Thursday 8 January 2015

HIKE messenger app buys Zip Phone to offer internet calls

HIKE messenger app owned by a joint venture of  Sunil Mittal's Bharti Enterprises and Japan's softbank. has now acquired a US based company ZipPhone that allows users to make and receive calls over Internet. Presently HIKE has above 35 million users and are growing day by day as the app seems to be so user friendly. The company has not disclosed the transaction amount of the acquisition.
The acquisition , first by the company run by Mittal's son Kavin , will put HIKE in direct competition with Facebook owned messenger and Whatsapp , as well as other messeging and calling apps such as Line , WeChat , Viber and Skype. Hike earlier provides only messenging services where users could exchanged texts and images . built in stickers via internet on smartphones.




"Zip Phone's technology will allow us to bring free voice calling to the market much faster . Incidentally this is the top requested features from our users as well ," said by Kavin Bharti Mittal , founder and CEO , in a statement.
Zip Phone actually is a one man start up founded by Anuj Jain in US , is a voice calling app that works globally.Interestingly , the company was also part of Y Combinator list  Summer  Batch(2014).

"As a start-up enthusiastic , I had been keeping a close eye on HIKE and its developments  and now I am excited to be a part of one of the Biggest and fastest growing startups in the Indian Internet space and finally building for India," Jain said.

It seems now the company is on the right way to give a great competition to its biggest competitor Whatsapp along with other chat and calling apps like Line , WeChat, Viber etc. It's also the time when whatsapp is also about to launch voice calling via internet on its app . It would be interesting to see how many new features  Hike would give on its app in future and this acquisition could prove to be a great success.  

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