We’ve been working hard on this and now it’s ready: our in-app payments for Android.

As many of you know, in-app purchases are useful for developers who want to earn more money. 1-click mobile payments are incredibly easy to use and convert many times better than credit cards.

As some of you have noticed, there have been a couple of other announcements over the past weeks. How is Fortumo’s solution for in-app billing different from everyone else’s?

First, we are much easier to integrate. As with any other Fortumo serivice, you can configure it online in 5 minutes, download and integrate the Android billing library and go live! Some developers we have worked with say that the whole process does not take more than 15 minutes!

Second, ours is the only global in-app payment solution with instant activation. In most of our almost 40 countries, you are live instantly. In some countries, Fortumo reviews your service and activates it within 24 hours. In any case, we can provide you time-to-market speeds that none of our competitors will match.

And third, we are open to all developers, regardless of size and location. We do not ask for application forms nor grant limited private access to selected developers only. This makes us easily the most accessible mobile payments provider, suitable also for smaller and medium-sized app developers.

Check out Fortumo In-App Payments for Android

Give it a try and tell us what you think!

It’s no secret that – partly thanks to mobile payments –  more and more web-based businesses are profiting from the sale of virtual goods. Mobile payments in an online environment are growing faster than ever. Some experts believe that we are just in the beginning of this exciting journey.

In order to make the journey smoother for you, we’ve been working on a new service called FortuMoPay.

FortuMoPay is an international mobile payments service for selling credits in online games, web applications and social networks.

Let me walk you through how FortuMoPay works:

First, you let FortuMoPay know how much you want to charge for a “credit”, “virtual currency”, “silver coin” or whatever you want to call the good that you are selling. (Let’s say you have an online game and you want to sell 1 credit for 0.10 EUR.)

Then, FortuMoPay will automatically activate all available price points in all Fortumo countries. For example, in France, Fortumo can bill users 0.35 EUR, 0.5 EUR, 1.5 EUR and 3 EUR. Therefore, if the user chooses to pay 1.5 EUR, he would receive 15 credits. If he chooses to pay 3 EUR, he would receive 30 credits. The coolest thing is that it works out-of-the-box: you do not need to worry about short codes, keywords or conversion rates!

All you need to do is to set up a script on your server that communicates with Fortumo through HTTP protocol and embed your brand new FortuMoPay button to your site:

Clicking on the button will activate the end-user payment flow, handled by Fortumo. Click on the button (above) to try it!

We are happy to let you know that FortuMoPay is now officially available. Like all other Fortumo services, setting it up is quick, easy and free. Why not take your mobile payments experience to a next level and give FortuMoPay a try?

FortuMoPay is available here.

This time we would like to present you a tool developed by one of our partners: SMS Bulletin Board. This simple Google App Engine application written by Andris Reinman can help you receive and handle mobile payments using Fortumo’s Premium SMS-connectivity service.

If you are developing your own programs using Google Apps and would like to integrate SMS payments into your application, the SMS Bulletin Board is a perfect solution for you. You can use it either to build your own application on top of it or just implement mobile payments into you existing Google App. According to the author, “the application is able to receive message notifications from Fortumo, store the message data in the database and display 100 most recent messages in the frontpage of the application”.

You can try the live demo at http://smscharty.appspot.com.

SMS Bulletin Board is provided free of charge, basing on the MIT License. More information, including installation instructions and downloads, is available at http://code.google.com/p/sms-bulletinboard/.

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 »