Blackberry App World: Carrier Billing via Bango now Live in 10 Countries

Posted on September 19, 2011 by

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.

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Industry news – Mobile payments from Bango increase GoSpoken.com eBook sales

Posted on September 14, 2011 by

Delivering a new type of content for today’s digital world, Gospoken.com offer customers access to thousands of eBooks and audio books to purchase and download directly on their smartphone and tablet 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

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2011 Annual Report and Notice of AGM

Posted on August 26, 2011 by

Click here to download the Bango 2011 Annual Report with the Notice of Annual General Meeting and here for the associated form of proxy.

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

Posted in General Market News | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

HTML5 getting support from Facebook?

Posted on June 22, 2011 by

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.

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

How big is the App Store Opportunity

Posted on May 29, 2011 by

Bango is powering the Blackberry App Store to enable customers to buy Apps and put the charges on their carrier bill.   Bango is also working with several other App Stores of various sizes to enable that capability to be used more widely, with announcements due in the coming months.

App Stores enable the download of free apps or “paid for” apps. Bango gets a small share of revenues from each payment transaction, so it is important to get some idea of the scale of the opportunity to see what returns might be available from this market, and important area for Bango in the coming years.

Vendors are highly secretive of the sales of Apps though their app stores. Apple, Nokia, Blackberry, Google, Amazon and many others have so far not revealed any financial details.  However, independent analysts have started to investigate the market, and are starting to publish their estimates.

iSuppli has recently pubplished its 2010 numbers  and there is a useful breakdown by vendor here at BGR

Bango will be preparing a roundup of some of the numbers, with a commentary later this year.

Posted in General Market News, Mobile Payment, Mobile Stats | Leave a comment

Mobile Wallet Opportunities for Bango

Posted on May 24, 2011 by

A number of shareholders have been asking about how Bango views the “mobile wallets” that have been discussed and announced a great deal over the last couple of years.

Mastercard/Nokia Visa Isis(Verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile/Discover) Sprint  Google PayPal

Mobile Wallets enable users to store financial credentials – like credit card details, bank account access codes and potentially some “stored value”.  Just like a real wallet might hold your credit cards, a secretly scribbled password for your bank account, and some cash.

Unlike a real wallet, your mobile  wallet can connect to the internet – possibly helping with security, and thru technologies like bar codes, cameras, accelerometers, and NFC it is possible for the wallet to reveal its contents and authenticate to a “merchant” without having to use a swipe card or chip and pin.

Bango enables mobile web pages or downloaded apps to collect payment from users – normally through their mobile operator (who then collects the payment) or a credit or debit card.

Bango has already integrated into the PayPal mobile wallet, which is starting to become more popular.  In the same way, a wallet holding credit cards, bank access credentials or a pre-pay can also be accessed by Bango – through the phone.  The app or website using Bango does not have to integrate into all the different possible mobile wallet standards (at our last count there were at least 38) or find out which wallet the user has, they can leave all that to Bango.  Bango can identify the available wallet, and connect to the most popular wallets – collecting payments. Just like Bango does with 50+ carrier billing systems.

So, if wallets become more popular, and are able to support apps and web access, Bango and Bango customers will be able to benefit.

Bango expects that wallets will continue to be in relatively small niches initially, until more standards develop. The technology – NFC, barcode, bumping, bluetooth etc. – will evolve at the same time.  Bango expects that within 5-6 years, most mobiles will be “NFC equipped” and therefore able to easily replace smartcards such as Oyster – driving mass adoption.

In Japan, the adoption of mobile wallets is more advanced – primarily because the largest mobile phone company – DoCoMo has been driving this for many years.  There is a great video about the “FELICA” system here.

Posted in General Market News, Mobile Payment | Tagged | Leave a comment

Bango raises £2.4 million via Share Placement

Posted on December 10, 2010 by

Bango is pleased to announce that it is raising £2.4 million via the placement of around 1.7 million new shares.

The proceeds of the Placing will strengthen the Company’s balance sheet, supporting its discussions with global industry leaders for its billing and analytics technology.

Application has been made to the London Stock Exchange for the New Ordinary Shares, which will rank pari passu with the existing shares in issue, to be admitted to trading on AIM. Admission is expected to become effective on 16 December 2010.

Ray Anderson, Chief Executive Officer of Bango plc, commented on this successful placement:

“We believe our relationship with RIM, providing payment services within the BlackBerry AppWorld, and our discussions with other application store owners have the potential to drive significant growth at Bango. This new investment is a strong endorsement of that potential, further strengthening our balance sheet and enabling us to fully capitalise on these opportunities as they arise.”

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