It seems like a match made in mobile heaven.

Monitise has announced a “global strategic alliance agreement” with Visa International Service Association, a subsidiary of Visa Inc.

The reported five-year agreement combines “Visa’s unmatched reach, payments expertise and trusted brand with the Monitise Mobile Money platform and toolkit.”

Basically, Monitise will be an enormously helpful vehicle for Visa’s already teeming offering of mobile services (including payments, transaction alerts and special offers) by providing support and even greater reach to the millions of Visa customers with mobile phones.

Although not many details have yet emerged, the news of the partnership is considered significant and an incredibly beneficial arrangement for Visa, which in recent months, has found increased competition in the mobile marketing realm from both Mastercard and American Express.

According to the announcement by Monitise, the five year contract value amounts to $13 million dollars.

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To quote Heath Ledger as the Joker: “if you’re good at something, never do it for free.”

That seems to be the thinking of late around the corporate towers of the New York Times.

And the “joke” could very well end up on lovers of the original mobile content provided by the venerable but financially struggling newspaper.

At some point soon, it is likely that the New York Times will begin charging users to access its news coverage on mobile devices.

Until now, the popular service has been free.

Citing lost revenue opportunities, the company is eager to move forward with aggressive plans to improve the service for which they will now charge.

“Mobile offers a better opportunity for paid content,” says a NY Times executive to Bloomberg News. “For publishers to offer their content for free in the mobile platform forever without getting paid very much money, I don’t think it’s going to be tenable.”

For now at least, The New York Times mobile content is available free of charge on the Apple iPhone.

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With paid mobile apps and content growing in popularity, and people becoming more comfortable with the idea of using their mobile devices for payments, Bango has introduced a new secure and low-cost method for integrating credit-card payments into apps and digital content.

With increased smartphone usage and the evolution of the mobile Web, Bango has created an ”easy on” ramp to selling content on the mobile web as well as a solution to give businesses a low-cost, easy way to capture revenue from the growing number of smartphone users- users that are getting a lot more comfortable purchasing items using their devices much like they would on their PCs.  

With the new solution from Bango, anyone can offer credit card payments to their mobile visitors and refine their product offer, pricing and consumer experience, with the flexibility to upgrade to operator billing through Bango when they’re ready.  “With the current rise in smartphone users, a lot of businesses who have never considered mobile before, are now looking at how they can capture revenue from this new market,” said Anil Malhotra, SVP Alliances & Marketing. “And many of these smartphone users, such as those with a Blackberry or Google phone, are used to using the web on their phones, and are familiar with credit card services.”

The solution works by offering a similar experience to purchasing via credit card on the normal Web, and cuts out many unnecessary steps such as entering the card type and a full billing address.  This speeds up purchases, leading to more successful transactions across all mobile devices.

Read the rest

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Maxing out your credit card? Ten Grand. Ending payoff balance? Twenty Grand.

Launching a payment platform to optimize business? Priceless.

For MasterCard, the financial services giant, there’s a big launch planned for the US later this month.

MasterCard announced its on-demand, person-to-person Mobile MoneySend payment platform will go live within the next two weeks.

According to the official word, “the Mobile MoneySend platform enables bank customers to offer P2P payments to their customers. Users can send and receive funds via SMS, mobile web, downloadable mobile application or PC, linking their mobile phone number to a MasterCard prepaid card issued by Bancorp. MasterCard adds that as more issuers enroll for the platform, their customers will be able to use MoneySend with their everyday accounts, including MasterCard debit, credit, prepaid or checking, as determined by their issuer.”

This week, CNBC reported that the major credit card companies (ranging from Visa to American Express) are stepping up efforts in the mobile world to attract new customers. MasterCard is certainly on board with this agenda, a development born in partnership with mobile payment solutions provider Obopay.

If you can’t wait, the platform is already available across the Asia Pacific, Middle East, and parts of Africa.

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Yes, mobile coupons haven’t quite caught on here in the US like they have in Japan, Eurpope and other areas, but it doesn’t mean the technology isn’t growing rapidly.  A new study sponsored by Juniper Research suggests that mobile coupons will be used by nearly 200 million mobile subscribers globally by 2013.  More specifically, The developed nations of the Far East, North America and Western Europe are forecast to account for the major part of the market by 2013.

“Today the overwhelming majority of coupons are paper-based, but the mobile phone is the ultimate individual marketing device and mobile coupon pilots show greatly increased redemption rates — often double digit percentages,” as the report states.  While this is true, some significant hurdles were identified, including the lack of suitable point of sale (POS) infrastructure at the supermarket checkout allowing for the quick and easy redemption of coupons, which is critical to the consumer experience.  Another obstacle is the fact that most mobile coupon campaigns rely on the use of mobile barcodes or SMS- technologies that not all devices support right now.

The industry is facing some problems, but all in all I think the technology will come around globally in the end.  With the advancement of more ubiquitous technologies aside from mobile barcodes, etc. more people and businesses will be able to participate.  For example, In the future Near Field Communications (NFC) will become popular in this application.  The numbers don’t lie- 200 million users in only 4 years means mobile coupons are expected to catch on in a big way.

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The Millennial Generation / Generation Y is known for being civic-minded and also for wanting instant gratification. The perfect blend of these two characteristics resulted in $40,000 donated to the Keep a Child Alive charitable organization through text messaging.

During eleven-time Grammy award winner Alicia Keys As I Am concert tour she partnered with the Mobile Giving Foundation to encourage text message donations of $5 from her audience. She took a few minutes to show a film clip from Alicia in Africa: Journey to the Motherland and then asked her fans to text the word ‘ALIVE’ to shortcode 90999. The text automatically sent the donation and showed up on their monthly phone bill.

When 6 to 12% of Alicia Keys concert goers responded with donations in $5 increments, over $40,000 was raised during the tour.

This text to donate system is possible due to the efforts of Mobile Accord, a Denver-based mobile provider. Their tool mGive is the platform that allows micro donations via text with carrier billing.

Truly, this is smart mobile marketing at its finest. The integration of having a real world experience (being at a concert), seeing a media presentation (the film clip) and then asking for the response on mobile is exactly the right formula. The fact that the target market is the generation for whom text messaging is as easy as breathing makes it all that much better.

My hat is tipped to Alicia Keys, Mobile Accord and all the early adopter fans who donated. (The campaign is still live, so if you feel so inclined, you can add your $5 to the cause - just text ‘ALIVE’ to 90999.)

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I just got finished reading this story on the Register about SMS enabled solar powered parking meters and how stealing money from parking meters is going to be tougher now in Eastbourne because the meter knows how to send an SMS meter in distress alert to the police department. Additionally, the device will let a meter attendant know that it needs to be purged of coins.

That’s a clever use of the technology but I’ve got a much better idea, one that eliminates the possibility of theft, the need to have coins collected and also turns the pricing model on its side by using dynamic pricing.

How? Let consumers start and stop the meter by using their mobile devices and replace the pay per minute model with demand based per minute pricing. If the meters are all mobile enabled devices capable of conducting a transaction then a central database knows what the inventory of available spaces looks like throughout the day… if the lot is busy guess what, the prices go up because available inventory is scarce. Conversely, when the lot is slow prices are reduced to incent consumers.

Crazy?

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