Zong Expands Mobile Payments Beyond Web, Revels in Big Data Trends
Zong, one of the premier companies in mobile payments space, has planned for its expansion beyond web space and Android. Now, the good news is that Zong is expanding its mobile payment platform to a number of environments including Flash, Unity, Interactive TV, gaming consoles, and the mobile web.
Just to recall, Zong offers an innovative way of making payments to purchase stuff online, especially virtual goods. With this technology, it allows users to make payments through their mobile phones. So whenever a user purchases something from the web, he can can enter his cell number on the site. In turn, a text message is sent to the mobile phone by the site. Once the user confirms the transaction, the bill appears on his mobile phone. And all this happens by technology powered by Zong.
“Zong’s payments system is optimal on a variety of platforms, but specifically is receiving interest from developers looking to integrate Zong in TVs and game consoles. For example, Zong could be used to power payments within a game on a game console. We made a tremendous amount of progress on the web, including Facebook, says Zong’s CEO and founder David Marcus, “But now we are ready to expand into new customer types and other platforms.”
Additionally, Zong also reported that it has expanded an in-app payment system to be used on Android 3.0 Honeycomb tablets. As of now, PayPal and Boku are its major competitors & doing their own efforts to expand their payment platforms too.
Mobile payments are fast becoming a big rage as the transaction rates are growing exponentially. Recently, Square also reported that it is now processing $1 million a day in credit card transactions over mobile phones. To handle the same, it has also developed apps for the iPad, iPhone and Android.
We also learned of Google’s plans to test NFC mobile payments soon, to enable the customers to make purchases just by tapping their mobile phones to specialized cash registers. Their experiment is expected to start within the next 4 months, at few retail locations in New York and San Fransisco.
The startup space is hot in this arena as well. Just today, we also heard Jumio gearing up for launch of its online and mobile payments solutions within 6 to 8 weeks. It has also lined up a significant investor, Eduardo Saverin, the co-founder of Facebook who has given $6.5 million to the company and will also become one of the Jumio’s board of directors.
As the realm of mobile payments and m-wallets is expanding, it still needs a middleman, as reported by ROAM Data VP, Rob Stringer in a interview with Kristen Nicole. Read the complete details here.
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