Investors are recognising the transformative power of subscription billing and billing using social network strategies, growing to billion dollar industries. After rumours that Paypal was to invest $16 million  in Tradeshift, a few weeks later Zuora,  a subscription billing provider, announced that it has received $20 million in a Series C round of funding.

It is predicted that industry after industry is shifting to the Subscription Economy: Enterprises and consumers shift from buying outright to subscribing to broad libraries of products and solutions.

Many companies are rethinking their core products and value propositions as services and investing rapidly in subscription revenue models, including:

·         Cloud computing is disrupting the $3.4 trillion technology industry as enterprises move to elastic compute clouds that are enabled by subscription billing's ability to meter, price, and bill cloud services.

·         App marketplaces, led by Microsoft, Google, saleforce.com, Apple, PayPal and others, are creating more opportunities for developers to offer software-as-a-service.

·         The media industry recognizes it needs to monetize online content, and it requires billing to create promotions and bundles of digital and physical content that push out to multiple devices and platforms.

·         Online consumer service providers are using subscriptions to innovate the pricing and packaging of freemium, try-before-you-buy, and cross-sell service models that best meet consumer demand.

·         Telecom and wireless technologies in WiMax, satellite, geo-location and 4G are creating a new wave of telecom services and service providers which are being enabled by subscription billing.

I find it interesting to see how this is going to develop in Europe towards and after the 2013 e-invoicing liberalisation.