By
Ed Finegold
Get a group of iPhone users together and it’s only a matter of time before they start to play “check out this app I found.” My wife is scrolling through her immunization record app with her best friend while her husband shows me his thoroughly exercised beer tasting app. I’m carrying a Blackberry Storm 2, which I find lacking in both apps and Internet experience, so my mind wanders to how they bill for this stuff. Apps from places like Apple’s App Store, Blackberry’s App World, the Android Market, and Nokia’s Ovi store, don’t end up on the wireless bill. Though I could guess why, I figured I’d ask an expert. That’s one of the many perks of being a BSS columnist. Monica Ricci, director of cross portfolio marketing for Intec, is one such person.
Why not?
I asked Monica why apps from app stores don’t end up on wireless bills, and she was quick to correct me. Stores like those mentioned above, which the device or OS manufacturers have launched, are “technology branded app stores” in the insider’s parlance. “Those are over-the-top services,” Ricci says. “They monopolize the relationship and interaction with the user of the end device. With no other options, they (the device and OS providers) monopolized the process including the payment. When you purchase something with a price on it in an app store you pay for it at the same time with a credit card or wallet payment.”
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Managed services enable companies to keep up with technological advancements, despite downsized staff. |
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sufficient focus and effort. Ricci flipped it around, however, and said that the one notable exception was Nokia’s Ovi store. Prior to launch, Nokia reached out to its global carrier partners to determine the requirements involved in billing apps directly to a user’s wireless bill. Nokia, rather than making the carriers jump through hoops to connect with a proprietary API, took on the burden of interfacing one by one with those carriers who wanted to play ball.
In May of 2009, Nokia’s VP of product management, George Linardos, was quoted saying “When we start locally with credit card billing and then we move to operator billing,
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Wait a minute, I say—no other options? But there are other options, right? “Our understanding,” Ricci says, “is that to go to market and have the complete process from order to cash, it was easier for them to drive the payment to a credit card or wallet payment device that they maintain because integrating into the carrier’s environment isn’t easy, even for the carrier.”
Now, this was my first assumption, but I’m still surprised to hear it. It seems like carriers would have every incentive to make it easy for third parties to charge apps directly to the wireless bill, and that they could do so with
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we see a 70 percent lift in sales literally overnight.” The advantage, Ricci says, is that carrier billing adds a further element of choice for the user, it gives them a pay-later option, and it keeps all spending relating to wireless services on one bill. Ricci believes that customers would also be attracted to features that give them visibility into their spending in real time along with alerts, so they can budget their wireless dollars, feel a better sense of control over their spending, and avoid radical billshock.
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