txtNation and MobileArt combine mobile content and mobile billing

 

MobileArt is due to launch in December, and while it’s not likely to be very relevant to European and American phone-owners, it’s probably going to see significant usage in emerging markets. The mobile content service is concentrating on making it’s content as easy to pay for as possible, with a heavy focus on geo-targetting.

The billing part is coming from txtNation, which has been working in billing for emerging markets for a long time now. Credit card transactions aren’t hugely useful in most emerging mobile markets, so txtNation supports multiple languages and allows billing via mobile banking, SMS and microtransactions. MobileArt will be doing business through 60,000 resellers (or so it claims), and will be using geo-targetting to ensure that when a user requests a piece of content they automatically receive from the best local server - while at the same time txtNation is ensuring the billing is as simple as possible.

What kind of content are we talking about? “Wallpapers, ringtones, games, videos and text” according to MobileArt.

What we think?

I could only wish that mobile content had been this easy to buy when it was still big business in developed markets. As our interests have moved on to mobile Web and smartphones, there are those concentrating on emerging markets - which are still huge. Far larger than ours, in fact. Companies like MobileArt stand to make huge wadges of cash as these markets become ever more comfortable saturated with mobile phone owners who have low-end devices, but want access to decent mobile content.