Swedish company has strong following in India.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: Social media company Twitter has partnered with a startup firm based in Sweden called Truecaller, which is behind an app that has a strong following in India.
Truecaller is a phone directory application that allows the user to look someone up on a social network via their mobile number, making it increasingly simple to find and connect with someone on a platform such as Twitter. Developed by Stockholm-based company True Software Scandanavia in 2009, it has already created quite a stir in the mobile computing world.
According to TechCrunch, the service has already made a significant impact in India: the app is adding close to one million new users every week, and about 500,000 of them are from India alone. The most staggering statistic, however, is that Truecaller has 22 million users in India, which accounts for about one-third of the entire mobile phone market in the country.
The initial version of Twitter with TrueCaller will allow users to find people on Twitter through their mobile number, follow them, and tweet at them. They will not, however, be able to see full Twitter timelines or reply to the other person’s tweets unless they are given authorization from that person. These are standard procedures with Twitter, however, especially if the person has a private account that already prevents anyone without permission from seeing their content.
Since Android phones are the fastest-growing in terms of sales in India, Twitter will debut its new TrueCaller-integrated version of its app on Android devices only. TrueCaller will continue to be available on other mobile platforms – such as the iPhone, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry – but the partnership with Twitter is indicative of the company’s commitment to growing in India.
Facebook has been taking India by storm in recent years, with a study released last month saying that India would soon overtake the US in overall number of users. Twitter, which recently had a successful IPO, is looking to keep up with Facebook’s domination of the Indian marketplace by partnering with an already-popular app.
India and other emerging markets are a lucrative prospect for tech companies, but each has their own restrictions – political, commercial, and cultural – that make things tricky. Time will tell if Twitter’s deal with TrueCaller bears the fruit it wants, and if Twitter is able to create as strong a foothold for itself in India as Facebook has.
This post first appeared in americanbazaaronline.com