Fortumo Sideswipes Boku, Zong And Other Facebook Mobile Payment Providers
Fortumo is an Estonian startup (see our previous coverage) focusing on making it possible for everybody from individuals to home-based businesses to global web entrepreneurs to easily and cheaply collect payments from their customers using mobile payments. The company emphasizes that it should be as easy, quick, and cost-effective to start using mobile payments on your site or in your app as creating a blog or a homepage.
Fortumo has now released a new service called FortuMoPay, designed for selling credits (to be used e.g. on virtual goods) in online games, web applications, and social networks.
MoSync Driving A New Cross-Platform App Store Ecosystem
MoSync, a Swedish developer of cross-platform mobile app development tools (previously Mobile Sorcery; see our previous coverage), has big plans for creating a whole ecosystem boosting open cross-platform App Stores. MoSync's new CEO Dusyant Patel, and Co-Founder Tomas Uppgård opened up MoSync's plans for ArcticStartup.
The global revenue from mobile applications, consisting of both paid downloads and mobile advertising, is estimated to increase to $17.5 billion by 2012 from $4.1 billion in 2009. The estimate is based on an independent study by Chetan Sharma Consulting (well, as independent it can be, being commissioned by GetJar). While massive amounts of players in the ICT industry are rushing to their own app store of some kind, developers are faced with an ever increasing burden and business challenges.
The Game Industry In Flux
Those following the mobile gaming industry paid notice that the Finnish gaming studio Universomo was shut down (in Finnish) by its owner THQ Wireless, which acquired the Finnish firm back in 2007. Rumors started to spread on Tuesday this week and pretty soon THQ confirmed the liquidation of the studio. This is part of a bigger shift in the game industry.
MySQL Founders Invest In Cross-Platform Tech Provider Mobile Sorcery
A Swedish mobile technology startup Mobile Sorcery has gotten a Series A investment of undisclosed sum a second round seed investment of 1.5 million Swedish Kronor (around 145.000 EUR or 206.000 USD)(Correction: the actual investment was a lot bigger, “a proper A round”, yet the exact sum is undisclosed) from MySQL founders David Axmark and Michael Widenius, and STING (Stockholm Innovation and Growth) Capital private equity fund. Majority of this round's investment came Axmark and Widenius, while for STING this was the second investment in Mobile Sorcery.
Easier Mobile Development with Mobile Sorcery's MoSync
Mobile Sorcery, a Swedish startup founded in 2004, provides cross-platform mobile development tools. The company's product is called MoSync, which allows developers to write single source code and then launch their applications on a wide range of mobile devices with different platforms, like Symbian, J2ME and Windows Mobile. Mobile Sorcery has gotten SEK 1.5M (around EUR 150k or USD 211k) funding from Swedish early stage VC STING Capital last year.
The key business benefits of MoSynch are reducing porting costs and time to market. For developers MoSync offers access to many existing C/C++ libraries even when targeting J2ME and other platforms and existing device profiles of hundreds of handsets. There are some clear feature weaknesses at the moment, though, which seem to be on the list for MoSync's next release: touchscreen support and SMS sending support.
It's a tough market out there. The existing players in the mobile industry have already porting frameworks and tools in use, and there are quite a many similar competitors as well. Less established companies or those entering the market currently might find Mobile Sorcery's offering quite interesting, though, as it can enable you to focus on building the actual product or service instead of worrying about the device fragmentation. MoSynch is available at no cost for non-commercial use, commercial users will have to contact the company for getting a license.
