BOKU’s SVP of Product & Marketing, Ron Hirson will be speaking on Mobile Payments and BOKU’s growth and opportunity, at ThinkEquity’s ThinkTomorrow~Today 2010 Summit. He’ll be covering:
BOKU’s background
The Current State of Mobile Payments
Carrier considerations
Merchant adoption
Path to monetization on mobile for merchants
He’ll be speaking on May 11th at 8:45A.M. in Ravenswood
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:
Last week Kara Swisher from the Wall Street Journal came to visit our humble offices here in San Francisco. She recorded a video checking out the premises, and then an interview with a couple of the BOKU founders, Mark Britto, the CEO, and Ron Hirson, the SVP of Marketing & BD. Her article published [...]
Our mission here at BOKU is to create a bank-grade payments company. We want to set the industry standard for mobile payments, and we do that by hiring talented people with the right experience in the right arenas. Our management team is made up of experienced executives from the mobile carrier, financial, and technology industries [...]
We’re excited to announce the launch of our BOKU for Android SDK with 1-Tap™ technology. We’re testing some cool features that can help you monetize your mobile apps. Check out the benefits: Seamless in-app billing 1-Tap™ mobile billing in 60 countries and 198 carriers No user registration or login necessary Potential for increased r […]
