Read the full release here ‘CNN Digital Outperforms Competition in 2011′

With Bango’s CEO Ray Anderson being recognised for Outstanding Contribution to the Mobile Industry in 2006, Bango went on to win the ‘Best Payment Provider’ in 2007, again in 2008, and now in 2011, a testament to the continued growth of Bango’s industry leading payments platform.

Bango received the award in recognition of its success as a leading payment provider for app stores, including BlackBerry App World, and its rapidly expanding direct operator billing connections, micro payment capabilities and payment reporting which links to its successful analytics products.

Bango is unable to disclose information about the sales of our customers, but a small Blackberry App seller has published a Blog entry here.

According to EBSCER: “Use of carrier billing has increased for the 14th straight month. September saw the use of carrier billing increase to 41.3% of all sales.”  and looking at the graph he provides it is easy to see that the share of billing via carrier (Mobile Operator) – which is powered by Bango – is accelerating fast.

Where sales in territories are currently restricted to paypal or credit card
only, significant additional revenue is anticipated with the addition of carrier
billing.

Ray

Bango is focussed on collecting payments from applications running on a mobile device – typically with a mobile operator connection from that device.

Bango technology and our direct carrier relationships enable us to provide a superior user experience which delivers more sales.

Here is a slide which shows (in a “gamer friendly way”) why Bango is better on mobile:

See: http://press.rim.com/release.jsp?id=5214 for a list of apps and more details.

Bango gets a very small share of the sale of each BlackBerry App World App, for providing the carrier payment infrastructure, payment processing and settlement services.

If Apps that would otherwise have been sold are provided free of charge, then during that 8-10 week period Bango would lose that portion of its revenue.  Ten Apps are being offered free of charge in App World – out of thousands that are for sale, so it is unlikley there will be a significant revenue impact.

On the other hand, it is a common practice to give away Premium Apps in some of the other App Stores – most notably Amazon’s – offer free Premium Apps to drive new users to their store, and drive customer delight and encourage more sales later.  See http://www.amazon.com/mobile-apps/b?node=2350149011

There is therefore a possible upside in this Premium App give-away in that it may stimulate users to buy more Apps and to visit the App World more often.

We believe this is a generous gesture by RIM to reward users for their patience and loyalty, which could have the side effect of helping more users discover the benefits of quality Apps on their BlackBerries.

This latest accolade is a testament to the longevity of the Bango technology and business that launched the idea of mobile payments for internet-enabled phones in many markets. Bango continues to pioneer new payment technologies to meet the growing demand for digital content and services from smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. The Bango platform is emerging as the mobile industry’s “open market” alternative to Apple iTunes for payments, powering major app stores such as BlackBerry App World.

Mike showed a slide to outline the key capabilities of App World 3.0, which has just started to be deployed to Blackberry users.  Alongside the enhanced merchandizing and discovery features of BBAW, the importance of Carrier Billing was mentioned, and the  fact that Carrier Billing (which is powered by Bango) was now live in TEN countries.

Bango started enabling Carrier Billing for BBAW in August 2010, going live with AT&T Wireless.  Recent progress has been brisk, and the announcement of 10 countries rolled our already demostrated Bango’s progress over the past year.

With BBAW deployed in 131 markets world-wide, there is still a huge opportunity for further carrier billing activity, and Bango is working hard to deliver this as fast as possible to generate more sales for Blackberry App World vendors and to improve the user experience on Blackberry devices.

Bango provides operator billing for the mobile digital bookshop enabling book-lovers worldwide to quickly and easily pay for eBooks and place the charge on their phone bill.

“By using Bango to deliver a consistent operator payment experience to all our customers we have seen a marked increase in sales. Conversion rates using operator billing are much higher than using other methods, and easier for our consumers”, said Stephen Crawford, Operations Director at Mobcast. “Over 50% of our customers read with their Android phone and an increasing number are using Wi-Fi for the faster connection speeds on offer – they can now buy the same way as everyone else. 75% of our customers choose operator billing through Bango, and no other billing solution lets our smartphone customers simply click-to-pay without additional registration.”

Read our full industry release here

Click here to order a printed copy of the Bango 2011 Annual Report.

The Company’s AGM will be held at 2pm on Monday 19th September 2011 at the offices of Threadneedle Communications, Aldermary House, 10-15 Queen Street, London, EC1N 1TX.

View the 2011 AGM notice, 2011 AGM notice Explanatory notes

Readers of blog.bango.com will be well aware of Bango’s strong support for the development of “web apps” – which can be delivered across a wide range of devices by using technologies such as HTML5 and modern browsers.   Bango technology has been optimized for browser deployment, and we see the browser as a great platform to enable truly explosive growth of mobile by making apps less dependent on the handset operating system.   If you want to share an App or service with others, it makes more sense to mail or tweet out a link to a web app than to try to get your friends to download apps!

It seems like Facebook may have the same vision according to an article in TechCrunch , joining Twitter and Google in pushing towards the mobile browser as the “Killer Platform”

There are some interesting points in the article:

“Facebook is about to launch a mobile platform aimed squarely at working on the iPhone (and iPad). But it won’t be distributed through the App Store as a native application, it will be entirely HTML5-based and work in Safari.”

and “those familiar with the project believe the intention is very clear: to use Apple’s own devices against them to break the stranglehold they have on mobile app distribution. With nearly 700 million users, Facebook is certainly in the position to challenge the almighty App Store distribution mechanism. But they need to be able to do so on Apple’s devices which make up a key chunk of the market.”

Bango provides payment services that work really well in web apps, so it was interesting to read TechCrunch’s take on payments in the case of Facebook:

“One thing the App Store has nailed is an easy payment system. Facebook has been attempting to build the same thing with Credits, but so far hasn’t done much in the mobile space. With Project Spartan, they intend to have Credits built-in to allow developers to sell apps and offer in-app purchases. This will be vital for a partner like Zynga, for example.”

We don’t know whether “Project Spartan” actually exists or whether its a “labs” project, as Facebook has not made any announcements.  Nevertheless, the ideas presented by TechCrunch are compelling, not only for Facebook but for any App or platform developer looking to take their services to a mass audience.

Bango thrives in an open environment where consumers have choice of apps and are not constrained by a “prison garden” mentality that tries to force loyalty to particular devices.  Seems like Facebook could be joining Bango, Google, Twitter and others as a strong ally in this new wave.