CNN Digital has remained No. 1 in mobile news for the past 4 consecutive years. In 2011, CNN Digital boasted 19.4 million unique users monthly, beating its nearest competitor – Fox News Digital – by more than 60% (Nielsen Mobile Media View, January – November 2011). CNN’s mobile website generated a monthly average of 210.4 million global page views for the year. (Bango Analytics, January 1 – December 31, 2011).
Read the full release here ‘CNN Digital Outperforms Competition in 2011′
Bango has won the ‘Best Transactions Provider’ at the Mobile Entertainment Awards 2011. Having been nominated for the sixth consecutive year, this is the third time Bango has picked up this prestigious award.
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.
This is a question that is often asked by investors seeking to forecast how fast Bango’s transaction volume will grow in coming months and years.
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
Boku and Zong are systems that allow users of PC browser based applications to place charges to their phone bills – sometimes called “Bill to my Mobile Number”.
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:
RIM – the makers of the Blackberry – (NASDAQ: RIMM; TSX: RIM) announced today that a selection of premium apps worth a total value of more than $100 will be offered free of charge to subscribers as an expression of appreciation for their patience during the recent service disruptions. The apps will be made available to customers over the coming weeks on BlackBerry® App World™ and will continue to be available until December 31, 2011.
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.
Bango has been shortlisted for the Best Transactions Provider at the Mobile Entertainment Awards 2011, proving again that it is an innovative leader in the mobile payments field. This continues Bango’s run of being selected as a finalist every year since the ME awards began in 2006.
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.
The importance of Blackberry App World (BBAW) to the fortunes of RIM (The Maker of the ubiquitous Blackberry) was underlined by Mike Lazaridis – co-CEO of RIM – during their investor update on Friday 16th September ( http://www.rim.com/investors/events/ ).
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.
