MCom

New Zealand developer Mobile Commerce Limited (MCom) won first prize in this year’s Frontier competition. Frontier is an application award initiative by Ericsson and Ericsson Mobility World in Australia.

Adam Clark, founder, director and CEO of MCom, says: "I am very proud to have won this award. Frontier is the biggest wireless award in the Asia Pacific region. Winning the award is very good public relations for us and fantastic reward for the hard work put in by the M-Com team, ASB Bank and Telecom."

MPayment is a gateway for mobile payment services that runs on MCom's secure platform, the MCom transaction server. The platform is built on MS.net. The payment gateway was launched in April, the first application being MTopUp – an application that allow Telecom prepaid subscribers to buy airtime via SMS and have the payment withdrawn directly from their ASB Bank account. After registering with ASB Bank, users SMS the word 'topup' together with a personal code (password) and buy airtime from the mobile operator. The entire transaction (from sending the SMS to getting the “Accepted” SMS response) takes approximately 10 seconds. The transaction is confirmed via a confirmation SMS including updated airtime balance. Mpayment and MTopUp will also work with Java, USSD, WAP and SIM Application Toolkit capable phones.

Adam Clark

"The service has been successful without any extensive marketing effort until recently. The above the line marketing over the past month has created a surge in registrations, prior to that new sign ups were assumed to be through word of mouth. The timing of this award is great for us since we'll be attending the matchmaking session at the Ericsson Mobile Application Awards in Zurich in December. This is a fantastic opportunity to meet with international operators and present a very good reference," Clark says.

He expects that mobile payments will increase significantly and compliment existing payment mechanisms in such areas as internet purchases, parking payments, vending machines, secure payment for phone orders or mail orders. He adds that the application also is suitable for person-to-person payment, the ability to make payment to friends and family.

Visit MCom's website

By Karin Hanson