Quality Content For Sony Ericsson Phones

Europe : Esato, the first port of call for phone users looking for quality content for their new Sony Ericsson phone, is now using the Bango.net Premium Service to charge for polyphonic ringtones. Attracted by the low cost of setting up the charging service, Esato found that they were making money from their WAP site, wap.esato.com, from day one.

"I was amazed at the low entry cost," said Olav Hellesø-Knutsen, Webmaster at Esato. "All I had to do was buy a few Bango Numbers and now Esato receives 60% of the price paid for each polyphonic ringtone downloaded from our mobile site."

Esato is the place mobile users go to find download backgrounds and ringtones, join the respected Forums and resolve any problems they may have. While the targeted audience is Sony Ericsson owners, owners of other mobile phones can also find backgrounds and ringtones on this site.

Esato has 250,000 visitors a month on the WAP site. To cover its growing bandwidth costs, Esato decided to start charging for its polyphonic ringtones using the Bango Premium Service. Fellow Norwegian company Logogo.com, already an expert on the Bango service, set up the Esato ringtone download site in under an hour.

"Esato has the flexibility to change the price of its content at any time, and implement any price point it wishes from 1 cent/p upwards," said Njål Hansen at Logogo.com. All this is done online by logging into their account at mybango.net.

Drive users to mobile content
Using the Bango Txt Trigger, the text message go esato sent to the 'short-code' 89080 automatically takes users in the UK to the Esato WAP site. From here, users can browse, preview and download the content they want.

As users purchase content, payments are charged to their mobile phone bill using Premium SMS or, if they are a Vodafone customer, using m-pay bill. The service works through the user’s existing WAP connection, so users can benefit from GPRS for faster download speeds. Vodafone live!, O2 Online, Orange, and T-Mobile users will all benefit from the broad range of content available from their phones, without having to change any settings.

Ringtones, logos and other personalisation services have formed the backbone of mobile content to date with a market value of €1.2 billion across Western Europe in 2002. However, many new mobile services such as polyphonic ringtones and Java games are dependent on WAP delivery.

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