A few weeks ago I covered Sarah Lacy’s talk at Girls in Tech. Although I agreed with Sarah’s assessment that mobile is the new hot area of growth, I had concerns about the feasibility of cracking the mobile market due to fragmented mobile carrier markets and difficulty of transferring money across global boundaries.

Well turns out that there might be some solutions out there. One of them is Paymo. Paymo allows users making purchases on merchants sites with Paymo to make a purchase by entering their phone number and replying to a text. Users don’t have to have a bank account or a credit card. Payment simply deducts from their cell phone plan. Paymo covers over 50 countries with large ones like India coming soon. Several Middle Eastern countries (where there is a lot of spending power) are already on board with Paymo.

Paymo, has recently partnered with Hi5 to allow mobile payments for virtual goods.

The real kicker that will arrive when services like Paymo can be coupled with mobile content delivery. From their website it seems that Paymo is currently only available for websites, which probably means its available on smart phones too. But that doesn’t help much if you are trying to reach users with non-internet enabled phones and no computers. I’ve emailed Paymo asking them this. I shall update you once they let me know.

Similar Posts:

• Interview Igor Faletski–How Mobify can help your mobile site setup ad revenue
• Girls in tech event: Sarah Lacy’s thoughts on personal branding and tech growth opportunities
• SDForum: Shaping the New Age Of App Development, Mobile Platforms
• Predictions 2009
• Indian mobile market–growing and whole

Popularity: 44% [?]