Comments on Bango’s “Amazon announcement”

Comments on Bango’s Amazon announcement earlier today.

Investors have been in touch with Bango this week to ask for more details about the announcement that we’re working with Amazon on launching carrier billing for the Amazon App Store.

First clarification – Bango carrier billing is now LIVE for some Amazon customers in Germany. This comes from the work Bango has been doing with Amazon in the nearly 3 years since the December 2011 announcement of an agreement. Some Telefonica O2 customers in Germany now have a “click to pay” option which will charge a purchase from the Amazon App Store to their phone bill. The Bango Platform is being used by Amazon to process these payments.

Secondly – we have released this investor update to ensure that all investors could become aware of this significant milestone. An increasing number of people were starting to see the charge to bill capability, the first time it has been offered by Amazon, and we anticipated that screenshots and other information would very soon get into the public domain.

We don’t comment on our partners’ business plans, our role is to provide the technology that enables carrier-billed payments to be delivered on a global scale, with the quality of user experience that Amazon customers – for example – have come to expect. This is why our update this week did not include any further commentary about Amazon’s plans for carrier billing.

Bango is now providing carrier billing to Google, Amazon, Microsoft, BlackBerry, Samsung, Mozilla and others. This is significant for the total value of the “app economy” particularly in the Android smartphone world where Bango powers the platform provider (Google), the leading smartphone maker (Samsung) and now the first entry by the global giant in internet retailing (Amazon).