Thoughts on BilltoMobile

It looks like everyone is talking about Verizon Wireless's partnership with Danal to offer BilltoMobile to it's subscribers.  I think this is a great step forward and maybe in a year or so, we would have enough data to really understanding how the American market will adopt this alternative method of payment from Verizon.  Based on the descriptions of the BilltoMobile service, here are some points that really jump out at me:

-Verizon's BilltoMobile can only be used to purchased digital content from participating e-tailers.
-A comprehensive list of e-tailers that accept BilltoMobile is currently not yet available.
-Purchases through BilltoMobile will be directly billed against the subscriber's mobile account.
-The maximum a subscriber can spend via BilltoMobile is $25 per month.
-Supposedly, there is no registration required to enable the services.
 
I was a little confused about the "no registration required" bit.  Does this mean that parental controls have to be explicitly set in order to limit the functionality for young family member accounts if you don't want them to have the ability to spend?  

Another thought I had was that it seems weird to me that this service is only available for post-paid customers.  Why couldn't you use pre-paid credit to purchase digital content in the same fashion you do with a post-paid account.  This may actually be a great way to limit and control spending for your young family members.  In addition, I didn't see any capability to purchase mobile add on services such as a-la-cart SMS/MMS messaging top ups, voicemail for the month, or calling hunting on the fly services that would potentially be more desirable to users older than 35 years.

The concept of billing to your mobile phone account seems heating up in the United States, and with competitors like Boku and Zong in the backyard, it will be interesting to see how Danal's BilltoMobile service tallies up against the North American counterparts.

Posted on: Wednesday, March 24, 2010