Verizon Deal Lends Impetus to Obopay’s M-Commerce Drive

Obopay Inc. on Thursday announced four new businesses for its mobile-commerce application, bringing to six the number of companies using the Redwood City, Calif.-based processor's service to enable payments via handsets. The news follows Verizon Communications Inc.'s decision to adopt Obopay's application for mobile payments on its wireless network, which with 60.7 million subscribers is second only to that of AT&T Inc. in size. It also follows PayPal Mobile's introduction to developers last week of a new service for mobile commerce called PayPal Mobile Checkout (Digital Transactions News, June 5). Meawhile, a Seattle firm that creates mobile Web sites for merchants, mPoria Inc., announced on Thursday it is integrating PayPal Mobile into its software. Obopay says RIPMobile.com, Chegg.com, Exit Games, and 4INFO have signed on to use its m-commerce platform. Early this spring, Xringer Inc. and Cellfire Inc. became the first two merchants to adopt the platform (Digital Transactions News, April 5). RIPMobile, which recycles used cell phones, will use Obopay to pay consumers for their old handsets. Chegg.com, which operates an online marketplace aimed at college students, will rely on Obopay to pay student representatives. Exit Games will integrate the payment platform into its multiplayer mobile-gaming system to sell content to users. Mobile-search and advertising firm 4INFO will use Obopay to allow its advertising partners to receive payments for goods sold via ads with short-message-service (SMS) links. Irv Henderson, vice president for product management at Obopay, says more merchants are in the pipeline. “This is part of a series of announcements” the company expects to make before the end of the year, he says. Lending impetus to Obopay's efforts in mobile payments is its deal with Verizon Wireless, under which the company's application will be the first adopted by a major wireless carrier. “We're seeing a change in the tone of the conversations we're having with merchants and carriers,” says Henderson, who is attending a trade show in San Diego concerned with mobile software called BREW (for Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless), which allows developers of games and other digital content to more readily write programs for mobile phones. The Obopay application for Verizon is a BREW solution that users will download from the carrier's Get It Now online catalog. After the download, users can sign up for Obopay directly from their phones. With Obopay, consumers pay other individuals or merchants in real time with funds they've stored in Obopay accounts. These funds can be accessed via a MasterCard-branded debit card. The service works via the company's proprietary application, through Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) sites, or with SMS transmissions. Separately, mPoria says PayPal accountholders will be able to pay merchants that are using its GoMobile! software, which allows merchants to quickly create Web sites suitable for display on cell-phone screens (Digital Transactions News, May 4). Coded into GoMobile!, PayPal Mobile will appear in a prominent position as a payment choice at checkout, mPoria says. Merchants using GoMobile! include Buy.com Inc., Gamestop.com, Gifttree.com, and Moosejaw.com.