It’s cold and snowy outside, but team Fortumo has no time for making snowmen or playing snowballs, because we are making our best to bring you the “best of the best” mobile payments. And this time, I would like to introduce you 2 new countries in our Family: meet Belarus and Slovakia.

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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!

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

This week we can finally share the news we have been holding up for few weeks now. Most of you like to use our most open service- Premium SMS-connectivity, mainly because it allows you to integrate the payment to existing user experience and interface with ease. As most of you also run the services in several countries, it was inevitable that we had to build a multi-country support for our most popular and open service type.

You can now activate  your Mobile Payment or create other mobile value added service in 28 countries at once within 5 minutes with Premium SMS-Connectivity service. With this you can not only save time, but have only one integration for all the countries you work. This means you don’t have to do backend implementation for 28 countries, you set it up just for one service and you are online and ready to do business.

But wait, that’s not everything. We thought that when you run an international business, you most probably have also a lot of work to get all the promotional texts in order.  It’s pretty time consuming and boring to copy paste all the promotional materials for 28 countries in different languages.

No worries, we have thought for that as well. You can also setup your server to make API calls to Fortumo in order to automatically download promotional information in right format as an XML document. You can find the link to API call under Setup tab on your service view.

We hope you’ll like these improvements and don’t worry we have new surprises to come soon. Meanwhile stay tuned and check out what is the next country we’ll launch soon.

Some of you have approached us and asked some improvements for messages view. Perviously when you had a customer complaint or had to search some specific message from thousands of messages, you had to download .csv file and seek the information from your desktop application. We have made this much easier now, and you can have everything done in your browser.

You can now use the search function in messages view to seek particular messages when ever you want. You can search information by senders phone number or by message content. We hope this will make things a lot easier for you.

In addition:
- we have improved the messages chart, so you could have better overview about the results
- we have now improved SMS-Adbox’s admin possibilities. Besides the previous features, you can now hide your own messages in case you make a spelling mistake

Last week we introduced a brand new service to our customers. It’s the SMS-Publisher – the application that helps you accept payments for your web page or blog content by providing you with a unique and simple SMS-based payment platform.

And how does it works? After logging in to your account, you can start uploading text, images or documents to your SMS Publisher account’s protected content area. After saving your work, you receive a unique HTML code for the content you just uploaded. You can then copy-paste this HTML code to your webpage content area or into your blog post. Read the rest of this entry »

This week’s release is mostly for people who use our chat/adbox service. It doesn’t matter are you using this service as a way to enable paid ads or notifications or you just want make you blog more interactive. These new improvements will be still useful for you.

In addition to admin function and ability to send messages through Fortumo web interface to your service there are now:

- Timestamps for every message
– All the links are directly click-able
– You can choose whether the messages would appear ascending and descending

This week we managed to release a lot of things we have been planning for some time already. At first I would like to introduce you our brand new Take a Tour page . In case you need to explain anyone what Fortumo is in 10 seconds, you should just direct people to that page. Clean and simple, all the information about Fortumo in seconds and the best part is- no kinky animations, avatars or social media videos

We have also improved the conditions in Poland . Due to the popular demand, we made new, higher end user prices available.  You can now choose 19 and 25 PLN tariffs for your services as well. And the best part here is, you can now get better revenue sharing in Poland.  See more details from the country page.

Last but not least, we have opened up in Western Europe. With this release we have removed invitations from French, Spanish and Portuguese sites. Now you are all free to create services in these 3 countries without any restrictions. The best part here is, we have opened 3 new countries and this time they are something really special – UK, Ireland and Germany. The countries will be available on invitation basis only. This means only 50 people per day can get access and start doing business in those three countries. You can ask invitations from local sites: fortumo.co.uk and fortumo.de

When you have SMS-chatbox on your website either just for chat or as a wall for news, ads or something else, you would also like to administrate it. Since you want to be ready if someone sends irrelevant or even stupid messages to your ads section.

You can now breathe easily, now you can choose which messages are visible in your ad-box/chatbox and which are not. But how to do that? It’s really simple, you just go to the messages view and un-tick those messages that are not necessary.

In case you have forgotten you can also place your own messages for free via Fortumo web interface (see detailed description) which enables you to have more interactive chatbox or ad-box.

Enjoy the admin features, but don’t control the content too much

As time passes new payment methods are becoming more and more relevant for internet businesses. You have to be flexible to reach to everyone, therefor it is wise to use alternative payment methods.

We are glad to present you new alternative – mobile payment. It is an alternative payment method in Romania with higher price points and better revenue sharing. As it is better known as Micropayment in Romania we have named it after that. Micropayment is meant for monetizing physical goods (CD-s, books etc), online membership and virtual goods. Like Premium SMS-connectivity it allows you to create practically any service that you could think of, but it requires some programming skills and a place to host your service.

Micropayment works in Romania only for Orange and Vodafone and only companies can run this service type. Read more about Micropayment.