Takuya Homma's Library tagged MicroPayment →  View Popular

As expected, 2D BOY have published details of their World Of Goo First Birthday experiment. Offering the game for whatever price people wanted to pay (previously it was $20), this meant people could get a copy for as little as $0.01 or as much as fifty million squillion space dollars. (I believe that’s the upper limit.) Originally this was intended to last for a week, but has now been extended to 25th October. And being a rather open sort they’ve announced how many copies they’ve sold so far, and indeed how much people have been paying, along with much more. It’s an unprecedented amount of detailed sales information. Its significance shouldn’t be underplayed.

In the last week there have been approximately 57,000 sales of the game. Which is a pretty stunning number. So let’s look at what people paid:

• The market for mobile applications, or apps, will become "as big as the internet", peaking at 10 million apps in 2020 according to Symbian.
• CGAP produced a recent survey on Financial Access and found that there are 6.2 billion bank accounts worldwide - more than one for every person on the planet - except that 70% of adults in developing countries do not use formal financial services, or are unbanked, compared to 20% of those in developed countries.
• Of the 139 countries that CGAP surveyed, only 40 reported that they encourage or mandate government transfers through the banking system; 14 of these are high-income countries and 10 countries in Latin America. Few countries in other regions are promoting such transfers.
• The survey predicts that the mobile payments market could be worth as much as £365 billion by 2013, with 110 million users in Europe alone by 2014.
• By the year 2012 CGAP and GSMA estimate there will be 1.7 billion people with a mobile phone but not a bank account and as many as 364 million unbanked people could be reached by agent-networked banking through mobile phones.
• CGAP estimate that mobile financial services to poor people in emerging economies will increase from nothing to $5 billion in 2012.
• 
  40% of Kenyan households have used M-PESA as of late 2008, a figure announced by Caroline Pulver of FSD Kenya as she unveiled the findings of their survey (see pdf)
• 41% of Filipino mobile money users were able to set up a mobile money account in 5 minutes or less.
• Electronic payments deliver cost savings of at least 1% of a country’s GDP when compared to paper, according to Visa.
• Monitise, the mobile money network, has just signed up their millionth
  customer and are processing 25 million transactions per annum.