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Mobile rewards startup Yoyo Holdings partners with Philippines’ largest telco PLDT/Smart

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See the original story in Japanese. Yoyo Holdings, the startup behind PopSlide, a rewards platform for smartphone users in Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines, recently partnered with Voyager Innovations (hereafter called Voyager), a subsidiary of Philippine Communications giant PLDT/Smart, and started offering Popslide’s service geared toward users of Voyager’s free internet service, SafeZone. In partnership with 19 major brands like Zalora, Skyscanner, Philippine Airlines , SafeZone offers free mobile internet service in exchange for using these brands’ online services. In countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, and Nigeria, free mobile internet connection services are being offered as part of service promotions from Facebook, Google, and others, but SafeZone, in emulation of these concepts, has made it possible for multiple brands to offer connection service over a shared platform led by the telecom company. See also: Telkomsel and Google Bring Free Mobile Internet to Indonesia (Tech in Asia) Facebook’s Internet.org app brings free mobile internet to the Philippines (Tech in Asia) Airtel, Google give customers free internet service (Vanguard) Through PopSlides participation with SafeZone, SafeZone users in the Philippines who have accumulated reward points on PopSlide by seeing ads displayed on their lock screen, will be able to easily use those points…

popslide-safezone

See the original story in Japanese.

Yoyo Holdings, the startup behind PopSlide, a rewards platform for smartphone users in Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines, recently partnered with Voyager Innovations (hereafter called Voyager), a subsidiary of Philippine Communications giant PLDT/Smart, and started offering Popslide’s service geared toward users of Voyager’s free internet service, SafeZone.

In partnership with 19 major brands like Zalora, Skyscanner, Philippine Airlines , SafeZone offers free mobile internet service in exchange for using these brands’ online services. In countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, and Nigeria, free mobile internet connection services are being offered as part of service promotions from Facebook, Google, and others, but SafeZone, in emulation of these concepts, has made it possible for multiple brands to offer connection service over a shared platform led by the telecom company.

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Through PopSlides participation with SafeZone, SafeZone users in the Philippines who have accumulated reward points on PopSlide by seeing ads displayed on their lock screen, will be able to easily use those points to enjoy free mobile internet service. Currently there are 800,000 PopSlide users in the Southeast Asia region, but with the development of this partnership, they can expect an influx of some percentage of the Philippines 2 million SafeZone users to begin using the PopSlide service.

Yoyo Holdings co-founder and CEO Yosuke Fukada commented on the partnership with SafeZone.

Both PopSlide and SafeZone(or YOYO and Voyager) have the same vision of inspiring progress in society by providing free access to the internet through its products and partners. I’m sure that this partnership will foster more impactful collaborations through the union of business and technology.

I am so glad to be able to start providing bigger opportunities in the Philippines through our partnership with SafeZone. This is just the beginning. I believe that this is just our first step in creating disruptive innovations in user experience across the region.

Voyager COO Benje Fernandez also commented on the new partnership.

With SafeZone, brands have the opportunity to be ever-present in the lives of users through a device they always carry with them wherever they go.” said Benjie Fernandez, COO of Voyager Innovations Inc.

Our latest partnership with PopSlide is inline with our vision of working with global startups to offer the complete digital lifestyle to the Filipino for free. Now PopSlide users can be rewarded with no data charges.

As for Yoyo Holdings, surely they will be working overtime with the increase in recognition of their service by partnering with the biggest local telco. In an interview with Fukada in May of this year, it was made clear that together, there are 1,000,000 users of Popslide and Candy, a service for getting points that can be exchanged for telephone charges, in southeast Asia, and that expansion into the Indian market will be within the year.

Translated by Connor Kirk
Edited by Masaru Ikeda