Billing

Bango (News - Alert) has announced a new service which the company’s officials say "turns the mobile phone into a personal on the go library." The billing and digital fingerprint technologies have let Macmillan Publishing Solutions create The Global Reader, a service giving consumers access to books, articles, newspapers and other print content on their mobile phone.

 

The MPS service offers publishers a distribution channel which, because it's mobile-Web based, lets them interact directly with customers and get information.

 

"We never envisioned people would want to read War and Peace on their phones," said Bob Kasher, one of the developers of The Global Reader. "What we responded to was the idea that millions of people have mobile phones in their pockets," folks who might fancy a chapter or two of the latest undemanding Nora Roberts or John Grisham opus while on the subway, instead of toting a paperback novel.

 

The Bango technology is used to let consumers on any mobile network, anywhere in the world, browse content on the Global Reader and make purchases. The ability to authenticate users means consumers can assemble a library of free and paid books.   Additionally, given that some content actually runs over five or six pages, the mobile site has a bookmark feature allowing the reader to save their spot online.

 

At the turn of the year Bango issued its predictions for what 2008 will bring for the mobile industry:

 
One: Increasing numbers of people accessing the Internet on their mobile phone.

There are many more mobile phones than there are PCs today.  More than 50 percent of the world's population now has a mobile phone, Bango officials say, adding that "this amounts to 3 billion mobile phones. It is estimated that there are 1.1 billion PCs."  As the majority of new phones come with Internet access as standard, "we envisage that by Q3 2009, more people will access the Internet on their mobile than through a PC."

 

 

Mobile advertising is "a huge opportunity with the potential to generate in excess of $10 billion in annual revenues by 2010," Bango officials believe, adding the caveat that "there are a number of factors holding it back, mainly the lack of analytics so advertisers can verify the results of their campaigns. Once this is solved and there's an independent auditing process then mainstream brands will dip more than a toe into mobile advertising."

 

We already see more Web browsing as operators have introduced flat-rate charging in 2007 and moved from a portal model to a more open search-based model. The new model encourages search by including the search box prominently on the portal home page.  Bango believes "mobile search will become more like the PC-Internet experience but the quality of mobile search index needs to improve dramatically to achieve mass market adoption."