Creatary Makes Monetizing Your Mobile App Easier, Allows Carrier Billing

Backed by the Nokia Siemens Network, Creatary consists of an API to put in your app that connects to the telecom company’s infrastructure. That way your app can draw on telco features such as SMS, location, and carrier billing, allowing users to, say, use their phone bill to pay for usage of an app. So it can help you solve the problem of monetizing your app. Plus, it works independently of the kind of phone or OS that the user has.

So far, Creatary has cooperated with Indosat (NYSE:IIT) in Indonesia and also TIM (NYSE:TSU) in Brazil (both with roughly 50 million subscribers) so that app devs in both those countries can draw on those resources. Now in private beta at Creatary.com, the site is being prepped for launch later this month. We talked to the startup’s Anand Jhingan (pictured below), who works on global strategy and alliances, and asked him to explain more about the upcoming service:

1. How many employees do you have right now? Is your team expanding?

Anand: We are actually a startup firm but lodged inside of Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN). There was an internal competition on innovation, and more than 200 ideas were submitted by NSN personnel globally. Of these, around 15 were short-listed and from these just six were given the go-ahead to be incubated further. Creatary was one of these finalists, and still functions as a full-fledged startup within NSN. Our team is global with the development cell based in California and sales and marketing across the globe – in Singapore, Brazil, the UK and India; and we are rapidly expanding. The Creatary team is extended by several cells and numerous resources within Nokia Siemens Networks which provide various kinds of support to our activities.

2. So far you have presences in Brazil and Indonesia. how many other countries will you target?

NSN has a vibrant relationship with over 600 operators in more than 150 countries, and one of the core ideas behind Creatary was to leverage these relationships while bringing value to our telecom customers. Via these relationships we introduced the idea with a multitude of telcos and the response from them was overwhelming. This helped the Creatary concept to obtain the firm backing of NSN management. Currently we are actively bringing additional operators on board and plan to have several integrated in 2012. In parallel, we are firmly focused on creating a complete end-to-end ecosystem from developers to operators in Indonesia as we see the high level of growth and appetite for innovation in this region.

3. Payment systems have always been a tough nut to crack in Indonesia. So, through your API, does it mean that developers can easily charge users through operator billing?

That is exactly what it means! We are well aware of the online payment issues and Indonesia is not alone as several other up-and-coming markets have the same issue. Very few people have credit cards and the ones who have them also are not very keen on using them on their mobiles. Globally it has been proven via various studies that people see their mobile bills as an extremely trustworthy source for payments. We factored this into our plans and by March 2012 we will have the payment API that allows developers to charge users on their mobile bills from within their apps and/or services.

4. Will Indosat be the sole partner for Creatary in Indonesia?

As of now we have partnered with Indosat for all of their 50 million plus subscribers but it is not an exclusive relationship and we are open to adding more operators.

5. How easy it is to integrate Creatary API into an app? Do you support all the platforms?