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May 28, 2007
Tunz Of Ways To Make Money With A Blog
Person-to-person mobile payments startup Tunz just launched a widget that we’re betting will be popular with bloggers – at least bloggers in Belgium [via Web 2.0 In Belgium].
It is an SMS payment button that enables readers to send money to the bloggeur.
Tunz also offers services for web merchants and content publishers. It isn’t the first to offer a mobile micropayments service but it’s the simplest one we’ve seen. For blogs Tunz charges a flat fee of 10 euro cents per transaction. You can accept donations/payments under your own name or an alias.
We don't want to sound like an ad for Tunz, but we note that registration is fast. No client downloads, its operator independant (but it's limited to Belgian networks), and it works on antique handys like the one shown here.
Just one text message is enough to send the instruction to make a payment, the amount of money to send, to whom, and your security PIN code. For example, the following text messagae sends 5 euros to phone number 0475123456 with a message saying "merci" and the last four digits are the PIN code.
PAY 5 0475123456 merci 1234
Tunz was founded by two entrepreneurs now on their third venture together. Jean Zurstrassen and Grégoire de Streel founded an online trading platform in 1998 and then got a banking license. The two sold Keytrade Bank to Crédit Agricole last year. Before that, the two founded and sold Skynet, a Belgian ISP.
We thought at first that this is a competitor for Swiss startup Zong which is already international, but Zong is about making money with SMS traffic, the person to person feature is missing, and registration is more baroque.
We’re not sure about the international potential for Tunz. Cellphone manufacturers Nokia and Motorola are rumored to be entering the mobile payments market but that rumor has been around for a long time, and Paypal is already offering a mobile payments scheme in the US. It may decide to internationalize it, which would mean serious competition.
But we note that even with Paypal present in the market, according to a CNN/Money article about mobile commerce 2.0, a couple of US startups targeting micropayment niches have nevertheless launched in recent months.
View Tunz
Posted on May 28, 2007 07:00 AM | Posted to Early stage | Permalink
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