Twitter said on Tuesday that it had acquired ZipDial, a nearly five-year-old Indian start-up that aims to help businesses connect with customers in emerging markets who may not have access to the Internet.
It is a move by Twitter into developing economies like India, where users have cellphones, but may not always subscribe to pricier data plans. ZipDial contends the average Indian user consumes just a fraction of the monthly data that the average American user does.
The company’s service works in an unusual way by exploiting a so-called “missed call” method popular in emerging markets. Users can call a special toll-free number for a particular business, and then hang up before the call is picked up, saving them from actually being charged.
ZipDial, based in Bangalore, will then send updates and content to the users through phone calls, text messages or apps.
The company has worked with Twitter before: on the recent Indian elections and on Bollywood film releases, for example. And users also take advantage of the service to pull up the latest scores in cricket matches.
Beyond helping businesses connect with users who do not have consistent access to mobile data connections, ZipDial can also serve as a way for companies to measure how well their marketing is performing — a business application that Twitter could find especially useful.
“Our ambitious goal is to make Twitter’s unique, great content accessible to 100% of the world’s mobile users, including those in emerging markets who will be experiencing the mobile Internet for the first time,” ZipDial wrote in a blog post announcing the deal.
Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Date: January 20, 2015