Mr Chua Zi Yong: We aggregate the various payment systems into a one-stop interface.

Stream Media has identified payment services as an important catalyst for mobile software development, and has focused its energies into building a system that connects and facilitates payment between the key parties in the mobile ecosystem.

The company was founded in March 2009 when its Chief Executive Officer Mr Chua Zi Yong saw the need for simple enablement of payments to be made to companies in the mobile space. “I was putting together a business plan for mobile TV streaming when I found setting up a system for payment to be a very big pain point,” he said.

Companies often had to individually integrate various payment types like credit cards, operator billing, and virtual currencies, into their internal systems, an onerous process that can take weeks or even months just to set up a single account.

“For the long term sustainability of the mobile industry, someone had to come out with a simple solution for content and service providers and we decided to move into this space and created MoVend,” Mr Chua said.

MoVend is an in-app commerce platform that allows users to make transactions and payments easily, without exiting the app. Other than collecting payment from established gateways like operator billing and PayPal, the platform provides a complete set of features, including user and licence management, sales tracking and analytics.

“We aggregate the various payment systems into a one-stop interface that manages all the necessary chores associated with billing so that our clients can connect to them instantly,” said Mr Chua. “By enabling mobile content and service providers to quickly receive payment, the developer can have peace of mind and focus on building quality mobile content and services.”

Stream Media’s innovative idea has received the attention of investors and apart from early development support from SPRING Singapore and the Media Development Authority, as well as the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore’s (IDA) Infocomm Leadership and Development (iLEAD) programme for manpower development, the company also recently raised S$1 million in funding from Stream Global and SingTel Innov8. This will enable Stream Media to effectively execute its twin-pronged strategy focused on channel and content partnerships in the coming year.

Founded in March 2009, Stream Media tapped on IDA's iLEAD programme for manpower development.

“We are partnering with several payment companies, operators and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) for either content distribution or cross marketing collaboration in Southeast Asia and China,” said Mr Chua. “We have closed app distribution deals with OEMs and operators to use MoVend for their app stores, and will help developers who use our software development kit (SDK) to publish and market their apps in these channels. We will also preload selected high quality games into devices to boost our developers’ revenue.”

Mobile game publishers like Hyperbees in the United Kingdom and GoodTeam Studios in China are the first few that have used MoVend.

While MoVend is currently available only for Android-based phones, the company expects its flagship payment platform to be available on the Apple iPhone, BlackBerry OS and Windows Phone 7 mobile devices within the year. “We plan for MoVend to become the uniform payment mechanism to enable in-app and virtual goods transactions in all application stores,” said Mr Chua.