Someone sent this pie graph to me earlier today, and I thought it was pretty interesting. In fact, our whole team is still talking about it. Before I get into anymore details, let me show you the chart first.
Are you surprised that RIM has such a huge smartphone market in the US? I am not. It did surprise me that Apple actually lost market shares between Q4 2007 and Q1 2008 though, but that’s not my point. What did surprise me is the following chart:
Nokia owns 52.9% of the World Smartphone Market? That’s huge! I guess US only covers a small portion of the world mobile industry. In fact, 44.5% of the US market is only equivalent to 11.4% of the world market!
I believe that Bharti Airtel and China Mobile alone already have more than the total number of US mobile subscribers combined, so the numbers do make sense. Just not what I had imagined, since Nokia smartphones aren’t as popular here in the US. I guess world domination is more important!
As some of you probably already heard, we have officially expanded into India! About a week ago, we announced that we just reached a partnership with YES bank.
Taken directly from our press release:
“With Obopay, YES BANK customers securely and instantly transfer money to and from any mobile phone number with Obopay’s mobile application, text message or mobile Web. YES BANK customers can instantly withdraw cash received using their YES BANK debit card.”
India’s mobile market is growing fast. For 2008, they have been adding more than 8 million customers a month! Needless to say, we are really excited about this new opportunity.
I am really not trying to brag, but Obopay has been all over the news recently. I just ran a quick search on Google News and saw that we actually showed up 38 times in the last month alone. This is just for news articles, not including blogs, forums, and other websites.
A lot of it probably has to do with our two major releases this month:
We released a new feature that allows you transfer money to any valid US mobile phone number, regardless of their bank account. You don’t even need their banking information! You can read our press release here.
We will certainly talk about these two things very soon. But needless to say, we are pretty excited about what’s going on!
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