Fortumoblog

Fortumo presents – Ukraine and Slovenia

Branimir Parashkevov — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 10:17:19 +0000

In the past few months, more and more countries from Eastern and Western Europe were joining our big Family. But at some point we thought that we need to even the load on both sides of our European connectivity map. Some would say that we already have Germany and it’s the center of Europe…and they would be wrong. Actually the geographical center of Europe is the village of Dilove located on the Tisza river which is in the largest country in Europe – Ukraine. So that’s why we introduce to you our new center of balance – Ukraine.

Once the country of fearsome cossacks and still a place with pristine nature and a lot of beautiful women, Ukraine is one of the fastest developing countries in the former USSR. It ranks among the top 45 countries in the world by its nominal GDP (according to CIA). Even more impressive is the fact that Ukraine is one of the 5 countries – leaders in the space research industry. They produce all kind of vehicles, among which is the largest plane ever – The Antonov An-124 Ruslan. What matters the most – with over 55.5million mobile subscribers (converted this is over 120% mobile penetration) it is a place that can take your mobile services to a new golden age.

The other new addition to our list is Slovenia. This jewel of the Balkan peninsula is famous with its amazing nature, wonderful wines and economic progress. If you are looking for a peaceful place to live - the 5th most idyllic place in Europe, according to Forbes, is in Slovenia and it’s called Bled (check the picture to the right). On the other hand, if you are keen on traveling – then the famous Slovenian Karst is the place for you. It is a very special, lyrical landscape, spreading over the south-western part of the country near the border with Italy. And if you “just” want to earn more by expanding your services into one of the countries with fastest developing economies – Slovenia can offer you over 100% mobile penetration and over 2mln mobile payers.

An interesting fact: Slovenia and Slovakia(that we presented to you a week ago) are the only former communist nations that are in the EU, the Eurozone, the Schengen area, OSCE, the Council of Europe, Nato, UNESCO, WTO and UN.

Stay Mobile! Keep the Fortumo way!

(Even More) Affiliate Tips – Affiliate Marketing is All About YOU

Alex Covic — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 07:54:56 +0000

Affiliate programs can be great. Sure, you might not become rich overnight like some ‘gurus’ claim in their 19.95$ e-books (actually, we have one of those, except it’s doesn’t feature any wild claims and it’s free), they can be a great way to make additional income, or, if you are really dedicated, they can even grow into a steady full- or part-time business. But, just like in life, the main requirement for becoming successful in affiliate marketing is patience, dedication (did I already mention it?), and hard work.

We know that there’s a lot of you out there who are either considering or already using Fortumo Affiliate Program - we received a lot of feedback and questions ever since we launched it back in February. And since you asked, we gave you some tips and finally created a growing Affiliate Advice section that sits right in your Affiliate account. The response was positive, and we figured there’s never too much of a good thing, so we’ll continue with the practice of publishing tips for affiliates – this time, I’ll try to focus not so much on our own affiliate program, but some of the best practices and general advices that should work for anyone trying to be effective in affiliate marketing. Read it all after the break.

First of all, I think that it’s important to define what differentiates affiliate marketing, or how it’s different from other ways of internet advertising. In my mind, it’ can be summarized in one sentence:

Affiliate marketing is as much about YOU as it is about the product you are advertising.

That’s right – one of the main reasons why affiliate marketing is working for everybody is that it functions more like one friend recommending a product to the other than a regular ol’ advertising campaign (unless you have huge audience – but even then, you should try to give it a personal touch).

What does this mean in practice? Basically, it means that you shouldn’t just rely on a banner or an ad to bring you clicks and joins. Keep in mind that the people reading your blog, visiting your web site or the people you communicate in social networks have established a personal relationship of sorts with you – they want to hear what you like and why, not just look into banners. Try to address them on a personal level – if you run a blog, publish a post about the product you are promoting, and put your affiliate link in the blogroll or in ‘Our Friends‘ section instead of just placing a banner or an ad somewhere. If you are promoting on a social network, or a forum, try to devote some time into writing a post explaining why you like the product you are advertising – people will be much more interested if you show some genuine enthusiasm towards it, and your message will become much more effective. And don’t forget to mention any special offers or coupons you might have to offer (like Fortumo’s bonus 5 € for new signups) – they are an efficient incentive, and can make your call to action much more attractive.

If your website doesn’t feature a blog, or you don’t feel that a post about the product in question would is a good fit to your website’s overall theme, you can still differentiate your affiliate offer from other ads you might have. Try to put it in a special category, or advertise it as an ‘offer from our partners’, or ‘our friends’ – in this way, it will stand out and it will be clear to the reader that this particular ad is important to you or different from the rest that you might have. And don’t be afraid to tell people that it’s an affiliate offer, and that you will have some benefit if they get involved – if your readers like your website and the content you are bringing them, they will most likely be interested in things you like and personally use, and if they can help you out by doing that, they probably will.

A great example, and a living proof of this concept, is one of our affiliates from Croatia (we wont link them right now, there will probably be a longer user case about them in the future). It’s a blog devoted solely to various affiliate and monetization programs for webmasters, and though their audience is much smaller compared to some other Fortumo affiliates, their conversion rates (the percentage of readers who actually sign up) are way above the average, and the clients that come to Fortumo through their affiliate link tend to make money using Fortumo, which benefits the affiliate as well. All this particular Fortumo affiliate did was to create one blog post where they are discussing Fortumo’s SMS services & Affiliate program and put their affiliate link in their blogroll. The reason it’s working out for them is the fact that they have managed to build a relationship between them and their readers over time, by giving solid, sound advice on one particular topic of interest – so now, when they recommend something, their users listen.

If you liked this post, and want to read more tips like it in the future, drop us a comment – we would love to keep them coming, but some encouragement is always appreciated :)

Fortumo user tells a story – souse.cc

Yichun Liu — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 07:41:11 +0000

Fortumo user tells a story will introduce membership verification service, an easy-to-adopt business model that has been common among Asian countries. Souse.cc is an open platform combined with forum discussion, chat room, blogging and online album. The owner of souse.cc, Zhe-Ming Lin, will share with us what motivates him to adopt such service and what it has brought to him.

What is this SMS-service about?

The SMS-service we adopted is very simple — for random visitors to register membership.

Whom is this SMS-service for?

The service of membership verification is open to everyone, and the real advantage is to protect the rights of existing members and to guarantee the quality of our chat room.

Where did the idea of integrating SMS-service to your website come from?

This will have to begin with building souse.cc chat room. From the very beginning it started to run, there had been numerous cases of robot registration, or random visitors who registered accounts and yet abandoned it not long after. Also, examples of users registering for the sake of posting commercial spams are plenty. Any kind of anti robot-registration validation is difficult to prevent such situation. So I thought the best way is to differentiate the values of members and visitors, by paying a small sum for membership validation.

Why did you decide to use Fortumo’s service to your web business?

I wanted to differentiate the values of members and visitors by charging registration fee. And making the process simple is the key point that I decided to use Fortumo’s service. There are already quite many mobile-payment channels in Taiwan, yet those are complicated to adopt, and some of them are not user-friendly. I found Fortumo by chance, and its simple-and-quick approaches are just perfect for my membership registration.

What has SMS-service additionally given you?

In addition to satisfying my need for anti-robot registration, Fortumo’s multi-country service functionality allows me to run my service in Taiwan, Hong Kong, China and Malaysia at the same time. Moreover, I was inspired by Fortumo’s flexible web 2.0 tool, and have implemented it to a new Facebook application. Such creative idea storming was what I didn’t foresee!

*As mentioned above, Zhe-Ming developed a cool Facebook application.

What’s it about? Take a wild guess, we’ll let you know soon:)

Прывітанне or nazdar? Both are welcomed!

Andrei — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 17:04:46 +0000

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.

Belarus, a country of friendly people, pure forests and tasty food, is at the same time a quickly growing market of modern technologies and innovations. Once famous for building BelAZ‘es and Belarus tractors, it’s now making progress in other forms of economy like mobile entertainment and online commerce. And while mobile penetration will be reaching 100% in 2010, it’s up to you to find the best way to attract those 10 million of mobile subscribers. And the best part is that the majority of population speaks Russian, so you can use the same tools as in Russia.

On the other hand, Slovakia is a high-income advanced economy located in the heart of the Europe with one of the fastest growth rates in the EU and OECD. It’s also famous for beautiful mountains called Tatras and dangerous castles, called hrad’s. Once a communist country, it has lately became an Tatra Tiger with new age technologies boosting to the market. And while local telecoms are fighting for the market, mobile penetration exceeds 100% and over 5 mln mobile subscribers are waiting for your content, apps and games. So what are you waiting for, create a revenue generating service right now!

So maybe it’s time to start learning some new words in Belarusian and Slovak languages? At least from now you know how to say hello.

Happy New SMS Year

Branimir Parashkevov — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 09:54:07 +0000

Six days ago the old year 2009 became history and its throne was taken by the new 2010. It is a year full of expectations and hope. Still, while some are waiting for the end of the ravaging economic crisis others already know that mobile revenue continues to grow, despite the recession.

Here are some raw facts from the holiday season, that you will find interesting.

150 millions text messages were sent in France for new year’s day from midnight ’til 1.00am;

Again in France, 274 million SMS sent on December the 24th (64% more compared 2008) and 292 million on the 25th (55% more compared 2008);

Swiss sent more than 55 million text messages on their mobile phones on New Year’s Eve.

The citizen of Belgium have sent 78,3 million SMS messages in the first hours of the new year and 62 million for Christmas.

The Bulgarians sent around 14 Million text messages at the new year’s eve.

In the Philippines 1,39 billion messages were sent (have in mind that the number of mobile phones users in this country is around 50 million !)

About 1 billion SMS were sent in India.

In Germany 300 million SMS were sent in the first minutes of the new year.

So much positive numbers and there are many more to be included….They show one thing – SMS will remain everyone’s favorite in 2010.

Use SMS to its best with Fortumo!

Fortumo user tells a story – transportinestonia.com

Marianne Voime — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 14:18:38 +0000

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!

What is your website transportinestonia.com about?
Basically, it is an environment for making price inquiries and also a database of different transportation companies. To use it an SMS of 10 EEK (~ 0.64 EUR) has to be sent. For transportation companies joining and presenting their information is for free.

Whom is it for?
The environment is created for transportation companies and smart people, who don’t want to waist their time for tens (hundreds?) of inquiries and prefer sending one SMS that enables to send an inquiry to hundreds of transportation companies at once.

Where did the idea of offering and starting a website like that come from?
The idea came when for a while I was connected with a transportation company. I noticed that a really big part of daily work goes to different inquiries and asking price requests from different companies. So, I thought this idea would help to decrease this part of daily work.

How have you applied SMS-services on your website?
After user sends an SMS, he/she will receive a one-time password with what it is possible to send inquiries for the transportation companies. In addition, the companies itself have an opportunity to highlight their company on the front page. A 25 EEK (~1,60 EUR) SMS needs to be sent for that.

Where did the idea of using SMS-services come from?
At the beginning, for few years, sending inquiries was actually for free, but during the time their number went so big that transportation companies couldn’t properly react and there were some cases, where those transportation companies received spam. Analyzing the situation we established a symbolic fee, to contribute to the environment’s targeted use.

Why did you decide to use SMS-services in your web business?
It is really comfortable to use SMS-services, they are easy to establish with different solutions and also easily understood for the customers.

What has SMS-service additionally given you?
SMS-services have additionally given me a comfortable and modern way to integrate payment option with my website.

hat is your website www.transportinestonia.com about?

Basically, it is an environment for making price inquiries and also a database of different transportation companies. To use it an SMS of 10 EEK (~ 0.64 EUR) has to be sent. For transportation companies joining and presenting their information is for free.
Whom is it for?

The environment is created for transportation companies and smart people, who don’t want to waist their time for tens (hundreds?) of inquiries and prefer sending one SMS that enables to send an inquiry to hundreds of transportation companies at once.
Where did the idea of offering and starting a website like that come from?

The idea came when for a while I was connected with a transportation company. I noticed that a really big part of daily work goes to different inquiries and asking price requests from different companies.
How have you applied SMS-services on your website?

After user sends an SMS, he/she will receive a one-time password with what it is possible to send inquiries for the transportation companies. In addition, the companies itself have an opportunity to highlight their company on the front page. A 25 EEK (~1,60 EUR) SMS needs to be sent for that.
Where did the idea of using SMS-services come from?

At the beginning, for few years, sending inquiries was actually for free, but during the time their number went so big that transportation companies couldn’t properly react and there were some cases, where those transportation companies received spam. Analyzing the situation we established a symbolic fee, to contribute to the environment’s targeted use.
Why did you decide to use SMS-services in your web business?

It is really comfortable to use SMS-services, they are easy to establish with different solutions and also easily understood for the customers.
What has SMS-service additionally given you?

SMS-services have additionally given me a comfortable and modern way to integrate payment option with my website.

Happy Holidays!

Fortumo — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 10:00:05 +0000

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

Fortumo Ideas: Earn more through our Affiliate program

Branimir Parashkevov — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 17:01:21 +0000

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: from Russia with Love

Andrei — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 12:19:30 +0000

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%

Get Statistics and New UI- Release Note 2nd Dec

Martin Koppel — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 19:41:57 +0000

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

M-Payment market in Poland

Adam Bednarek — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 19:39:58 +0000

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

Multi-Country Mobile Payment- Release Note 25th November

Martin Koppel — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 12:38:08 +0000

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.

South-east Europe is Buzzing with Business

Alex Covic — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 10:56:59 +0000

Well, this just might be a bit overdue, but we just felt the need to share some of the positive buzz and enthusiasm we experienced at biZbuZZ conference that took place in Niš, Serbia last month.

biZbuZZ is a annual conference dedicated to internet commerce, and it pretty much gathers most of Serbian internet ’scene’ – and some of prominent bloggers, entrepreneurs and internet folk from the region. This year, we had the pleasure of participating with a keynote on mobile and micropayment in general, with a special focus on Fortumo’s take on the topic (you can see the English language version of presentation and video footage in Serbian after the brake).

Apart from several very informative & engaging keynotes and presentations that took place during the conference, the main impression we left biZbuZZ with is the general sense of a vibrant, lively and motivated – though relatively small internet community that is emerging in Serbia, and SEE region in general. As we were saying over and over again on these pages in the past 2 or so years – people in South, East and Central Europe just get internet, mobile and related technologies. We can expect many more great things from the region in the near future.

If you aren’t already there, expanding your existing or creating new innovative mobile services – you definitely should be. South-East Europe is the place to be for internet entrepreneurs.

And for ~21 million of you Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian speakers, here’s the video footage, courtesy of live-e.tv. Hope you find it interesting, and feel free to drop us a comment.

Why Virtual Goods Are Hot?

Martin Koppel — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 13:56:48 +0000

Nowadays everyone is speaking about virtual goods market- its key players and who should be involved. Some say it is only for social networks and online games, others are determine that others could also ride on that wave. It’s no wonder, analysts estimate, this year, virtual goods revenue will be $1 billion in the U.S. and about $5 billion worldwide. Another analyst predicts annual revenues will reach $15 billion by 2012. Things have become even more interesting as already universities have been involved to study virtual goods buying habits to have more solid projections for the whole ecosystem (you can read more from here). But what do we know about virtual goods market so far?

Online games were the first adopters of virtual goods. They started to offer users the ability to upgrade their game characters and tools with new features for a small fee. Many such games generate most of their revenue using a virtual goods model.

Social networks were the next ones, they enable members to send virtual hugs, cards and other gifts for much less than buying and mailing a tangible gift to a friend. As most of the people have an account in at least one social network, it has rapidly grew into really big business as everything is moving online these days.

Others, such as luxury brands are beginning to deal with virtual goods as add-on, just-for-fun services. Such companies choose to adopt virtual goods as it is a great way for brands to get additional reach and put a brand in an environment where people can interact with it.

The biggest benefit is the incredible profit margin for virtual goods. Online games for example are providing virtual goods that do not have outstanding manufacturing or physical distribution costs. Marketing virtual goods is minimal as well—most promotion occurs via social media. So basically everything they make is the pure profit.

It is an interesting time with a lot of opportunities and I believe many cool changes are to come. So lets get all virtual and be part of the revolution. I also advice to see the presentation below about virtual goods market in Asia, you’ll be surprised what is actually happening there.

Virtual Goods in Asia

View more documents from Benjamin Joffe.

Indonesia – the rising phoenix from South East Asia

Pohan — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:08:43 +0000

Sumatra and Java are not the only treasures you are related to with Indonesia. This is the most rapidly growing mobile commerce market in the South East Asia, with annual 18% growth rate (2007-2010 est.). It is also the “BIGGEST” mobile market in South East Asia, with 144.64 million mobile subscribers (Q1 2009).

In order to help our users to explore the potential, Fortumo has been working on the connectivity to this archipelago state for more than half an year. Despite all the complicities and difficulties, we are finally ready to lift the veil and present the “precious” – Indonesia, to you.

Market Scan:
Population: 230 Millions
Mobile Subscribers: 144.64 Millions (Q1 2009)
Mobile Penetration: 56.8%
Mobile Internet users: 146 Millions (2010 est)
Operators supported: Telkomsel, Indosat, Excelcomindo
Billing Method: MT Billing

Indonesians sent out more than 1 billion SMS in the last Christmas and New Year season alone. People are keen to the SMS media here. Why not start to polish your creative mind and take the advantage fortumo offers to discover this tropical paradise.