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 ME 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 pioneering 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.

Martin Harris, SVP Strategic Accounts, who collected the award on behalf of Bango, said, “The competition in the Best Transaction Provider category included other big named players such as Ericsson IPX, OpenMarket and TxtNation, so we are proud to have been recognised by our industry peers and selected as the best in the business again this year.”

Held in London the awards show is one of the world’s key mobile entertainment industry events, attracting over 300 senior professionals to celebrate innovation and success in the mobile content space.

Bango would like to thank the voting panel of around 400 execs from all sectors of the industry for choosing us as the Best Transactions Provider 2011.

Bango’s unique technology and operator relationships, plus millions of consumer profiles worldwide, enable businesses and developers to market and sell digital content more effectively to mobile device users.

With over 5 billion mobile phones worldwide, Bango Payment technology leverages operator billing, credit cards, PayPal plus unique ‘social payment’ functionality, enabling any phone user to purchase content and services from their device using the optimum payment method available to them.

Content and services are becoming digitized at an ever increasing rate and the internet usage model is becoming dominated by mobile devices. Bango is a key technology provider in this evolving, fast growing, global industry.

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.

Bango scored a hat trick to claim the award for Best Billing Provider at the 2007 and 2008 ME Awards and in 2006 CEO Ray Anderson picked up the most prestigious award of the evening for his “Outstanding contribution to mobile entertainment”.

Organized and hosted by Mobile Entertainment magazine, the ME Awards celebrate innovation and achievement in the mobile content space and the winners are chosen by a voting panel of several hundred industry executives.

This year’s ME Awards will be held on 23rd November in, London. Bango will be in attendance with everything crossed!

Bango announces that it provides Mobcast, the digital book software platform, with operator billing for its mobile digital bookshop GoSpoken.com. This means book-loving customers worldwide have the option to quickly and easily pay for eBooks and place the charge on their phone bill. The Bango charge-to-bill technology even works when the device connects over Wi-Fi.

Mobcast developed GoSpoken.com after spotting the potential offered by the increasing numbers and capabilities of mobile phones. With thousands of bestseller titles available on the digital bookshop, customers are able to purchase eBooks and audio books from the extensive catalogue and download them across their phone, PC, tablet or eReader from as little as 50p / 50¢.

Bango enables GoSpoken.com customers to place a charge on their phone bill for purchases made directly from the mobile version of the digital bookshop. This click-to-pay consumer experience is seamless and secure, maximizing conversion rates for purchases from connected phones and tablets across multiple platforms and networks including Wi-Fi.

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.”

Operator billing provides customers with the quickest and easiest way to pay for content and services from their mobile device. We see an average of 70% payment conversion through operator billing compared to 40% for credit card”, said Anil Malhotra, SVP Marketing at Bango. “The customer experience is crucial and with operator billing a simple single-click is all that’s required to make a purchase.”

Bango provides Mobcast with detailed payment reports to track their revenues and see conversion rates for all purchases. In addition, Bango delivers insightful information about their customers, including country, network, device type and status of billing transactions, enabling Mobcast to provide an optimized service to their customers.

Having anticipated the market for digital books to mobile devices years ago, Mobcast is now a successful platform for digital books on both sides of the Atlantic. As it continues to grow through product innovation, Bango supports Mobcast by providing its leading billing solution.

The Opera Mobile Store is quickly and easily accessed through a single-click from the Opera Mini and Opera Mobile browsers, making it immediately accessible to more than 100 million customers with no downloading or special provisioning required. The Opera Mobile Store is also accessible through any other mobile browser by going to mobilestore.opera.com. Every user will discover apps and content targeting their specific mobile device, local market and currency. The store is one of the top ten app store services for mobile phone users available worldwide today.

Opera’s breakthrough is the delivery of a browser-based app store”, said Ray Anderson, Bango CEO “This means that localization, adaptation to different devices, support for multiple payment methods and currencies, can all be provisioned in real-time without the need to modify software on the device. Bango payment technology will automatically calculate and deliver the optimal payment experience for each individual user of the Opera Mobile Store, giving customers a great experience wherever they are and maximizing revenues for developers. We are proud to be working with Opera to provide this service”.

Our app store is hugely popular across the world with millions of customers accessing content every day. Delivering the best payment experience to our customers is essential and Bango provides the most sophisticated mobile payment technology available,” said Mahi de Silva, EVP, Consumer Mobile, Opera Software.

Bango powers global app stores with payment capabilities designed around the mobile device experience. Over ten years, the Bango service has evolved into a market-hardened platform trusted by the world’s largest content publishers and app stores. In addition to providing sophisticated billing capabilities the Bango platform delivers real-time analytics, full reporting and settlement services and customer support.

Bango Inc. announced that it has further expanded its mobile payment platform by adding carrier billing in Canada. This brings the total number of subscribers it reaches through carrier billing in North America to over 200 million. Bango additionally provides mobile credit card and PayPal for payments that cannot be charged to the carrier bill.

Bango mobile payment technology is designed to enable the migration of e-commerce services from desktop PCs to the mobile phone and tablets. Developers and publishers using the Bango platform to reach their mobile customers benefit from one-click payment to the carrier phone bill.

App store providers and content publishers connect their services once to the Bango platform and reach over 600 million paying mobile users worldwide, in 120 countries. Mobile payments are benefiting from the take-off in smartphone usage, led initially by the iPhone. However Apple requires all payments to be made through iTunes. But with smartphones becoming so popular, merchants are able to use the Bango platform to enable mobile payment for products sold on BlackBerry, Android, Nokia and other platforms.

Outside Apple’s walled garden, direct carrier billing for apps and mobile web content has replaced premium SMS as the payment standard for mobile commerce”, said Anil Malhotra, SVP Marketing at Bango. “Driven by the greater flexibility and reliability of direct carrier charging, the growth opportunity for m-commerce is enormous as usage of internet services migrates on mass from PCs to billions of mobile devices.”

Bango allows users to place charges on their phone bills for purchases made directly from the mobile device, including tablets. Bango’s mobile device billing is automatically authenticated through its partnerships with mobile carriers. This click-to-pay consumer experience is seamless and secure, maximizing conversion rates for purchases from connected phones and tablets.

This year we are opening-up mobile billing in Latin America and key Asian territories, and forecast coverage of 1 billion paying customers by year end – greater reach than any e-commerce system,” said Malhotra. “Bango self-optimizes on-line payment from both smartphones and feature phones, meaning one connection to Bango delivers mobile payment worldwide.”

Bango pioneered the mobile payments market by delivering carrier billing for content and services with Vodafone in 2004, AT&T in 2005, Orange in 2006, Telefonica in 2007, Sprint in 2008 and T-Mobile in 2009. In 2010 Bango delivered carrier billing for application developers distributing through the BlackBerry app store, enabling in-app payments charged to the phone bill. The company is the leading provider of next generation mobile payments from apps and the mobile web, benefiting from consumers who make purchases from their smartphones and other mobile devices.