Mobile payment and analytics company Bango Inc. has launched WiFi-enabled carrier billing for smartphones, claiming that method boosts mobile content sales considerably.

While Bango claims that carrier payments deliver more successful transactions than traditional payment methods, mobile content revenues have been impacted by the increasing popularity of smartphones, such as Research In Motion's BlackBerry and Apple's iPhone. Because these devices can connect to the Web through WiFi, carrier billing that normally relies on traffic coming through carrier gateways becomes unavailable, making it difficult for consumers to buy content.

"Consumers are getting more in the habit of connecting to the Internet with their mobile phones," said Anil Malhotra, senior vice president of marketing and alliances at Bango, Cambridge, England.

"This has triggered two trends that Bango is tracking: greater interest in smartphones to enhance the browsing experience and an awareness of how to connect to the Internet to minimize cost and maximize the connection," he said.

"Using Bango Analytics, we're recording about 20 percent of mobile connections via a vendor gateway [RIM devices], by a standard Internet gateway (iPhones) or by selecting a WiFi network connection [in the workplace or at home]."

Customers who connect in these ways -- outside of their carrier networks -- cannot be easily billed, according to Mr. Malhotra.

As a result, content providers are experiencing a loss of premium content revenues as the popularity of smartphones and WiFi connections grows.

"Bango's strategy is to bring these users back 'on-net' so that they can charge purchases to their mobile phone bills, just as if they'd connected through their mobile network," Mr. Malhotra said.

"In this way, the Bango platform optimizes the payment experience across all users, however they choose to connect to third-party premium services," he said.

The most popular WiFi handsets are BlackBerry, iPhone Palm Pre and the Samsung Jack.

In response to more consumers connecting to the mobile Web via WiFi, Bango has developed a technology that delivers the carrier on-bill payment experience to every mobile phone, even when consumers connect through WiFi.

Bango's new WiFi on-bill payment services is designed to enable both carriers and content providers to capture revenue from this growing segment of their customer base.

For example, last month, 36 percent of Monotype Imaging Inc.'s http://FlipFont.mobi traffic was recorded as coming from Symbian Series 60 handsets via WiFi and other non-carrier connections.

This makes it crucial to present the same carrier payment experience to its Wi-Fi customers to fully realize the company's sales potential, according to Bango.

Ebook vendor GoSpoken.com tapped Bango for WiFi-enabled carrier payments.

More than 25 percent of GoSpoken.com's customers have a BlackBerry or Windows Mobile handset and an increasing number are using WiFi for the faster connection speeds.

Conversion rates using click-to-pay carrier billing are much higher than using other methods, according to GoSpoken.com.

Mobile social network Flirtomatic has also adopted Bango's platform for WiFi-enabled carrier payments.

"We are working with the main U.S. carriers that support ?browse and buy' billing, as well as operators across Europe," Mr. Malhotra said. "For content providers, Bango's system does the hard work of figuring out how to bill an off-net consumer to their cell phone account, so the content providers don't have to do anything to benefit.

"The capability is automatically adopted by everyone using Bango to bill," he said.

Smartphones represent the fastest growing mobile phone segment.

According to Gartner, 38.1 million smartphones were sold worldwide in the first quarter of 2009.

Until now smartphone users were redirected to credit card billing platforms instead of placing charges on their phone bill, leading to lost sales and lower conversion rates, according to Bango.

Bango also claims that many marketers selling content and services exclude smartphone users from their ad campaigns due to their inability to effectively monetize users.

According to Nokia, carrier billing increases sales by 70 percent.

The mobile payments industry was worth an estimated $25 billion in 2008, according to Informa.

"This WiFi carrier billing platform means that all the advantages of placing charges on the cell phone bill are retained, whatever the device," Mr. Malhotra said. "Previously BlackBerry users had to set up a credit card account to pay for a music track, or subscribe to a news or sport alerts service, or worse still, set up a PayPal account activated on their phone.

"Now they can browse premium mobile Web sites and pay on their phone bill, like other users," he said. "For mobile merchants, it means a significant uplift in the revenues generated from a mobile marketing campaign.

"Previously, the conversion rate on smart devices had been much lower because of the comparative difficulty of making a payment -- for some services with high penetration of the smartphone user base, up to 25 percent of revenues could be lost."