Twitter to acquire Bangalore-based startup ZipDial: Report

Twitter is in final talks with Bangalore-based startup ZipDial. The deal is said to be closed to $30 million-$40 million and will be announced as soon as this week. ZipDial offers a unique marketing solution where consumers can give missed calls to a number to engage with an advertising brand. If the deal works out, ZipDial would be Twitter’s first acquisition in India.  Tech Crunch reported that if the deal gets done, it would be the latest in string of startups in India getting acquired by U.S. companies keen to capitalise on the opportunity to pick up talent, knowledge and traction in a very huge market. The basic functionality of this startup revolves around people who call numbers, but hang up before the call is answered. This simple alert then becomes the basis for a number of other, commercial actions, and analytics to track everything. This proves beneficial to Twitter who can try to engage with users who don’t log into Twitter. The report also stated that ZipDial, founded by CEO Valarie R. Wagoner, COO Amiya Pathak and Chairman Sanjay Swamy in 2010, has been working  with Twitter for a while. It offers a service for users to dial/hang up on a number to activate receiving a tweet stream from a specific Twitter account. Earlier  **reports** suggest that Twitter had acquired mobile advertising startup Namo Media last year. The combined platform would improve the social media power’s ability to deliver “native ads” – promotional material that blends into mobile apps and mobile websites.