dollar)
- Mobile operators supported by Fortumo: 13 (Rogers Wireless, Telus Mobility, Bell Mobility plus 10 virtual network operators)
Want to collect payments with your app or web service in Canada? Simply go to the Fortumo Dashboard and add Canada to your service. If you are a new user, click here to sign up.
Moscow, Berlin, Las Vegas, Singapore, Malmö: Meet Fortumo At Events In May
May is stacked with exciting gaming and developer events all around the globe. Fortumo will be participating at the following events in the US, Asia and Europe:
- FlashGAMM in Moscow (May 14th)
- Social Gambling & Gaming Summit in Berlin (May 14th-15th)
- The App Summit in Las Vegas (May 21st)
- CTIA 2013 in Las Vegas (May 21st-23rd)
- Casual Connect Asia in Singapore (May 21st-23rd)
- Nordic Game 2013 in Malmö (May 22nd-24th)
Attending one of these events? Send us an e-mail at bd@fortumo.com and let’s meet up!
Meet Fortumo At The Global Mobile Internet Conference
The Global Mobile Internet Conference will be taking place in Beijing, China this week.
From May 7th to May 8th, over 10 thousand participants from the mobile industry – including Fortumo – will gather for keynotes, networking and experiencing new technologies first-hand in the exhibition area.
Fortumo provides the broadest mobile payments coverage in 80 countries and supporting all major platforms. In addition to payments over the web and in Android & Windows 8 apps, we recently launched payments for NOOK and Windows Phone devices as well. Interested in reaching overseas markets through a simple payment solution with great conversion? Send us an e-mail at bd@fortumo.com to set up a meeting during GMIC.
What To Learn From 1 Million Payments On Android?
Fortumo processes hundreds of thousands of payments each day. In order to help developers using Fortumo maximize their revenue, we recently extracted one million payments conducted on Android randomly from our database. Some of the more interesting findings from this data is presented on the infographic to the right – click on it to see a full version.
- Android OS is fragmented: 27.7% of users make payments on Android Gingerbread (2.3.6) – a version of the operating system launched in September 2011. An additional 18% use an even older version of Android. This can be explained with the widespread use of cheaper, lower-end smartphones in emerging markets.
- Weekends bring the highest revenue: There is a tendency for more revenue to be made during weekends. The dataset is randomized across all our developers, but the largest ones hold their promotional campaigns during Saturday and Sunday when people have more time to play.
- Revenue can be made anywhere: For us, the five countries listed in the infographic – Brazil, Thailand, France, Turkey and Malasia – are some of the biggest in terms of revenue. Germany and UK are also pretty high on the list. This shows that even in developed countries – where there are a lot of credit cards – users still prefer to pay using their phone, simply because it’s easier.
Interested in learning more about how to successfully monetize your Android app using mobile payments? Get in touch by sending us an e-mail at bd@fortumo.com.
Fortumo at Guangzhou Game Show
From April 3rd to April 5th Fortumo is exhibiting at the Guangzhou Game Show in Guangzhou, China. With an estimated 200,000 people in attendance, Guangzhou is the largest game conference in Southern China. Fortumo has also been selected to give a speech at the conference. In the speech, our VP Gerri Kodres will provide tips and recommendations on what Asian game developers should do to expand to Western markets.
So, if you are an Asian developer looking for billing and distribution outside of China or a Western developer looking to enter the huge and growing Chinese market, you are welcome to visit our booth in Guangzhou Game Show on Thursday and Friday. You can also send e-mail at bd@fortumo.com to set up a meeting.
Meet Fortumo at Game Connection & GDC
March is closing out with two large gaming events in San Francisco as both Game Connection and Game Developers Conference 2013 are taking place this week.
In total over 23 thousand games industry professionals will be attending these events and Fortumo will be there as well.
For the next two days (Tuesday and Wednesday) we will be participating at Game Connection and starting from tomorrow will be joining GDC too. If you want to learn more about monetizing users on the web and in Android, Windows 8 & Windows Phone apps or would just like to meet up for a chat, let us know at bd@fortumo.com. You are also welcome to drop by Table 252 at Game Connection and look out for the guys in red jackets at Game Developers Conference.
Barnes & Noble Partners With Fortumo To Bring In-App Purchasing To NOOK
We’re excited to announce our partnership with Barnes & Noble to bring in-app purchasing to NOOK tablets.
In-app purchasing on NOOK is using the same Fortumo in-app payments integration that developers are already using to make money in other Android stores. What does it mean?
For Fortumo’s existing customers, it means that no additional development effort is needed. You can keep your current integration, just update the SDK (to ver 9.0.) and you’re good to go!
For NOOK developers, it’ll mean that with one simple Fortumo integration, not only are you able to make money on all NOOK tablets (which alone is more than worth the integration), but you can also distribute the same app in other global marketplaces and monetize with mobile operator billing.
In-app purchasing on NOOK is currently in pilot phase, scheduled to open to all developers soon. Interested in participating in the pilot or want to be the first to know when the program is open to all? Let us know!
Press release here.
Feature Phones Are Dead, Long Live Feature Phones!
The research company IHS announced last August that smartphones will seize more than half of the mobile device marketplace in 2013. During the same month data from carriers confirmed that over 50% of the mobile phones used in the USA are smartphones. Even though Android and iOS powered devices are taking over, nothing will change overnight. There will still be billions of feature phones in use during the upcoming years.
The first reason why feature phones are not yet dying out is data connections. The main advantage of smartphones – apps and cloud services – are mostly useful only when the user is connected to the internet. Looking at worldwide data from Ericsson, 3G connections (WCDMA/HSPA) are currently available only to ~45% of people in the world. Even though the prediction says ~85% of people will have access to 3G by 2017, this still means four years of billions of people not having full functionality on their smartphones.
Secondly, there will always be people who prefer older technologies. Even though the idea of a “post-PC era” of tablets and smartphones widely circulates in the media, there are still 350M traditional PCs (desktops & laptops) sold annually. Nokia just recently announced a new 20$ feature phone. The benefits of older technologies is that they are often cheaper and more durable. In emerging economies, this can be the key factor for deciding which phone to purchase. What does this mean for developers?
From the perspective of mobile payments, feature phones should not be discarded yet. There are 3 billion mobile phones running Java globally and enabling users to pay on these devices can help expand revenue. In addition to payments made over the Internet on such devices, games built on J2ME can also be potentially lucrative.
Since feature phones are not going anywhere during the next few years, we have created a customized payment flow of Fortumo web payments for use on feature phones. The solution automatically recognizes when a feature phone environment is being used and morphs itself to enable payments on phones without in-app payment capabilities. Click here to see what the payment flow looks like in a feature phone.
All you need to do to your existing Fortumo web payment integrations is to add the v=wap parameter to force the feature phone friendly flow, but as stated early, we will do this automatically if we see a feature phone.
There is no reason to leave billions of feature phones out of the mobile payments ecosystem. If you want to make sure that even more people have access to your payments, check out how to integrate payments for feature phones in our Developers Portal.
Fortumo Hosts UK Ambassador
Today Fortumo was visited by the ambassador of the UK in Estonia, Mr Christopher Holtby OBE.
After a short tour of the office, the ambassador sat down to talk with Fortumo co-founder Martin Koppel and VP of Business Development Gerri Kodres about the mobile payments industry, its future and how Fortumo could be more involved with the UK.
Under discussion were also business development opportunities and help which Fortumo can provide to British developers looking to increase their export through mobile payments.
Thank you for the visit and we look forward to seeing you again!
Windows 8 Payments Update: Easier Integration & Windows Phone Support
We are happy to let you know that we have released a major upgrade for our Windows 8 in-app payments solution today.
Based on feedback from developers who are already using Windows 8 payments solution, our development team has been busy upgrading it and adding additional features. Today, we are launching a new version of the product with two major updates: support for Windows Phone and cross-device integration.
The new version has less code and makes integration of mobile payments with Microsoft devices significantly faster. Developers can now use a single SDK to activate payments in all Microsoft devices: desktops, laptops and tablets running Windows 8 & smartphones running any version of the Windows Phone operating system.
The improved native SDK also reduces the payment friction and users can make payments with 2 simple clicks. For the end-user buying virtual coins or unlocking new features, payments are completed without leaving the app, leading to better payment conversion and increased revenue.
Developers already using Fortumo payments in Windows 8 can upgrade in their own time as we will continue to support the previous version – however, you should definitely test out the native user experience and payments on Windows Phone as well. If you’re new to Fortumo, all you need to do is install the NuGet Fortumo package and write a couple of lines of code:
using Fortumo;
using FortumoWindowsPhone; //or using FortumoWindows
//Create the Fortumo object, use your Service ID and secret.
Payment p = new Payment(“serviceID”, “secret”);
//subscribe to the Completed event (see PaymentCompleted function below)
//do this right after creating the Payment object to make sure that
//you don’t miss out on any “completed” notifications
p.Completed += PaymentCompleted;
//add extra parameters
p.AddParameter(“cuid”, “my_users_id”);
//show the payment window.
p.Show();
You can download the latest Fortumo Windows 8 Payments Library from your Fortumo Dashboard and read more about the changes in our developers portal.