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Bengaluru-based ZipDial gives clients phone
numbers for use in marketing campaigns. Consumers call the
numbers and hang up before connecting and incurring charges, and
then receive promotion-related text messages.
The start-up's clients include International Business Machines
Corp, Yum! Brands Inc's KFC and Procter & Gamble Co's Gillette.
The service capitalizes on a local tradition of communicating
through so-called missed calls. A person may give a friend a
missed call to signal arrival at an agreed destination, for
instance, without having to pay the cost of a phone call.
Such "unique behavior" was behind ZipDial, the start-up said in
a statement announcing the Twitter deal.
Twitter did not disclose terms of the purchase. Techcrunch,
citing unidentified sources, reported the deal at $30 million to
$40 million.
"This acquisition significantly increases our investment in
India, one of the countries where we're seeing great growth,"
Twitter said in a statement.
The acquisition is the latest in India by global tech giants who
have snapped up companies in a fledgling startup scene,
concentrated in the tech hub of Bengaluru in southern India.
Last year, Facebook Inc bought Little Eye Labs, a start-up that
builds performance analysis and monitoring tools for mobile
apps. Yahoo! Inc bought Bookpad, whose service allows developers
to add document viewing and editing to their own applications.
(Reporting by Nivedita Bhattacharjee; Editing by Christopher
Cushing)
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