Fuel app's success in Oz creating global buzz for VMob

Scott Bradley from mobile marketing company VMob. Photo / Greg Bowker

VMob, the listed mobile advertising firm, has made its first large-scale foray into Australia with a fuel app made for convenience store chain 7-Eleven.

The app allows customers in Australia to identify the lowest petrol price across their nearest five 7-Eleven shops, lock in that price and pay it at any store within seven days.

Founder Scott Bradley said while there are no plans to launch the app in New Zealand, VMob has had a lot of interest in some of the larger markets 7-Eleven is involved in, like Asia and the US, since the launch of the app at the start of March.

"We're still in early stages of deployment in Australia so probably not a New Zealand-specific deployment, but highly likely to see that technology scaled globally," Bradley said.

International interest has been driven by the app's success in Australia, Bradley said.

"It got to No 7 in the iOS app store in its first 10 days, and there were 50,000 downloads in that [time] - it's been very successful from a consumer perspective," he said.

"There's been a lot of interest from other convenience store chains globally, as far afield as Mexico, around the initiative, because a lot of convenience store traffic is driven by largely impulse purchase.

"The whole idea is creating a utility functionality for 7-Eleven so I keep on going back to that mobile experience on a weekly basis and 7-Eleven becomes habitual."

VMob migrated to the main board of the NZX in January after its stock gained enough to lift its market capitalisation over the required $40 million mark.

VMob was told by the stockmarket regulator, NZX, last September that it could join the main board if it almost doubled its market value to at least $40 million by the end of March and completed a $5 million private placement.

The company, now based in San Francisco, raised just over $5 million in three tranches late last year to a mix of high net worth individuals, institutional investors, and one of the company's directors.