Today Helio announced that its subscribers will be able to pay their bills via Obopay. Targeted mostly for pay-as-you-go users, Obopay is the latest in MasterCard’s way of having you spend money on their terms. It works sort-of like a prepaid credit card that you can use to top up minutes, buy crappy wallpapers, and such. But it’s also so much more!
Helio says that if you have a phone with Obopay on it, money can be sent to you from anyone. This is a great way to buy your friends who you occasionally talk to a small — gift like a ringtone or video game (NOTE TO MEN: Do not buy your sig other a ringtone). It seems like a decent product and if you visit Obopay’s website, you can get $5 for signing up and an additional $5 for scamming your pals referrals.
Helio taps into Obopay [Electronista]
But Helio said not to call it a phone. OH, THE CONTRADICTIONS. :o Anywho, I probably wouldn’t use it if I did get a Helio – Mastercard and I have an uneasy truce because they’ve been the only card I’ve ever had that was used for purchases I didn’t make.
The last frontier for credit cards companies to get consumers to pay for small things with their cards. Such as jammin’ ringtones and sweet wallpapers yo.
Smart idea considering the market and age group that Helio caters to rely a lot on their parents for money and still consider hip-hop and pop ringtones to be the coolest things ever ELL OH ELL hee hee!11!
Ahem.
Anyways, with the way credit card companies such as Visa or MasterCard are gunning to get you and me to buy our trendy salads and bottled waters with our plastic, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more marketing schemes like this popping up in most normal providers such as Verizon or Cingular…
Great… all my pockets are full along with my backpack of other electronics… where the hell am I going to put this now? I might need a sex change to make room to carry yet another electronic device! Let us hope they roll this out on other phone systems via firmware update before I go under the knife!
Jon
I saw Obopay last year at CES and thought it was a pretty good idea. Although at the time I thought paypal mobile would come up with the same idea and crush them. That hasn’t happened, nor has obopay really taken off.
Helio is a start, but how many customers does Helio even have? 100,000? Take a small percentage who would use obopay and you are talking about 1k-3k people even using this service.
They need to close a large carrier, and I guess this is the first baby step. Look at Google checkout, it is google, and it’s taking quite some time to get traction.
I agree with Peter. Rather than focusing on recruiting ways for people to pay, why not actually recruit customers? Helio has a long way to go before they get to the stage where they have to seriously worry about offering a variety of payment options.
Jon
It’s a cellphone, not a credit card (and I hope you wouldn’t need plastic surgery to carry another one :))
Mastercard’s decision to target Helio could be a great way to show the bigger providers why they should adapt. Simply going up to them and saying “we’ll take over one of your key markets” probably won’t make them very interested. Being able to go “we did that with Helio and they made -very-large-number-” might