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%

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

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

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.

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).

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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.

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.

This time in section Fortumo user tells a story we would like to introduce you a neat web and SMS-service developed by Lapadoo. translate.lapadoo.com is a web based translation service that brings translation to your cellphone. No need to have any separated application or even Internet access, the whole translation is done via SMS.

“The service is intended for all those who need translation help while being abroad without access to a computer or dictionary. All you need is to know the phrase you want to translate and your cell phone. “

Where did the idea of offering and starting a service like that come from?

Like many other good ideas, the mobile translation service was born while drinking beer with my buddies. One of my friends was telling me about a comical failure he had due to not understanding the local language. While listening to his story, it suddenly occurred to me – I should make a  service that allows people to translate sentences from one language to another despite the location and situation.

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It is hottest topic in the web biz world. No matter it’s on TC, Virtual Goods News, Venture Beat or even BBC, people everywhere are talking about the vitality of the virtual goods market in Asia. Many people are stunned by the fact that the biggest market of virtual goods is actually not in USA but in Asia. In a matter of fact, the VG in Asia is actually a $5 billion market in 2008, which is 25 times bigger than the States.

Indeed, most people from other parts of the world have just realized Asia has been in the leading position of VG for quite a while already. No matter on SNS or on web games, in China or in South Korea, the Asian counterparts seem to be steps ahead in terms of virtual goods monetization comparing to other places.
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Exactly 2 years ago we publicly launched Fortumo in 7 countries. Fortumo become available in Nordic and Baltic countries building a bridge for web entrepreneurs.

Fortumo celebrates that day as its B-day, although we had been working on this project for some time already. I had a looked at the very early posts in this blog and suggest you to do the same. You can find very interesting reading, for instance the very first teaser post and a peek behind curtains. I also advise you to read our Fortumo user tells a story section, you can find pretty interesting user cases.

It is funny how things have changed during this short period of time.

Today Fortumo operates in 29 countries in Europe and Asia and Pacific. Our latest destinations have been Hong Kong and Bosnia and Herzogovina.

Fortumo has helped more than 28 000 companies and individuals to take advantage of Fortumo’s easy and open platform. These people and companies have created more than 76 000 revenue generating SMS-services.

Best part here is that most of them have been small and medium sized web companies who didn’t have plans and possibility for expansion. Now they can do it ease.

Don’t worry this is just a beginning of the journey – new service types, new countries and even new continents are soon to come. A small hint would be appropriate here. An interesting country will come soon, it starts with R and it is pretty cold there during the winter

Stay mobile and expand a lot