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Currently, this all new Airtel App Store contains over 10,000 apps and will cater to a variety of preferences such as book references, gaming tools, business & finance, social networks, music & audio video, travel & GPS TV lifestyle, wellness education & eLearning, themes and many more. While customers could download certain apps for a one time fee, they also have the choice of choosing a range of apps for free.
Speaking about the launch of this new service, Airtel Lanka Chief Executive Officer/Managing Director Suren Goonewardene said, “We are very pleased to partner with neXva on this app store initiative. With neXva having a technology centre in Sri Lanka, this can help local developers monetise their content. We realise that localisation is key to the success of our app store in Sri Lanka. We want to bring locally relevant mobile applications to our customers and support Sri Lanka’s talented developers. We selected neXva to deploy the app store because of neXva’s robust technology platform and their internal team will able to customise and localise the offering of applications specifically for our customers in Sri Lanka.”
The store features ‘one-click’ billing that enables Airtel’s customers to purchase apps through their operator billing as well as neXva’s neXpayer technology that enables in-app purchases and subscription billing.
“Bringing neXva’s app store platform to Airtel Lanka is a great opportunity for neXva,” said neXva founder and CEO Brian J. Friedman. “Our technology team is based in Colombo and we’re delighted that Airtel selected us to bring our app store platform along with a highly curated selection of content to Airtel’s customers in Sri Lanka. Localised content combined with our direct billing connection with Airtel Lanka brings a unique opportunity for local and international developers and content providers to monetise their content through neXva’s neXpayer operator billing API that enables content purchases through the mobile wallet.”
Google in talks with Airtel to provide carrier billing serviceGoogle is in talks with Airtel to allow customers of the mobile operator to pay for digital items such as e-books, paid apps and in-app purchases through their service provider, reports the Economic Times. This would greatly benefit the Indian smartphone users who do not use credit cards. Such a tie-up can significantly boost Google’s digital goods business, benefiting both the app developers and content creators. This tie-up would enable Google to sell its apps and digital content to Airtel’s 40 million data subscribers in India, without having to collect their banking details. Out of the total 40 million subscribers, 12.5 million are on 3G. Presently, people can purchase the digital items through credit cards, debit cards or gift cards. Industry experts call this practice of allowing customers to charge their digital purchases directly to their phone bills as ‘carrier billing’. With only 2% credit card penetration and many people who are not comfortable making digital payments, operator billing has a huge potential to boost digital goods business. Google and Airtel are expected to announce a deal once they agree on revenue sharing and receive regulatory clearance. An undisclosed source was quoted in the Economic Times as saying, “Google was asking for as much as 90% of the revenues.” Traditionally, Operators have been taking over 50% of the revenues. However, operators have been under pressure to pay out more to publishers and developers. Google’s digital goods and apps business is expected to bring in over $5 billion in revenues by 2017 worldwide. |
