Twitter just announced that it has acquired a young startup called Cloudhopper to “further grow and scale [Twitter’s] SMS service.” Though no financial details have emerged just yet, both Cloudhopper founder Joe Lauer and Director of Carrier Integration Kristin Kanaar will be joining the Twitter team as part of the deal.
Created in late 2008, Cloudhopper seeks to refine and make efficient mobile messaging technology for businesses. Promising clients zero downtime, the startup provides businesses with the software and infrastructure to scale high volume messaging programs.
Before founding Cloudhopper, Lauer was the founder and vice president of Simplewire, Inc, an SMS aggregator acquired by Qpass, Inc. in 2006. Qpass was itself acquired just a few months later for $275 million by Amdocs, a billing, customer relationship management (CRM), and operations support systems (OSS) service provider. According to Cloudhopper, Simplewire is still functional at Amdocs under the name OpenMarket and in 2010 is expected to process billions of messages and more than $600 million in mobile transactions from ringtones, games, and other multimedia.
Kevin Thau, responsible for mobile products and partnerships at Twitter, does not say much about what exactly Cloudhopper personnel will do at Twitter but he explains that his company has already worked extensively with the startup:
“Over the last eight months we have been working with a startup called Cloudhopper to become one of the highest volume SMS programs in the world—Twitter processes close to a billion SMS tweets per month and that number is growing around the world from Indonesia to Australia, the UK, the US, and beyond.”
Based on Cloudhopper’s niche market, it’s pretty clear that both Lauer and Kanaar will be working extensively on making sure Twitter’s SMS service is running on the most stable infrastructure possible.
