India has seen a series of recent developments in the carrier billing space, especially related to platforms that aggregate mobile carriers and allow publishers from both the mobile Internet and mobile applications space, the ability to enable payments via telecom operators (carriers): Earlier today, carrier billing and cross-platform mobile payments company Boku acquired Qubecell, and Estonia based mobile payment provider Fortumo, setup its first Indian office in New Delhi. This year alone, three companies -- Fortumo, Ver Se and NeoMobile -- partnered with telecom operators in the country for carrier billing. In March, Hungama.com had tied up with all telecom operators for billing when it launched a music and video streaming mobile app that also let listeners purchase tracks. Earlier this month, music streaming platform Dhingana signed a carrier billing deal with Idea Cellular to let its users download unlimited tracks from the service for free and without subscribing to a data plan. Some services such as Times Internet's BoxTV signed up with Fortumo for operator billing last month. 1. Carriers want it: The wind has gone out of the Mobile VAS sails in India, and that is clearly a segment on the decline. The number of activations declined by 60% between June and July 2013, and with the focus now shifting to the Mobile Internet, it's likely that they will continue to remain low. Carriers need to make money, and are now more open to integrating their billing with merchants through third party aggregators. Earlier, merchants had to integrate with carriers directly, which was never an easy…
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