Large brands switching to mobile web to maximize revenue and marketing impact benefit from bespoke services

Bango today launched Bango Enterprise, a new service tailored to the specific needs of the world’s largest content providers. Bango Enterprise comprises a comprehensive service package and support to complement Bango’s high conversion rate mobile billing platform. Bango Enterprise is designed to meet the needs of the growing number of large music, games, video and social networking brands who are switching their businesses to use the mobile web.

Bango payment technology delivers unique capabilities developed through ten years of innovation and experience alongside the company’s strategic partners, including leading mobile operators. The new Enterprise service gives big brands direct access to this experience encompassing technical, marketing and commercial know-how. Many of the most successful brands on the mobile web, including Buongiorno, Dada, Flycell, EA Games and Gameloft, already use Bango for mobile billing and analytics. Large brands that have built their businesses on the fixed web are now following in their footsteps.

To deliver this Enterprise service a team has been established to provide dedicated account management across multiple countries and billing routes. Enterprise customers get worldwide customer service, pro-active account management, and early access to new technologies. A Service Level Agreement provides uptime guarantees.

“Bango mobile products enable everyone from start-up to global media brand to have a successful mobile web business,“ said Elaine Davies, VP Customer Services. “Increasingly, the world’s biggest brands, generating millions of dollars in revenue every month, are putting their mobile payment business through Bango, and in response to this trend we’ve developed an enterprise service to support their special requirements.”

Bango is leading the evolution of mobile payment and analytics standards. With the new Bango Enterprise service, large content providers benefit from being part of this evolution by getting direct access to Bango’s product roadmaps and beta programs. In addition they get a single point of technical integration for their mobile billing and mobile analytics needs, with the ability to integrate their own systems and existing third party solutions to Bango if they wish.

The new Enterprise service includes:

• A dedicated team of experts providing support across all mobile payment and analytics services

• Worldwide customer support, with fast service response times

• Service level agreement, with a guaranteed service uptime

• One point of integration and one Bango API for all billing routes

• Multiple currency and language support

• Detailed, real-time reporting and analytics

Large content providers interested in the Enterprise service please visit www.bango.com/enterprise

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Lee Davies, Chief Technical Officer at Bango

Bango has appointed Lee Davies to the role of Chief Technology Officer to steer Bango’s technology strategy and further increase the technological engagement between Bango and its business partners – such as mobile operators, handset makers and internet companies. This will enable broader use of Bango mobile web payment and identity technology.

“Lee has a well deserved reputation as an innovator and forward thinker in the mobile web development community. He has enabled Bango to push forward the boundaries in mobile payments and user identification – bringing benefits to millions of users around the world.” said Ray Anderson, CEO of Bango. “In his new role I believe that we will contribute more to the advancement of an industry where the benefits of mobile connectivity and personalization are making a huge impact on the use and functionality of the traditional web.”

Bango has a long history of partnering with mobile operators such as Vodafone, T-Mobile, Sprint and Telefonica to enable them to bring their benefits to the web. Bango is now increasingly working with internet companies such as Yahoo, Google and Microsoft and handset makers such as RIM, Nokia and Motorola as the use of the web on mobile devices is starting to move in to the mainstream.

Lee has over 15 years proven technology experience, designing and developing Internet-based solutions across a range of industries. These include e-commerce, medical systems, bioinformatics and the mobile internet. Prior to working at Bango, Lee was Principal Architect at LION bioscience, designing and developing solutions to analyze data from the human genome project to enable tier 1 pharmaceutical companies to better understand disorders such as cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Coronary Heart Disease.

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Ideal for smartphone users who are comfortable using credit card to pay for digital content and apps

Bango has launched Bango Credit Card Payment, a new mobile payment product, to help businesses and individuals charge mobile phone users for their digital content and applications anywhere in the world. By integrating Bango Credit Card Payment into their website for just $9.99 / €7.99 / £5.99 per month, businesses get a simple and low cost way to bill their mobile customers.

“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.”

With Bango, anyone can offer credit card payment 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 are ready.

Bango Credit Card Payment is easy to set up and brings the familiarity of online credit/debit card payments to mobile, using an intelligent, optimized flow that eliminates unnecessary steps for the user, such as entering card type and full billing address. This speeds up purchases, leading to more successful transactions across all mobile devices.

To add credit card payments to their mobile site, businesses simply need to go online at www.bango.com/creditcard and set up Bango Credit Card Payment in minutes. It can be upgraded to include operator billing for suitable services.

Using a network of credit card processors, Bango collects payments worldwide in multiple currencies and languages, from all handsets, networks and mobile internet connections. Bango Credit Card Payment offers single click checkout after the first purchase. As Bango knows the preferences of millions of consumers across many merchants, this increases the availability of this fast payment feature being offered, despite the merchant never having sold to that person before.

Bango has over eight years of mobile billing experience. It was the company first to offer credit card payments on the mobile web and has developed a service that delivers high level of successful transactions by providing the optimal presentation across multiple device types. Bango’s payment platform has processed millions of financial transactions securely for many of the world’s top brands.

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With a presence on dozens of mobile operator portals around the world, Ringtones.com now offers its extensive choice of content channels directly to the US mobile consumer through m.Ringtones.com with off-portal WAP payments powered by Bango.

For a competitive subscription charge of just $9.99 per month, m.Ringtones.com customers have over 35,000 music tracks and artists to choose from including a wide range of homegrown and international favorites such as Katy Perry, Coldplay, Flex and J. Holiday. The store offers limitless content choices with everything from polyphonic and MP3 ringtones to wallpaper and games.

“According to Nielsen Mobile, 40 million people in the US regularly browse the mobile web and many of these will be entering “ringtones” in their search boxes,” said Ray Anderson, CEO of Bango. “We are pleased to be working with Mobile Streams as they bring their premier mobile internet site to the US.”

“With our mobile retail knowledge and expertise, we ensure that our customers receive a warm experience when shopping with us including uncomplicated purchasing and trouble-free billing. We selected Bango to power our mobile payments for the US as their service provides this simple and reliable payment experience,” commented Simon Buckingham, CEO of Mobile Streams.

Mobile Streams provides their customers with a mobile web browse and buy billing flow for m.Ringtones.com which is as familiar as using a standard website. This “safe” mobile web approach from Bango is already powering subscription services for the Big 6 content providers in the US where subscription is the mainstay of the mobile content market. Compared to other payment methods, Bango’s WAP payment experience delivers the highest conversion rates and fewer consumer complaints.

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New version tracks smartphone users over different network connections

The latest version of Bango’s mobile analytics service, Bango Analytics v4, breaks new ground by providing mobile site owners with the most accurate mobile analytics in real-time. Importantly, it provides the same high degree of accuracy regardless of connection. It’s not unusual for smartphone users to swap between WiFi and operator networks as they move between home and the office.

In a challenging economy, it’s more important than ever for businesses to assess how consumers are engaging with their brand on mobile and track mobile marketing campaigns to measure return on investment, said Bango CEO Ray Anderson.

“History is repeating itself,” Anderson said. “Businesses have benefited from choosing products like Omniture and Coremetrics to get accurate, in-depth data of their website traffic. The same thing is happening in the mobile world with Bango delivering the quality and depth of analytics needed by mobile brands as they make critical business decisions on their mobile strategy.”

Anderson called the latest version of Bango’s mobile analytics service “ground breaking” because:

• It lets businesses track unique visitors whether a mobile user connects via operator gateway, WiFi or home broadband – even if users change their connection, Bango still retains the ability to track them. Bango has extended the capability of its Identifier technology so now everyone who interacts with a mobile website or mobile campaign has a privacy protected, unique user ID, no matter what type of network connection they use.

 

• It provides a greater level of granularity than other mobile analytics products by letting people see metrics by the hour. This enables marketers to understand how a mobile marketing campaign is performing in real time so any necessary adjustments can be made to ensure the campaign is a success.

 

• It offers new, advanced filtering and sorting that enables precise segmentation of mobile data, so it’s quick to get to the results needed on a case by case basis. Live data is used to provide greater accuracy, rather than pre-cached reports which throw away the original raw information.

Bango Analytics is a hosted service that provides analysis of mobile visitors, mobile site activity and marketing campaigns, with detailed metrics including unique visitor count, country, network and handset of each user. This helps brands make the best decisions about future mobile investments and get closer to their customers. To
sign up for a 30-day trial go to http://bango.com/analytics/

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