Twitter has acquired Bangalore-based mobile marketing & analytics platform ZipDial for an undisclosed amount. Post acquisition, ZipDial team will be joining Twitter India and Twitter says it also gets a new engineering office in Bangalore. The terms of the acquisition were however not disclosed. This follows a TechCrunch report from last week which had suggested that Twitter is acquiring ZipDial to strengthen their international growth plans. At the time, it had cited sources to put the acquisition amount between $30-$40 million. ZipDial provides a mobile marketing platform through the "missed calls" feature. People can call a particular toll-free number, following which they are automatically disconnected and start receiving inbound content from brands via SMS, voice or an app notification. The service has also been used to verify mobile numbers and public voting for TV shows and in offline events. This disrupts the traditional SMS based business, wherein users send an SMS to a short code, sometimes paying premium rates, for either voting on something or pulling some information. It also allows brands to reach out to consumers who aren't connected to mobile Internet yet. It looks like Twitter was attracted towards this feature, since the company says this acquisition will allow them to make content more accessible to everyone. Twitter says that it has previously collaborated with ZipDial on various campaigns including the Indian elections, Bollywood film promotions and MTV India’s #RockTheVote “Dial the Hashtag” campaign. Interestingly, Facebook had also partnered ZipDial in July last year, to test a new type of ad unit that allows users to place a missed call to an…
