virtual goods

A mobile payments provider BOKU has partnered with AT&T to launch a direct mobile payment connection trial. The new program is aimed to offer customers a direct carrier-billing solution for online goods and services using their existing wireless service account.

Now AT&T customers can pay for virtual purchases and online content from participating merchants using the BOKU mobile payments service. Just using their mobile phone customers may make online purchases by entering their mobile number and charging directly to their existing AT&T wireless service account.

A payment solutions provider for online merchants mopay entered into a partnership with 16 social gaming brands. At the moment mopay offers mobile payments for social games published on international social networks like Facebook, Hi5, MySpace, Orkut and VZ-Networks.

 Sales of digital goods such as virtual objects and currency used in online games are taking off with consumers. Unfortunately for their vendors, they are increasingly popular with cyber criminals, too.

Merchants that sell digital goods lost 1.9% of all revenue to fraud in 2009, compared with a 1.1% fraud rate for companies that sell physical goods online, according to CyberSource Corp., which processes credit cards for online merchants.

PlaySpan, a social net e-commerce provider, is going to enlarge its business by acquiring rival Spare Change, a micro-payments system for social networks. Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. PlaySpan business targets online communities, gamer sites and virtual worlds and offers Ultimate Wallet (an e-wallet for games and other applications), PayByCash (an online payment processor), and Ultimate Game Card (a pre-paid game card) and other products.