If you have been on the web for any amount of time, you would have heard of Zong, a division of Echovox, which is the leader in Mobile Media Solutions in Europe and provides services to many of the world’s largest media groups.
Zong is the only web service that enables creating and launching of mobile services in about ten countries. It is the first open mobile platform provider that allows companies, developers, web enterprises and social networks to launch mobile services for revenue generation.
With Zong, mobile services and applications can be launched to more than 500 million subscribers worldwide in just a few minutes.
To get a better idea of what Zong’s all about, let’s take a look at how it works.
Once the Zong services are created and a person becomes the developer, all users will be able to access their services from their mobiles. When the user sends a message with the keyword pertaining to the developer, the message is routed through the user’s mobile operator, which whom Zong has contractual obligation. That mobile operator, in turn, sends the request to Zong, and Zong manages this request using the service provider’s application and sends a response back to the user.
How does the developer benefit? When users use the service, they will be billed based on how the billing is set up. They can be billed monthly on their monthly mobile bill or users can also set up an account with Zong, and pay for the services by direct debit into the Zong account. The mobile operator used by the user takes a small fee and Zong takes a small transaction fee, and the rest of the amount is given to the developer in the form of revenue.
Zong, which has recently announced a U.S. launch soon, says that Zong Open Mobile Platform delivers a single, http-based open API that enables developers to create applications once, for distributing across all the major U.S. operators, irrespective of the type of handset used.
Zong has plans to release several turnkey applications to assist publishers in launching mobile services with ease and instantly.
The CEO of Echovox, David Marcus says, “Zong enables the effortless launch of mobile services and applications that are then extended to more than 500 million people around the world.” He also went on to say, “No other company can monetize mobile content this way, making Zong the only true open mobile platform for both mobile development and monetization.”
As part of its ongoing marketing efforts, Zong has also launched the Zong Developer network (ZDN). ZDN is the world’s first ever open mobile development platform that provides developers everything they need in order to create their own mobile services and applications, including turnkey applications and an open API, as well as the required testing tools. Along with this, it is also releasing a high-level open API, which can be used by most of the programming languages. There is also going to be an API explorer that will make life easier for developers to interact with the API, by alleviating the need of a code.
Their simulation tool can be used by developers to test their applications, without having to worry about different handsets and SIM cards in different countries.
With all the services provided by Zong, it will be a cakewalk for publishers to create and launch their mobile services to thousands of handsets and hundreds of carriers, within just a few days, instead of waiting for years like they used to earlier.
Earlier, it was a herculean task to launch a mobile service and developers had to create separate applications for each country they targeted. Zong has solved this problem in a big way with its open mobile platform, making application development extremely easy, and only once for the whole world.
According to a Portio Research report, “Slicing up the Mobile Services Revenue Pie,” the worldwide mobile industry will be worth $1 trillion by the close of 2008, making the opportunity of mobilizing web content more lucrative than ever.
