Hack Week: Two words that have the power to put a smile on every engineer’s face (even before their first cup of coffee).
Last week, Boku kicked off its first ever Hack Week. Everyone took a break from their normal work (except mission critical tasks of course) to reflect and “hack” on a project they are most passionate about.
The result? All our employees around the globe Rocked. Our. Mobile. Payments. World. Check out the video below of the rock-ness in progress
Boku was recently invited to participate on a panel at GlobalLogic’s Innovate 2013 Conference at Stanford University in Palo Alto. GlobalLogic’s Innovate conference series explores how today’s business leaders are transforming their market spaces through innovative ideas and technologies. The April 18th conference discussed the impact of rapid and widespread mobile adoption on the global market for mCommerce, media downloads, mobile apps, and ads. Industry-defining figures were also in attendance from NEA, Google, VISA, LinkedIn, Facebook, Boku, Bloomreach, and Appcelerator. Participants opined on how to take advantage of the explosive growth and adoption of mobile devices and apps.
Continue readingLast Tuesday night, the Boku Kafe was transformed into a No Limit, Texas Hold ‘em poker super arena with everyone out for blood. Dozens from Boku threw down cold, hard cash for the chance to win fame and fortune.
Continue readingOnce again, Boku is making the journey to GSMA’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. In case you’re new to mobile and not familiar with the GSMA, from their website: “The GSMA represents the interests of the worldwide mobile communications industry. Spanning 220 countries, the GSMA unites nearly 800 of the world’s mobile operators, as well as more than 200 companies in the broader mobile ecosystem, including handset makers, software companies, equipment providers, Internet companies, and media and entertainment organizations.”
Continue readingPayments Forward is a networking forum that brings together senior professionals from across the payments world to discuss and debate the issues and future developments within the industry. Last week, they invited our CBO, Jon Prideaux, along with the Head of Digital Banking from Barclays responsible for Pingit, the Managing Directors of iZettle and the UK Cards Association to debate the following proposition:
Continue readingThe Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is always an organized, yet glitzy form of chaos and 2013 was no exception. For anyone who has been to CES, you know that life outside the show floor consists of two things: meetings and parties (and sometimes the parties are your most important meetings). Since we love a good party, we decided to throw a shindig of our own on Jan 8th, stocking a suite at the Hard Rock Hotel with Boku branded champagne.
Continue readingBoku Chief Business Officer Jon Prideaux traveled to Milan, Italy last week to present at GSMA’s NFC & Mobile Money Summit. Now in its 4th year, the Summit is a premier event for industry leaders and players. Over 800 people were in attendance representing 82 countries. This year’s event focused on the latest innovations and lessons learned within the mobile money and NFC space.
Jon was on a session that included TIM, Ingenico and American Express and shared some details of Boku’s growth and the sort of people who are using mobile payments. Around half of our users pay with Boku because it’s the only way that they can get the stuff that they want to buy, but an increasing number pay with their phone because it’s more convenient (they know their phone number but can’t remember their card number) or more secure. Age-wise our users are quite young: half are 25 or under.
As a former Visa executive, Jon also compared Boku’s current growth with Visa during the same point in its growth cycle. The biggest difference is the speed of scaling. It took Visa decades to reach 1 billion users (and every employee got given a mug!), through the power of mobile, it took Boku only 3 years to reaches more than 3.5 billion users. One thing is similar though: the need for “co-opetition” (cooperation between competitors). It’s just as necessary in mobile payments now as it had been for Visa back when they were building their payments infrastructure decades ago.
Many thanks to GSMA for the invitation to attend and share our experiences with our colleagues from all over the world. Hope to see everyone again in Barcelona this February.
The Boku Team
On Wednesday October 24th, two different speakers from Boku HQ will be speaking on panels at the Sprint Open Solutions conference in San Jose. The conference, a part of Sprint’s commitment to providing a vibrant ecosystem for mobile app developers and service providers, offers a variety of presentations, panels, breakout sessions and demos that highlight the tools available to vendors offering services to the Sprint network of customers. Ron Hirson, our co-founder and President, and Kevin Grant, our SVP of Sales, will be on the following respective panels:
Continue readingThis Monday, Boku President Ron Hirson will be moderating the panel “Virtual Currencies, In-App Payments and Other Alternative Payments” at this year’s Money2020 Expo in Las Vegas. Money2020 is a groundbreaking event for emerging payments and financial services and an opportunity for the who’s who in money to create, share and disrupt.
Continue readingLeading up to the 2012 LOGIN conference, Boku attended a recent event with the most influential private community in digital games, Gaming Insiders. The exclusive event was held at Unicorn in our home city of San Francisco.
Membership and event attendance are by invitation only, and the attendees reflected a tightly curated mix of leaders and promising newcomers in the digital gaming space. This group came together to discuss the issues, challenges, and opportunities in the gaming market, as well as enjoy some amazing food and drinks provided by Unicorn.
We were excited to attend this exclusive event and to join with TapJoy, TrialPay, and Vonchurch as sponsors to make the event an incredible night with insightful speakers and excellent networking opportunities. Looking forward to many more Gaming Insiders events in the future.
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