If you have been following this series, you may have discovered I was focusing on the conceptual level than giving people something like guidelines or manuals. As the magic formula is constantly absent in the reality, I think the conceptual shift results in greater inspiration, which actually helps people to knock out the shell to success.

In the past 2 episodes, I have covered the paradoxical thinking among Web 2.0 start-up people, such as the missing income plan and the over rigid definition of value. Also, I was trying very hard to pimp everyone’s quantitative perception by fusing the relativity between small and big (hope I managed…) as we ought to think outside of the planet to get the whole picture.

Now come back to mother Earth, as revenue is inevitably a must for Web 2.0 start-ups and micro payment are our common ground, is there any trick/tip to be applied in the Web 2.0’s monetization strategy formulation? After the mind tuning process in the previous 2 episodes, it’s the time to handle the physical world.

Let me reveal the secret word “R” for Read the rest of this entry »

“Many grains of sand piled up will make a pagoda”, “Little drops of water make the mighty ocean”, there exist many other similar expressions in all civilizations. Actually, they are all about the perception of the quantitative relativity. Sorry, in human words, they are all depicting the idea “Small can be also big”.

The idea seems to be simple. However, as we are evolving from the material based world to knowledge based world, many people still have difficulties to get rid of their old value system. Despite the fact that in the physical world, materials are scarce while in the virtual world, products Read the rest of this entry »

It’s always great experience to communicate with start-up people. They have the most creative and ambitious mind among us. By luck, I have the opportunity to talk with many undergoing start-up project owners. Frankly, I think they all have brilliant ideas. However, many times it is just frustrating as I get to know they suffered from the same start-up myth.

“I run a web 2.0 start-up. I think to get users has priority over profit. After I have users, I can have all sorts of monetization models.” Actually, most of the start-up owners embrace this belief, despite the fact that facebook’s or twitter’s case is just one out of a hundred. In reality, the other 99 Read the rest of this entry »

Our users have asked for some time that they would like to test their service via web interface not to send messages. It is also a great feature to service providers who have services running in different countries.

Now it is really easy, you can create services and test them right away from your Fortumo account. It doesn’t matter which service or which country. Basically you just have to go to the service view and open the testing tab. Cool thing is that there is no limits in testing, if you change your service or script a bit you can run another test right away.

Other new features

Virtualgoodsnews is a blog which talks about virtual world – latest trends, new cool sites, payment methods and everything that happens in virtual world. They also wrote a story about Fortumo:

Fortumo’s strategy allows them to get the valuable first foothold in an emergent market that could become very significant in the future. Virtual goods are increasingly a global business since it’s easy to sell to anyone in any country provided they can understand the platform and find a way to pay for what they want. Fortumo gives Eastern Europe a fairly easy way, and may open up more countries to the sort of low-friction payment methods that can drive virtual goods sales in the future.

Check out the full story .

The Bulgarian football team CSKA Sofia recently has problems with a large debt. They owed money to some other teams and organizations. Before the crisis they were the winners of the elite A-group. After the problem arose they were threatened by loosing their rights to play in the 1st group and being returned to the local leagues. Moreover, their right(as the winner of the Bulgarian championship) to take part in the Champion’s League was withdrawn.

To help their favorite team, CSKA Sofia’s fans have started to collect money through an SMS-campaign. Each SMS sent, containing the word CSKA, to a special short code is worth 2.40lv(a bit more than 2EUR) and is going to an account for covering the debt. The good news is that the fans have collected most of the needed money and the most severe sanctions won’t bring down the team.

Such strategy is used by some other football team in the process of selection of future players. The SMS sent is granting vote rights to the sender and earns revenue to the team – money needed to buy the new player. How can you play bad after such selection?

Today we can see businesses using SMS for different purposes – marketing, notification, news, text to win campaigns and so on. In those cases usually SMS is a small part of a big project. However, there are plenty of businesses where SMS is in the middle of the business case and sometimes gives the competitive advantage. I will introduce four innovative SMS-based business cases that have been extremely successful in Nordics during the past years.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few days ago social networking site Facebook announced mobile extension to its popular developer platform. Great move, as mobile is definitely where things are going these days. However, it seems that it’s not very stable yet, and they have rushed a bit to get this news out.

In addition to showing snippets of information on the Facebook mobile page (m.facebook.com), application developers could use the API to add SMS interaction to their applications. SMS is great for allowing instant communication with the users wherever they are. However, it has also proved of being one of the most accessible and convenient ways to collect micropayments from users. There are several success stories of social networking sites in Europe, that have made fortunes using one or two simple premium SMS services neatly tied to the otherwise free website. For example, you can make your photo appear on the front page for some time, by sending premium SMS costing let’s say €1. This amount is then added to your phone bill and mobile operator is sharing the revenue with the website.

Eric Eldon from VentureBeat wrote:

Mobile apps may be a good way to monetize, though, Shen [RockYou co-founder Jia Shen] tells us: “Lots of people are thinking about how to run micropayments through phone bills” as high schoolers don’t have access to credit cards for doing things like buying Facebook’s virtual gifts.

At its current version though, Facebook Mobile API does not seem to support premium priced SMS, nor do they share any revenue with application developers, but I’m sure they’re thinking about it. As contextual advertising does not work, I think that SMS could become one of the easiest ways to monetize Facebook apps.

Good news for Fortumo users from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, who would like to cash out their revenues via PayPal. In the end of last month, PayPal announced new international withdrawal functionality for multiple countries including the Baltic states. Users from these countries can now receive payments to their PayPal accounts and withdraw the money to either bank accounts in the U.S. or to Visa debit or credit cards. Unfortunately many Visa debit cards do not have a Card Verification Number on the back of the card, which is required to receive payments. Of course one could also use the accounts to pay for other goods and services via PayPal or just send money to someone else. PayPal charges € 0,35 + 3,4% for receiving the money, and € 2 for withdrawing it to a Visa card.

Users from Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland can also withdraw their PayPal accounts to their local bank accounts. And Fortumo also supports direct bank transfers (in Euros) to local bank accounts in all the member states of the European Union or in EEA countries (that also includes Norway).