PayPal paid around $240 million to buy Zong, which it calls one of the "leading providers of payments through mobile carrier billing," according to Fast Company.
Zong has relationships with more than 250 cellphone networks in 45 countries, and combined with PayPal's 100 million-ish user accounts, it could give PayPal the "potential to reach the more than 4 billion people around the world who have mobile phones," according to the company.
That's a distinctly different solution to the growing field of NFC-enabled wireless payment systems, which typically blend high-tech devices like smartphones with existing payment structures to deliver an enhanced payment system.
What PayPal and Zong will be able to create is something simpler an integrated system that replaces a credit card or even hard currency with a device as simple as a dumbphone. In certain markets in developing nations where dumbphones prevail, PayPal could enable advanced in-store purchasing using nothing more sophisticated than a specially coded SMS.
