Twitter buys Indian mobile marketing start-up ZipDial

REUTERS - Twitter Inc on Tuesday said it will buy Indian mobile phone marketing start-up ZipDial, reportedly for $30 million to $40 million, as the U.S. microblogging service looks to expand in the world's second-biggest mobile market.

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 capitalises 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 behaviour" 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)