STi Prepaid has created a huge empire with prepaid phone cards, selling over 200 million cards a year in 200,000 stores.
In a smart move, Zeus Research is teaming up with STi to create a way to use those cards to pay for virtual goods inside online games.
San Francisco-based Zeus research is announcing today that STi will provide a massive increase in distribution for Zues’ online entertainment partners. Virtual goods are turning into a big business. Inside Network estimates that virtual goods will grow from $1 billion in the U.S. in 2009 to $1.6 billion in 2010.
But a big obstacle is that a lot of teens, kids and adults don’t have credit cards or don’t feel comfortable using them online. Kwedit has come up with one way to serve these folks. And other companies such as PlaySpan and Incomm have created prepaid game cards that let people pay for games with the cards.
Now Zeus Research is greasing the skids even more. STi Prepaid has more retail shelf space than any of the game cards, and now Zeus’ patent-pending system can instantly convert STi Prepaid phone cards into virtual goods payment cards.
Sean Ryan, co-founder of startups teen virtual world Meez and virtual goods platform Twofish (the latter acquired by Live Gamer), saw these problems first hand in his prior companies. He founded Zeus in 2009 and built a service that would be simple for players to use, quick for publishers to integrate, and have a huge reach across retail. To redeem a card, you simply click on the STi logo within the game’s payment options, fill in the two numbers from the back of the STi card, and click enter.
Zeus makes it simple for publishers to begin accepting payments from users via STi cards. Zeus does so by providing an applications programming interface (API), which is the technical glue to make it happen. Zeus will launch the STi Prepaid Card service for online games in March, along with a series of partners.
The company has fewer than ten employees. Rivals include Kwedit, Rixty, and Cash in the Mail. The company is self-funded and has raised less than $250,000 to date.