Boku Blog

BOKU is excited to announce a new round of funding and the launch of Paymo!

January 19, 2010

Today is a great day for BOKU, and we’re excited to share our announcements with the everyone. The first piece of news to share is a new round of funding for BOKU. We received $25 million in a round led by DAG Ventures with participation from Benchmark Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Index Ventures. We’ll use the funding to expand into new markets, add redundancy to our systems, and continue to refine and improve our security and fraud prevention systems. We’re incredibly pleased and flattered by this vote of confidence from our investors - it’s both gratifying and a great way to start 2010.

Our second big piece of news is the introduction of our consumer-facing brand, Paymo. While we love the BOKU brand, after exhaustive and global testing we’ve determined that Paymo is a universally understandable brand, irrespective of culture, language, or background that resonates with consumers. So the Paymo brand is what customers will see when they checkout online using their mobile phones.

We’ve had a whirlwind experience as a company with a lot of exciting activity since our launch in June 2009 (only seven months ago!) Today is another thrilling milestone in an exciting tenure as a growing, active company.

We’ve also received a warm reception from bloggers, writers, and pundits in the online and traditional press, who have been spreading the word today. The list of who covered our news is below, and we’ll keep adding to it as we see more stories come out.

Thanks to our customers, our partners, and our investors for all your support and confidence. 2010 is going to be an exciting year!
-The BOKU Team

•    All Things D
•    MSN Money
•    TechCrunch
•    VentureBeat
•    Moco News
•    Washington Post
•    Silicon Alley Insider
•    Virtual Goods News
•    Payments News
•    Paid Content
•    Inside Social Games
•    Alt Assets
•    Wireless Week
•    Fierce Mobile Content
•    Nonstop Tech News
•    Telecom Paper
•    SF Business Times
•    Digital Media Wire
•    THE Paypers
•    Strategy Eye

Posted by bokunews on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 at 11:20 pm in Announcements, Mobile Payments.

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Mobile Donation to Haiti

January 14, 2010

Many of you are aware of the tragic 7.0 earthquake that hit Haiti on Tuesday.  The impacts to this already impoverished nation are staggering and help of any kind is being sought.  We wanted to let you know of a program where mobile payments can be used for donations and we’re reaching out to friends and partners to ask folks to donate to the American Red Cross Relief for Haiti via texting “HAITI” to 90999.

This will work similar to mobile payments in that $10 will show up on your mobile phone bill. Mobile donations have *no* carrier fees.   BOKU is not the provider of this service, we just want to get the message out about this opportunity to help.

More details can be found here:

http://newsroom.redcross.org/2010/01/12/disaster-alert-earthquake-in-haiti/

and here:

http://www.redcross.org/en/

Thanks,
The BOKU Team

Posted by Ron on Thursday, January 14th, 2010 at 1:06 am in Mobile Payments, security.

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Happy Holidays from BOKU

December 31, 2009

What an amazing year. We launched in June and have since reached quite a few milestones:

  • 58 countries (Estonia, who knew)
  • Great funding partners (Benchmark, Index, & Khosla)
  • Management team brought together
  • 1000+ partners including the top gaming companies on the internet and social networks

We’d like to thanks all of our friends, family, co-workers, and partners for making 2009 a phenomenal year.  Here’s to an even better 2010.

- The BOKU Team

BOKU Chocolates

Posted by Ron on Thursday, December 31st, 2009 at 12:41 pm in Mobile Payments.

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BOKU Showcases at Under The Radar.

November 23, 2009

Under The Radar - Nov 2009

Last Thursday, BOKU’s co-founder Ron Hirson presented in front of 350 attendees at Dealmaker Media’s Under The Radar conference in Mountain View, CA. Ron was there to highlight what we were doing as a company and what we were doing to help “beat the odds” and offer some insight for startups presenting on what they could do to succeed. You can view Ron’s presentation by clicking here.

Here are some photos from BOKU’s showing at Under The Radar:

Under The Radar - Nov 2009
BOKU gear at the Under The Radar conference.

Under The Radar - Nov 2009
Ron showing Greg Grunberg, from the NBC show Heroes, the BOKU-copter.

Under The Radar - Nov 2009
Greg Grunberg playing with the BOKU-copter.

Under The Radar - Nov 2009
Ron being interviewed by BNetTV.com

Under The Radar - Nov 2009
Ron showing how the BOKU-copter works to BNetTV.com

Posted by bokunews on Monday, November 23rd, 2009 at 1:26 pm in events.

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Direct Payments vs. Lead-gen

November 7, 2009

It’s been a week since the Virtual Goods Summit.  A great show put on by Charles Hudson and David Sachs.  The last session of the last day had some interesting fireworks.  Mike Arrington from Techcrunch traded words with Anu Shukla of Offerpal around the lead-gen business (great summary by VentureBeat here: http://bit.ly/2YLHIl).

I thought it might be worthwhile posting our thoughts on the space as we’re partnered with many of the payments aggregators to provide direct mobile payments, which means our direct-payment button appears in some screenshots near the types of offers that are under review.

We have built BOKU as a direct payments company, in the same category as Paypal, VISA, and other major credit cards.  We are purely focused on mobile payments.  BOKU does *zero* lead generation, CPA, subscription offers, IQ quizzes or the like. We enable customers to purchase virtual goods and currencies directly (not indirectly) via their mobile phone.  The offers that are being discussed in the blogosphere are around those companies that provide subscription services after lead-gen offers like quizzes, IQ tests, or wallpaper downloads, etc.   **BOKU does not provide such services.**

BOKU does not target an under-age audience, and avoids entirely the use of any subscription offers and lead generation techniques. In essence, we do the same things that VISA and Paypal do.  Our direct payment system is highly secure, and in lock-step with the policies and standards of the credit card industry.

Overall, we think it benefits the industry to have a open discussion around keeping customers safe as it relates to this lead-gen business. We look forward to the results of the efforts of platforms (social networks), games and offer providers to ensure that in the end the industry that we’re all working for, keeps the customer safe and secure, as they are the core of ours, and any business.

Please feel free to contact us with any questions. ron [at] boku dotcom or press [at] boku dotcom.

To view how our service works, see this video here:

Posted by Ron on Saturday, November 7th, 2009 at 8:46 pm in Mobile Payments, security, social networking.

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Boku Live From The Virtual Goods Summit.

October 30, 2009

We’re here at the Virtual Goods Summit in San Francisco to continue to let people know who we are. We brought along our legendary Boku Copter and track jackets that we’re going to give away to some lucky people attending the conference. In order to win, all they have to do is wear a Boku button and display it in the most creative way.

During the morning breaks, we gave away a couple of American Apparel-style jackets and even some cool remote controlled helicopters that we got some lucky winners to try out and fly out in the foyer of the Westin hotel.

Boku at Virtual Goods Summit 2009
8:45 am - Boku at the Virtual Goods Summit.

Boku at Virtual Goods Summit 2009
Introducing the Boku Copter - we’re giving them away to some lucky attendees!

Boku at Virtual Goods Summit 2009
11:15 am - We’re at the Virtual Goods Summit!

Boku at Virtual Goods Summit 2009
11:29 am The first winner shown playing with the Boku Copter.

Boku at Virtual Goods Summit 200911:33 am - Andy is the second recipient of the Boku Copter.

Boku at Virtual Goods Summit 2009
11:45 am  - Robbyn receives the third Boku Copter!


2:37 am - People just love our Boku Copter!


2:43 pm - The Boku Copter makes its way through the crowd.

More photos from our giveaway can be found on our Flickr page.

See some video of the Boku Copter by visiting our YouTube page.

Posted by bokunews on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 3:30 pm in events.

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Virtual Goods Summit - and VGSUniversity

October 29, 2009

We’ll be at the Virtual Goods Summit today and tomorrow.

I’m speaking at 4:15 on the following panel:

The Payments Landscape – Virtual Goods Payment Options

We’ll also be giving away BOKOpters and American Apparel jackets tomorrow. Details tomorrow.

BOKU at Virtual Goods Summit

BOKU at Virtual Goods Summit

Hope to see you there.

If you want to meet up dm @hirson or email chris.hickson [at] boku dotcom or kurt [at] boku dotcom.

BOKU Team

Posted by Ron on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 10:28 am in events.

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Landmark Ventures Technology Showcase & CTIA

October 6, 2009

We’ll be onstage at the Viceroy in Santa Monica tomorrow at 4:00 presenting with Jonathan Teo from Benchmark at Landmark Capital’s Technology Showcase.

We look forward to seeing folks there. Ping Kurt [at] boku.com if you’d like to meet up.

We’ll also be at CTIA Wed-Fri with a few folks from product, engineering and BD. Let us know if you’d like to meet.

Posted by Ron on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 11:14 pm in Mobile Payments.

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GDC Austin

September 14, 2009

We will be at GDC Austin, so ping us if you would like to meet up.

kurt @ boku dotcom.

GDC Austin

GDC Austin

Posted by Ron on Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 6:23 pm in events.

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BOKU Event: Metrics & Monetization

September 11, 2009

Thanks to everyone who made Wednesday night’s event a success. A special thanks to Shay/TMA. The feedback we’ve received has blown us away and kudos go to the speakers who put together insightful presentations (and revealed a bunch of numbers):

* RockYou – Jia Shen
* MySpace – Rita Garg
* Meez – Sean Ryan
* Aeria Games – JT Nguyen
* Gambit – Noah Kagan

We’ve had a lot of requests for the presentations, and watched as guests furiously took notes (Did you get the list of countries where easy money can be made from Noah? Or, The formula for Free-to-Play success from JT?).  While we aren’t going to post the presentations to the web, because of the sensitivity of some of the data and special sauce behind the companies, we are going to be hosting more events, so let us know if you’d like to be added to the guest-list.

Instead, here’s a peek behind the scenes into how we make the BOK’opters that were part of the giveaway competition.  Mike Cahill (no relation to John from Meez – get well soon), from our engineering team, hand-makes each one with the able assistance of Trisha.

Congrats to the winners of the helicopter flying contest.

We’ll see you at the next event.

Posted by Ron on Friday, September 11th, 2009 at 12:00 am in events.

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