ZipDial, The Missed-Call Leader In India, Adds Jungle Ventures To Seed Round And Launches In Sri Lanka
ZipDial, the company based in India that has turned missed calls into a business, has raised new funds from Jungle Ventures and launched its service in Sri Lanka. The company has clients like P&G and Disney, who have realized that the common social interaction of missed calls in India, are turning to ZipDial instead of focusing on driving likes to Facebook pages or chasing followers on Twitter. Basically, in a trend seen by ZipDial and others, people would communicate by calling one another and then hanging up. This is so that pre-paid cell minutes aren’t used up. For ZipDial customers who get their own numbers, consumers can call it, hang up and then receive an incoming text about the brand, which is free. When I met with its founder and CEO Valerie Rozycki Wagoner while visiting India, she made it clear that ZipDial was a company that could bring its learnings and services from India to new markets globally. With new funding from Jungle Ventures, the service has launched in Sri Lanka, ...
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Rackspace Looks To The Telcos In Global Expansion Of Its OpenStack Cloud
Rackspace is banking on services providers such as telcos for its global expansion, leveraging OpenStack to build out cloud infrastructures that partners will then charge end customers for cloud offerings. Rackspace will provide an end-to-end program that will include the hardware and the OpenStack cloud operating system software for the build out. The company will provide continuous automated testing and delivery of updates from the Rackspace engineering teams. Rackspace will also manage infrastructure operations such as patching, tuning and monitoring. Engates said in an email interview that if a large telco or service provider wants to become a public cloud provider, they have lots of options for the parts, but none of the sum: Until now, there has been no way for them to get all the pieces they need. They could go to a hardware company who will pull a tractor trailer full of hardware up to the loading dock, call a software company to buy licenses, an integrator to come put it all together, ...
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What We Learned in 2012
Well hello there, 2013. It’s taken us a few weeks to settle into you (if we still used checks, this’d be about the time we’d stop writing “2012” on them). Now that we have, we like what we see: people taking risks, taking charge, and taking a stand. Passionate conversations about not just which tools to use, but why our work matters . A community coming together to make sense of a web that’s changing faster than we can refresh our tiny screens. But before we barrel into the future, we’d like to take a moment to reflect. So we asked some of A List Apart’s friendly authors and readers to share the lessons they learned last year, and how those lessons can help us all work—and live—better in 2013. Solving information gluttony In 2012, I left Seattle and the company I founded to join Twitter and help solve the most serious issue in the world that I might be qualified to solve: information gluttony. We used to live in a world where we didn’t have access to enough information ...
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GiftCards.com Agrees To Buy Giftly To Grow A Mobile Platform
GiftCards.com, a Pittsburg-based company that has been around for more than a decade and has sold 5 million gift cards, agreed to buy San Francisco startup Giftly to grow out a mobile platform. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Giftly had raised about $2.8 million from investors including Baseline Ventures, SoftTech VC, Floodgate, Thrive Capital, and Techstars’ David Tisch. Giftly’s acquisition follows a number of other ones. Karma was picked up very early by Facebook although it may not produce meaningful revenue for some time for the social network, according to its earnings results earlier this year. Another gifting startup, Giftiki, which pooled together people’s money to get gifts, was acquired by Launchrock. Giftly built a platform that avoided the hassle of individually dealing with merchants and point-of-sale systems. They came out with a native mobile app last fall that made it easier to send presents to friends and family. The company’s platform didn’t put ...
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Translation Platform Gengo Raises $12M Funding Round Led By Intel Capital
Gengo, an increasingly popular online translation service that uses a network of more than 7,500 pre-screened and rated translators to provide high-quality translations in 33 languages, announced that it has raised a $12 million funding round. The round was led by Intel Capital, with participation from returning investors, including Atomico, Iris Capital, Infocomm, NTT-IP and Saudi Telecom Ventures. The service previously raised a total of $6.8 million, including a $5.25 million series A round led by Atomico and Dave McClure’s 500 Startups. McClure is also a Gengo board member. The fact that a number of telecom companies are part of this round, Gengo’s CEO and founder Robert Laing told me in an email earlier today, ”shows how telecoms companies ‘get’ the global opportunity of Gengo.” “The Gengo team is excited about working with investors from Asia, the USA, Europe, and the Middle East, led by Intel Capital, because of their global experience and track record helping entrepreneurs,” ...
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