Twitter acquires ZipDial as part of the company's goal to increase the number of its users with greater emphasis placed on large developing nations. Through the acquisition, Twitter becomes more accessible to people on a global scale.
It is speculated that in the next years to come, billions of people from countries such as India, Brazil and Indonesia will experience the Internet for the first time. Most of these online experiences will take place on a mobile phone. However, their web encounter may be limited due to issues with data charges. Twitter hopes that its partnership with Indian-based ZipDial would eliminate such barrier, allowing great content to be more accessible to any user types.
"Today, people across India use ZipDial's platform to access great content, including cricket scores, audio programming, Tweets from their favorite Bollywood stars - and much more - on their mobile phones," Twitter says in a blog post.
Twitter adds that popular figures such as athletes, politicians and actors use the platform in order to reach a huge number of Twitter users through SMS and voice messages.
"By coming together with ZipDial, we'll help more people around the world enjoy great and relevant Twitter experiences on their mobile phones," said Twitter.
Founded in 2010, ZipDial is an Indian mobile platform developer which has its headquarters based in Bangalore, India. Through the platform, users can make a special business call to a number and then hang up before someone from the other end of the line answers the call. Doing so will make the call akin to a "missed call" which doesn't incur a charge. The user will then receive a phone call or a text message that contains information about the business. This type of gathering content by making a "missed call" proves to be useful in developing countries where most of the users have limited budget on data plan charges.
"The company was founded on the insight that consumers and brands in emerging markets behave differently and have different needs," said ZipDial. "We build for them and their unique behaviors. We leveraged the ubiquitous behavior of 'missed calls' between friends and applied it as an offline call-to-action for brand engagement."
The acquisition would also allow Twitter to add a new engineering office in Bangalore, India.
Some of ZipDial's investors include Unilazer Ventures, Jungle Ventures, Mumbai Angels, YourNest Ventures, AngelPrime, Blume Ventures, and 500 Startups.
