Nokia gives Obopay a boost

September 1st, 2009

“The announcement on Wednesday by Nokia, the world’s largest cell-phone maker, that it will launch a mobile-payments service is likely to give a competitive leg-up to Obopay Inc., the Redwood City, Calif.-based mobile-payments processor that developed the software for the new venture, called Nokia Money.”

The article noted Nokia’s news release’s stating that the service will be open and interoperable with other payment services, and that it will run on other manufacturers’ handsets.  According to Realini, “In all cases, their [Nokia’s] service commitment is bigger than handsets…..there’s nothing about our relationship that would prevent us from having an offering on other people’s handsets.”

In the article Realini also said that Obopay was making good progress abroad and that with the possible exception of Kenya, no mobile-payments provider had locked up any country yet, and compared the potential to that of the Internet in 1993: “There’s just a huge amount of opportunity.”