Last night saw the Mobile Entertainment Awards 2008 being announced at a gathering of the great and good of the world’s mobile industry.

I’m delighted to report that for the 2nd year in a row, Bango won the Best Transactions Provider award, beating Dialogue, Ericsson IPX, Mblox, Netsize and Valista.

Not only was it a successful night for us but also for many of our customers. In nearly every category there was a Bango customer or partner up for award.

Bango customer/partner category winners included:

Best Imaging Company - Fonestarz
Best Music Label - Sony BMG
Best Video Producer - Sky
Best Games Publisher - EA Mobile
Best Video Service Provider - Quickplay Media
Best Music Service Provider - Shazam
Best Publishing Platform - Volantis
Best Advertising & Marketing Company - AdMob
Best Search provider - Taptu

The Company’s 2008 Annual Report has been posted to shareholders together with the Notice of Annual General Meeting and the associated form of proxy. The Company’s AGM will be held at 12pm on Friday 19 September 2008 at the offices of ICIS, Aldermary House, 10-15 Queen Street, London, EC4N 1TX.

View the 2008 AGM Notice, 2008 AGM Notice Explanatory Notes and 2008 AGM New Articles.

The Bango 2008 Annual report is available for download here: http://bangoinvestor.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/bangoannrep-08-ol_web.pdf

In addition to the financials, there is a lot of useful information about Bango and our business in this document.

The cover of the report of made up of hundreds of small flags - representing the global activity we have built up.  As our Mobile Analytics products augment our Mobile Payments products we expect the global buzz around Bango to intensify.

The CEO of Bango recently presented to a group of Mobile Industry types, who were interested what Bango’s view of the Mobile Analytics opportunity was.

As Bango is the current leader in the field of Mabile Analytics, they wanted to understand how big the opportunity might be and how we were planning to sustain our competitive edge and leadership.

This presentation helped demonstrate that the market opportunity could be hundreds of millions of dollars in 2011, and that Bango is in a good position to take a sizeable chunk of that market.

Visit http://www.slideshare.net/rayand/mobile-analytics-opportunity-presentation to view or download the presentation.

Bango (AIM: BGO) the mobile web platform provider, has won the ‘Best Mobile Internet Use’ Award presented by the Mobile Data Association (MDA) on July 1 2008. These prestigious industry awards recognise companies and individuals that have made an outstanding and innovative contribution to the rapidly growing UK mobile data industry.

This means Bango has won two awards in two weeks, after picking up a special Gold Award at the Mobile Content Awards last week. Read more

We just published our Preliminary Results for the year ended March 31st 2008, and we have our analysts conference at 11am UK time in London.   Sales were up costs were down, resulting in losses halved and continued good progress towards profitability.  Sales productivity has been improved and the pace of sign-ups at www.bango.com has increased significantly as we open our technology to more content providers and the interest in Mobile web grows. 

With interest in mobile marketing growing, our new Bango analytics product is attracting attention from investors.

Visit our Key Financial Documents page for copies of our Prelims Announcement and a slide presentation summarising the results.
 

Bango was founded in 1999 to enable people with content and services to benefit from the roll-out of the internet / web to mobile phones.  Ever since then, a hot question in our investors’ minds has been “when will mobile web take off?”.

We are preparing the powerpoint slides and narrative for our preliminary results announcement on 10th June, and for the meetings with investors after that.  In doing so we have been surveying the market to see who, that our investors might respect, shares our view that take-off is underway.

I came across this interesting interview of Google CEO Eric Schmidt with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung last week.  (its at http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/108584 ) He predicts that: “The mobile internet would be the next major advertising platform. ” and “In a few years, mobile advertising will generate more revenue than advertising on the normal web.”   Quite remarkable indicators that Google believes in Mobile web going mainstream.

A mixture of technology, commercial, operator political, consumer and business model issues have slowed the uptake of the mobile web - until very recently.  There is a lot of evidence that internet is now reaching a wider group of mobile users, and that teh mainstream is only a few quarters away.

Ray Anderson, Bango CEO gave a presentation on Mobile Advertising at Mobile Monday London on 12th May.

The event, at Thomson Reuters in The City was attended by 200 agencies, advertisers and mobile website owners.  Other presenters included Reuters, Vodafone and Mindstreams.
The presentation is at http://mobilemonday.org.uk/ray.pdf

Bango just made the following RNS announcement:

Bango Launches Mobile Advertising and Marketing Product

ID technology provides essential understanding of mobile visitors to enhance marketing effectiveness

February 8th 2008 - Bango announces the immediate availability of Bango
Analytics, a new product that enables businesses of all sizes to get a better
return from their investment in marketing and advertising campaigns on the
mobile web.  Unique technology captures valuable mobile-specific data about mobile users responding to campaigns and presents that data in an easy to use form to enable informed decision-making.

With the mobile advertising market forecast to grow fast over the next few years -  Gartner (IT) forecasts $11 billion in global revenue from mobile advertising by 2011, up from less than $1 billion a year in 2007 - Bango is well positioned to capitalize on this growth.

Bango Analytics measures the effectiveness of Google, Yahoo!, AdMob, JumpTap, Microsoft and the many other advertising and search marketing opportunities available on the mobile web. It is a widely held view within advertising agencies that the inability to measure the effectiveness of mobile marketing is holding back investment.

The new product overcomes the limitations of traditional web analytics by recording mobile specific data about website visitors such as their country, network and handset type. It works for all mobile phones, without downloading software or changing the user experience. Bango’s unique “digital fingerprint” technology assigns each user a persistent user identifier which enables precise user tracking without revealing any personal data. Businesses of all sizes get a valuable view on how their mobile website is performing, which marketing campaigns are working and their total return on investment.

Bango Analytics is a hosted service, available self service, free of charge for small scale use. As activity rises, Bango charges a usage-based monthly fee starting from £29 and rising with activity levels. Deep analysis of a typical mobile advertising campaign can be provided for around 1-5% of the campaign budget.

“Mobile needs a better, more innovative way to provide accurate conversion tracking for mobile ads, and Bango Analytics promises to do just that by understanding how the mobile user connects to the internet,” said Farhad Divecha, Managing Director of AccuraCast, a leading mobile search marketing agency.

Ray Anderson, CEO of Bango, added, “We have positioned ourselves at the centre of the mobile web, interacting between the mobile networks, the content providers, the search engine operators, and the users of the mobile internet. This gives us a unique position as the custodian of a wealth of valuable data about visits to mobile websites. Bango Analytics will now enable owners of mobile websites to access and use that data to be more effective in their marketing and advertising.  This is key to driving the growth in traffic over the mobile web.”

For further information visit http://www.bango.com/analytics

Bango just posted a trading update via RNS:

February 8, 2008 - Ahead of its financial year-end on 31 March 2008, Bango today releases the following update on current trading:

During the second half of the year, Bango has continued to experience strong growth in revenue from end-users, leading to a continued reduction in operating losses broadly in line with market expectations.

Bango continues to broaden its range of products and services that enable content providers to optimise their offering on the mobile web.  They include the new Bango Analytics product, launched this week, as well as the broadest and most flexible range of payment solutions available on mobile globally.