Go read this feature on how India’s digital revolution started with missed calls
Rest of World covers ZipDial’s efforts to bridge the offline-online gap
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Leaving a missed call on someone’s phone usually signals that you should call them back but at one point in India, it was communication in its own right. A new feature by Atul Bhattarai in
Rest of World examines the Indian culture that grew up around missed calls and the startups that took advantage of it.
In basic terms, a “missed call” means dialing a person but hanging up before they can answer. Hanging up without talking let users send a basic message (“I called”) without getting charged for minutes or SMS messages like paging someone without a pager. Bhattarai focuses on ZipDial, a company that turned missed calls into a robust advertising business and a way to experience some of the features of online life without paying for data.