Could you ever think that a missed call could be a way to earn money? Well, Indian entrepreneurs have found a way to optimise even those calls that go unanswered! This tale, of the ‘missed call’ entrepreneurs, turns the spotlight on innovations in the IT market — and the mergers they lead to.
About five months ago, micro-blogging giant Twitter made the headlines when it took over Indian mobile-marketing start-up Zipdial for a whopping $30 million. The start-up was the brainchild of Valerie Wagoner, a Californian who moved to India's Silicon Valley, Bengaluru, after her stint at eBay. When she saw how Indians used the concept of ‘missed call’ (hanging up after a couple of rings) to send across messages, like safe arrival, she had a Eureka moment. She teamed up with Amiya Pathak and Sanjay Swamy and monetised these calls, by turning them into a mobile marketing tool.
Thanks to them, now, all customers need to do is call and hang up, and they get marketing messages, coupons and other deals. This is ideal for emerging markets such as India.
Not an entity to be left behind, social-media website Facebook partnered with Mumbai-based Vivaconnect to scale up its own “missed-call-ad unit” business. Facebook had also acquired a Bangalore-based analytics-and-monitoring-product start-up, Little Eye Labs, for $15 million a year earlier.
There have been many other mergers and acquisitions involving Indian start ups. For instance, Snapdeal bought Freecharge, an online recharge platform, for as much as $450 million! Paytm, to step up competition, then attracted investments from Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and other investors, including SAIF Partners.
The founders of such companies, usually in their 20s or 30s, have emerged as the faces of Indian tech. Investors don’t seem in any hurry to stop pumping in money. As much as $2.36 billion flowed into home-grown companies. To read this article, click on this link .