Favor: A Publishing Platform That Earns You Money
Monetizing content online is a wet dream of many content-creators. Some are putting their creations behind a pay wall, while others grudgingly offer their content for free, hoping for advertising revenue or spill-over effects in other business areas. Some start-ups, however, took it upon themselves to fight the trend and help content-creators monetize their creations without paywalls or other tricks. They simply offer viewers of the content micropayment options to reimburse creators for their troubles. Favor is one of such services that recently emerged from Rovaniemi, Finland. Users can publish any kind of content on Favor's platform (text, audio, video, pictures), share it elsewhere on the internet with a link and encourage followers to 'Return the Favor' - give a small donation (starting from $0.10) to the content creator. 90% of that money goes directly to the author of the content, the rest 10% goes to Favor.
Flattr Enables Social Micropayments For All Content On The Web
Flattr is a new Swedish service enabling easy microtransactions, or social donations, for the whole web. Flattr wants to make it easy for people to share money in addition to content on the web, and thus allow content producers to get income on their work. The service is currently in closed beta, but I got an account to take a closer look.
In practice, every Flattr member needs to pay at least 2 euros per month (you can up to 5/10/20 as well). Then, during each month, you discover content on the web that you really like, be it text, audio, video, or something else, and you want to "flatter" the creator. You then click a small button the content creator has placed on her site. After each month is over, your monthly allowance (e.g., 2 euros) is divided evenly to all of the content creators whose work you have "flattred" during the month. Flattr itself takes 10% cut initially.
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.
mobileAxept Enabling Mobile Payments
mobileAxept is a Norwegian startup providing a mobile phone payment system, which directly charges an existing credit card or a bank account.
mobileAxept's solution is based on a patented gateway for securing transactions between the customer, merchant, and credit card companies or banks. The merchants can offer customers a way to pay with their mobile phone, either by calling or sending a SMS to specified numer. However, the payment will be processed on the customer's credit or debit card rather than added to phone bill. This way the phone can be used for quick impulse purchases or micropayments without big overhead costs typically associated with mobile payments.
Campfire Brings Marvel Comics to Mobiles
Campfire is a Danish startup, founded in 2007. The company offers cartoons to mobile handsets under a service called Catooz. And not just any cartoons, but licensed ones from Marvel. Campfire signed a deal with Marvel in October last year. Right now there are strips of Xmen, Spiderman, Iron Man, Fantastic Four, etc. The service is currently available in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Germany.
Campfire provides a Java client for accessing Catooz, the installing of which is smooth. The comics are distributed in multiple small packages, "chapters". Each chapter might cover around couple of pages of a physical magazine and is downloaded over-the-air. There is one free "chapter" of each comic as an introduction and a teaser to the service. You can buy more chapters easily from within the mobile client. However, the single chapters are really overpriced at EUR 2 (USD 2,69), considering you only get only a few of minutes' worth of reading, and there are apparently 6 chapters per story. The purchase process works smoothly, though: you press 'Yes' to confirm, and you'll instantly start reading the strip. The payment system appears to be implemented over Ericsson IPX, so being SMS-based might explain the high pricepoint. Luckily, Catooz also offers a basic monthly subscription at EUR 4 per month, which is much better deal. With the basic subscription you can read all comics which have been published over a month ago. There is also offer a premium subscription at EUR 8 (USD 10,70) that allows unlimited access also to the latest comics. At the present time it seems only basic is available, though.
It's also worth noticing the EULA states all purchased comics are yours for only maximum a year - and, Campfire can remove all purchased comics from the service without any compensation to customers, should any of the copyright holders request so (i.e., decide to pull out from the partnership). Nevertheless, at least you are able to keep your purchased comics even after changing phone, provided you keep the same SIM card and phone number.
I tried the Finnish version of Catooz. I have to say the translations were a bit poor - lots of spelling erros, and some bad sounding sentences. The comics look really good, though. Catooz supports phones with resolutions from 128x160 to 320x240. Campfire describes all the comics content is created or transformed from scratch into mobile. Images are hand drawn, and the process involves story writing, translating, storyboarding, drawing, colouring, scanning, rescaling, transferring to an advanced graphical technology, colouring, and finally transferring the graphics to their Java application. Catooz also offers "cinematic sound" along with the imaging, and some visual effects like flashes and shaking. The effects boost up the experience nicely. I noticed, though, the sounds work best while you are on the go, as they end quite sharply rather than smoothly fade out, giving a somewhat add-on feeling in a quiet place.
Swedish Blog Reader Service Bloggkoll Becomes Bloglovin’
Bloggkoll.com has been a successful Swedish local blog reader service, but the founders are now looking for international markets and have changed the name accordingly to Bloglovin.com. The service has been available as Bloglovin' since September, and gathered from 15 000 to 60 000 visits per week, but now the name has been changed to Bloglovin' for good.
The site offers essentially a simple mass market service to stay aware when new posts are available, having them all in the same place for easier and quicker access, and prevent forgetting the addresses of blogs.
The features are really simple. Each time you log in you see how many new unread posts you have, and also you'll see right away which blogs have been popular today (ranked by the amount of new followers subscribed during the same day), and can select a second tab to view the most popular blogs (in terms of total subscribers). This is a nice feature for first-time visitors, as you can instantly get started even if you didn't know many blogs. For adding blogs on your reading list you use the search function to find the blog you're looking for, and if not already in the service, you can add a new blog with its URL. Another nice way to make things easier with not having to know the URL necessarily, if you've just heard the name of some interesting blog. And there's also the recommendation service "if you liked this, then try out these blogs also". It's possible to create different groups as well to classify the different blogs you're following.
I couldn't find too much regarding the business model; however, there's an interesting micropayment option called Spotlight - with 10 SEK (close to 1 EUR or 1,20 USD) you can get your blog to be visible to everyone currently using the service for 5 minutes. The payment is done by SMS, but currently works with Sweden only. Very nice idea, but would need quite a big user base and further categorization to generate sizeable revenues - theoretically with just one slot, fully booking 24h would generate just 288 EUR per day (or 2880 SEK/345 USD).
The founders themselves state on the web page they feel the other readers are "technical, boring and cluttered with features", so they rather wanted to create a dead-simple service with user-friendly interface for those who just want things to work. This kind of service could indeed hit the main stream, as there might be room for a simple reader that just does the core trick without any distractions, and recommends new blogs on the side. However, it's not going to be an easy task in terms of discovery, and also I'm not sure what the sustainable competitive advantage of the service would be, preventing some other players from stealing the users. Nevertheless, right now the service delivers on its promise. Also interestingly, most of the founder team is around 20 years old, so kudos to the guys for going for it!
