Have you wondered what great other ideas there are to provide SMS-services? Fortumo user tells a story section has made another interview with great, yet simple idea of providing SMS-services. Meet transportinestonia.com! It’s useful, easy and quick solution for anyone who needs help with transportation service. Check it out!

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Merry Christmas and Happy New Year – 2010!

Let the new year bring a lot of joy, success and wonderful mobile moments to all of you!

Fortumo’s team

As the interest towards our affiliate system is constantly rising we decided to outline some generally good ways of advertising. By doing this we want to help to the ones that wonder what should they do with the affiliate code or when to use the affiliate link or mix both. At the same time, the advertising pro’s can check if they have used our tools in all possible ways.

I am glad to welcome you to our brand new Fortumo affiliate advices section. In order to see it you have to be logged in and registered as an affiliate of ours. Inside you can read more about using the advertising tools that we offer you and, what is more important, you can gain valuable ideas about the ways of promotion.

You may also notice that we have separated the text ads from the banner ads in different tabs, so that you can find the ones that you need easily.

What’s to come: for those of you that are bored from the banners that we currently offer – wait for a few weeks and you will be amazed by the new goodies that are coming.

Good luck with the mobile promotion!

Fortumo loves expanding to new markets. So this time we are bringing you something very extraordinary: say hello to Russia, a new member in Fortumo family.

Forget the rumors about the snow, bears and vodka, it’s a country with friendly people, who love to communicate. Actually there are 142 million of them, not to mention than 70% of them have a cell phone. And, of course, Russia is by far the largest country in the world, covering more than a ninth of the Earth’s land area.

At the moment Russian mobile content market is hot. And there’s no difference, if it’s a ringtone, book or a virtual flower on local social network – Russians are used to paying with mobile phones, as it’s easy and fast. You’ve  never thought about doing business in Russia before?  With Fortumo you have access to 11 local operators and you can choose between five different pricepoints.

So hurry up and start your mobile business is Russia. Some facts about the country:

• Population 142 008 838
• Mobile penetration 132,8%
• Internet penetration 27,1%
• Mobile content market growth 50%

This week we are glad to present you the new statistics view. I can imagine if you have 30 services running in 10 countries, it is pretty vital to keep an eye on everything and to get reliable online statistics about services performance. We have now taken the first step to build you that cool Mobile Payment Analytics so you could analyze all the campaigns you run. Set the timeframe and get the accurate overview realtime.

Currently we provide you only numeric results, but don’t worry cool graphs, that help you to get an overview with a glance and comparison with previous timeframe are coming soon.

In addition to statistics view, we have slightly changed My Services UI. We were thinking of how to place all the important information right under your eyes without overloading the website. Good old tabs came handy again. We placed your services, statistics, account and billing info just one click away. Pretty simple, isn’t it?

Stay tuned to see what will be the next cool features. To get the information even faster, follow us in Twitter, or become our fan in Facebook

The polish economy is seen as the one of the European best performing economies during the global crisis. Poland is expected to have a positive GDP growth in 2009 and probably will be the only country in EU10 to achieve that. Still, the tougher conditions force people to find saving possibilities where possible and business to find new sources of income. These conditions facilitate polish e-commerce market to evolve.  More and more people tend to buy goods online and internet transactions are expected to make up 15% of all purchase transactions in 2010.

Mobile penetration in Poland
Source: UKE report on the state of polish telecommunications market (http://www.uke.gov.pl/)

Some part of online transactions may be classified as micropayments, which usually amount to about 1 - 80 PLN. As mobile penetration rate in Poland grows to 116.8% in Q3 2009 (Central Statistical Office), the mobile payments through Premiums SMS seem to be the most favourable payment channel for micropayments. M-payments are very convenient for users and can be used by everyone owning a mobile phone. Polish customers, still a bit anxious about the security of other payment channels like credit cards or virtual wallets, more eagerly use SMS payments for small online purchases. On the other hand, business owners looking for new income sources benefit from the access to the wider group of potential customers, including those not willing or not able to use internet banking or other payment solutions.

According to Frost & Sullivan report Money in Mobile – European Transactions, mobile payment market in Western Europe is expected to reach 4-5 billion EUR in 2013. However, in Poland m-payment market is still in early development phase. Thanks to cooperation of main polish mobile operators and banks in March 2009 the first polish m-payment guidance programme has been established. Sharifah Amirah, the main analyst of the telecommunications sector at Frost & Sullivan, says that “It is worth to introduce new technologies, because Poland and other countries of Central and Eastern Europe could soon catch up with their Western partners. (…) Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary have the chance to outstrip the technological level of infrastructure of developed European countries and begin to apply modern methods of payment using a SIM card on a wider scale.” [1]

Another study, IEMR’s Poland Mobile Payment Market Forecast, expects that the gross transaction value of mobile payments in Poland will reach $1.16 billion in 2013. All these information can only confirm that mobile payment and value added services sector in Poland is facing towards a good direction. In these “recession times” it may turn out that m-commerce is the best opportunity for cost-effective development of already running business as well as a good starting point for new entrepreneurs.

[1] http://www.frost.com/prod/servlet/press-release.pag?docid=185179726