Framtiden nu

Financial Times via The Economist Intelligence Unit:

Mobile operators expect app downloads to become their biggest source of income in developed markets within three years

Sounds like alot of apps that they need to sell. The average revenue per user for data and voice in Europe is right now €30 – €40.

Link

Just realized I have an awesome autumn in front of me! If everything goes as planned I’ll be working on a new mobile payments platform that will be trialled by Ericsson in Sweden later this year. Why am I excited about this? Well, I think we finally have nailed what mobile payments should be like.

Source: Flickr

Not that I believe Premium SMS will disappear but I believe we got off to a bad start with mobile payments and nobody has really sat down and thought through what mobile payments really is about with all the changes that have happened in the past years. There is so much more to mobile payments than app stores and music!

So what IS mobile payments all about?

• consumer convenience - allow consumers to pay for things when there is no Point of Sale terminal available or when it is inconvenient to use another payment method.
• operator convenience – allow consumers to use services without causing churn
• credit card convenience – let credit card companies avoid the microtransactions that they are not interested in having
• merchant convenience – make sure that your customers can always pay for themselves and that you get a reasonable (> 95%) payout

I think we finally have found a way to work with payments that makes everyone in the value chain happy: consumers, operators, banks (and ofcourse Ericsson! ).

Looking forward to a great autumn!