Fortumoblog » Payments

In-App Payments for Android are here!

Rain Rannu — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 11:25:08 +0000

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!

Introducing FortuMoPay

Rain Rannu — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 07:15:31 +0000

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.

SMS Bulletin Board – Fortumo services in your Google App

Adam Bednarek — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 10:17:36 +0000

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/.

Web 2.0 Start up Smart Trilogy III: The ultimate secret “R”s

Pohan — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 21:48:45 +0000

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 “Recurring”. Despite you might be still thinking how to market or sell your products; the punch line to the ultimate secret is actually elsewhere. “Recurring monetization” is indeed quite different from the conventional merchant’s logic. However, it is the sleekest model for Web 2.0’s financial success as recurring services generate sustainable income while the free Web 2.0 spirit pumps in more users.

These 2 perfect strategies compliment each other. However, how to find the niche/segmentation to provide the added value is definitely something needed to be taken into consideration while designing the recurring services. If you are running a web 2.0 and your business model is still missing, it is definitely worthy to cool down your passion towards user numbers but also invest some time in reviewing all the possible points for recurring value added services.

Nevertheless, we see in the real practice how mobile micro payment is pouring even more fuel into the fire. As this mutant tool has blurred out the feeling of conventional payment and is indeed a cash cow, we see more and more Web 2.0 embrace this new method. Actually the breaking news of today is “Facebook starts to test mobile payment solutions.” This is definitely a gold rush and I have told you all the secrets to dig out your own gold mine. End of the series.

Web 2.0 Start up Smart Trilogy II: Neo-Relativity “Many a little makes a mickle”

Pohan — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 20:41:55 +0000

“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 can be multiplied with zero cost in real time.

Unfortunately, end users seem to be more aware of this perception than business people who still try to sell goods with price in the material world. A well known example is the audiovisual industry; we saw how their attempt to carry on the material value (big bucks) in the virtual world ended up in devastation. What’s the reasonable “value” apparently is another story in the virtual world.

And that’s how the ancient wisdom of “Many a little makes a mickle” made its own come back with the modern name micro-payment. The hot scene at the “A” fruit store clearly demonstrates the life sample of this wisdom. You can be a millionaire even when your product is at extremely low price. Pennies can top up to million. You don’t even need to worry about the supply and inventory level in the virtual world.

The only issue is “To give a buck or two takes only seconds in the real world while it is comparative painful to do the same thing in the virtual world”. For the security reason (weird that we need to ensure the “virtual” transaction is real…), the current internet payment tools aren’t exactly user friendly nor safe despite all the security measurements. For Web 2.0 start-ups, to change user’s mentality to pay for their service is already a difficult enough task. To ease the pain in collecting payment is absolutely a horrific mission.

There is no solution? Of course, there is. Actually, most people see the ultimate solution already – mobile payment. However, many others are struggling with their internal “value” system to adopt this payment tool. Why? Because the cost structure of mobile payment seems to be very different from the normal perception of a “payment tool”. Many people simply deny the idea that the cost might be even bigger than their share in some markets.

This is actually a flaw in the human brain. As I tried to explain earlier, everything is relative and the most difficult thing to change is actually one’s perception. If embracing a new pricing strategy is not an issue, why embracing a new payment tool is? In terms of making money, there are only 2 finite states, either getting it or not getting it. Why considering other irrelevant factors?

Let me “borrow” some statistics from some fellow competitors.

N company

Our customers observe a revenue increase by 400% after the integration of Mobile payment and even mobile devices using Wi-Fi have a 30% surge in the transactions.

B company

The conversion rate is 60% comparing to 7% while using credit cards

Z company

Our solution converts web visitor to active buyers 10 times better than any other payment mechanism.

Let’s visualize it. Piggy’s before and after demo.

Do you notice the difference? Do I manage to change your perception? Open sesames!

Web 2.0 Start up Smart Trilogy I: Plan your “income” in the biz plan

Pohan — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:46:11 +0000

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 web 2.0 start-ups die out in silence because they fail to feed themselves before a rich daddy adopts them.

Let’s see the classic examples:

Specimen A, an ambitious travel social network “T”

Network – Strong (multi-national team, in association with a global student NGO)

Market – Whole World

Idea – Brilliant (travel social network with “Glocal” knowledge)

Product – Sleek and well focused

Specimen B, a SNS targeting on OL (office ladies) “L”

Network – 4 people (with no outside network & limited resource)

Market – Taiwan

Idea – Brilliant niche market (single OLs consume the most in the demography)

Product – Disorganized compound

You might wonder “T” would be the favorable by the market as it seems to have better advantage. Somehow one year later, “T” is more or less a typical internet carcass. I recalled when I talked to one of the co-founders about their monetization plan. They told me it’s not their priority at that moment. When the time is right, they would think about it.

When the time is right? Unfortunately, they did not manage to survive for that long to see the right time. On the contrary, the start-up “L”, with their disorganized compound, they have manifested profit and expanded to another country. What is the successful secret of “L”? To be honest, it’s really simple. They tried to monetize all sorts of their products and discovered their users did not reject the idea of micro-payment. They then integrated mobile payment as part of their interactive application design and voila! they hit the goldmine.

It’s complicated of course the factors involved in the success or failure of a start-up project. But it’s obvious, when you open up a business, you plan your income sources and the more sources of income, the better it is. In the virtual world, the production of virtual service or goods costs virtually nothing. Don’t sell it in the way as selling material goods as you will also virtually get nothing. Embrace the idea of micro-payment. Fortumo empowers your creativity.

Test your servises from web and other features – Release note 25th Feb

Martin Koppel — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 16:13:27 +0000

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

People outside Europe can now get the payout also through Moneybookers

SMS-pay password can now also be valid only one time

affiliate system – promote Fortumo and earn additional revenue

Fortumo in virtualgoodsnews

Martin Koppel — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:12:35 +0000

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 .

CSKA (Bulgaria) Saved by a SMS Campaign

Branimir Parashkevov — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 09:05:13 +0000

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?

Top 4 innovative SMS-based business cases

Martin Koppel — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 14:25:24 +0000

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.

1. SMS-auction

An SMS-auction is where user’s text in a bid for an advertised item. The system can be set for “highest bid wins” or “lowest unique bid wins” mode. Either way, the user receives a reply message acknowledging the bid and advising them of its position. There are different variations on that business model, which all have their own advantages. Get a general idea of SMS-auctions.
* Bimbaso is a good sample of lowest unique bid auction
* sms2bid is an Australian version of highest bid auction
* Sendioksjon is an Estonian neat version of SMS-auction, where every SMS increases the price per 0,006 EUR and extends the auction by 2,5 minutes. Last person who sends the message gets the product.

2. SMS-loan

It is probably the most profitable SMS-based business, which has also raised some ethical issues. Many countries have already regulated their market for SMS-loans and some countries are doing it right now. Business case is simple – give out loans for small sums with big interests in a really quick and easy to use way. Before creating your own SMS-loan office, read those two stories as well: SMS-loan sharking and loanshark 2.0.

3. Browser based games

Browser based games are quite popular among youth. Believe me, there are plenty of people who want to do something besides shooting someone or playing flash games. Business case here is this – if you want to get advantage over other players, use paid services. Get cool widgets, more money, fame, train yourself etc. Many Fortumo clients have said that for micro-payments SMS is the best one. Every player has a mobile phone these days and they are using it impulsively.

4. Social Networks

Who isn’t a member of some social network nowadays. Some of them have a strong business case behind the solution; some of them don’t have a business case at all. Smaller local social networks have solved it really easily. There are 5 simple steps:
1. you have a social network where people love to spend their time
2. think what could be the extra feature for what users are willing to pay small sums
3. monetize these features with SMS
4. let people know about new opportunities
5. start earning revenue even while you are sleeping

Some things that have been monetized: sending presents, changing the background theme of your profile, getting fame, giving higher points to users, highlight your account/ad/picture etc.

Facebook app monetization via SMS?

Veljo Otsason — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 16:44:40 +0000

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.

PayPal expansion

Veljo Otsason — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 15:40:43 +0000

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).