And now it’s ZipDial and Twitter! What’s the secret?

On 20th January last month, the startup community of India was jolted out of its Tuesday morning daze to the news of Twitter acquiring five-year-old ZipDial. We cheered too, of course, because Bangalore-based ZipDial is our long-standing customer and relies on our cloud-based platform for various services.

ZipDial is a marketing solutions and analytics platform specializing in driving consumer engagement with a personalized and highly targeted user experience. Its much-talked-about missed call solution is only one of many innovative ways in which the company helps companies run powerful marketing campaigns.

For Twitter, this move would mean greater reach into the country where it has an estimated user base of 18.1 million.

Valerie Wagoner, ZipDial CEO and Founder, said in a post on the company website:

“We also eagerly anticipate everything we can achieve with Twitter. We’ll continue building upon the existing ZipDial platform, and now, by coming together with Twitter, we have the tremendous opportunity to elevate everything we’ve built to a global scale. 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. We could not be prouder to join the flock.”

The news of ZipDial’s acquisition by the giant microblogging site is heartening for the entrepreneurial community of the country because this would be its first such significant move in South Asia. Last year, Facebook acquired Little Eye Labs while Yahoo bought BookPad, both Bangalore-based companies.

Subhendu Panigrahi, entrepreneur and an admin of the popular Facebook group Bangalore Startups, believes the promise of the numbers is a huge pull for multinationals. A startup that builds an app targeting millions of Indians is a very alluring proposition for a big company looking to tap into bigger markets, he says. Twitter’s ZipDial ambition was a complementary acquisition.

So may be it’s a trend we’ll see a lot more of, or may be these startups are just in the right place at the right time. Either way, they’re worth reading about because they’re obviously doing something right.

So, read Valerie’s exclusive interview with us HERE where she talks about how ZipDial was conceived, the challenges and opportunities and what inspires her.