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|In: Android|Last Updated: | 1 Comment

UrbanLadderLogo

Urban Ladder announced the launch of ‘Living Spaces’ – a one of its kind app in the on-line furniture segment. Living Spaces is a world class augmented reality app & a unique initiative to tie in Urban Ladder’s long term vision of providing best in class customer experience by integrating technology.

The Living Spaces app lets users virtually place multiple options of Urban Ladder[UL] sofas in their living space by using augmented reality.  Users can place life size models of UL sofas to visualize their entire living room & select multiple colour and seating options without having to involve any physical furniture.

The next version of the app will have additional notable features such as pulling in a silhouette and ambient lighting.

The app is conceptualized by the Urban Ladder team & developed in collaboration with Whodat & House of Blue Beans, both Bangalore based tech startups. The user experience is designed after in-depth research on sofa buying patterns so that the flow of the app is seamless. The app aims at making the interactions natural & the sofa design takes into account imperfections of the real world like wrinkled cushions and fabric folding at the edges. All these details make the user experience real & help solve several customer pain points.

Urban Ladder had earlier introduced another innovative initiative called ‘Trial Room’ where one can experience different models of UL sofas from the comfort of their home.

As per Rajiv Srivatsa, COO & Co-Founder, Urban Ladder

Over the last year sofas have emerged as one of our best-selling categories. This confirms a strong demand for the category and the potential for it to grow. Initiatives such as Trial Room, and now the Living Spaces app aim at converting the apprehensive shopper into a confident and content one”.

“We strongly believe that innovative technology is the solution to improve the ‘touch and feel gap’ in on-line furniture buying. We are proud that UL Labs is setting new benchmarks globally in the technology and e-commerce space. Living Spaces is another effort to stay true to our commitment of bringing innovative changes in the furniture industry globally, and we are proud to take technology to the world from India”

Living Spaces is the second app to be launched in the UL Labs series after Urban Storage which focuses on wardrobes. ‘UL Labs’ is a collaborative outreach effort where teams from Urban Ladder will work with digital start-ups across the world to come up with pioneering solutions in various aspects of furniture buying.

Download Link

UL Living Spaces can be downloaded from Android Play-Store from here

For more information on ‘UL Living Spaces’, please visit the following link. Do give UL’s Living Spaces a spin & share your comments/feedback !!!

|In: Android|Last Updated:

Flipkart, India’s largest e-commerce marketplace, became the first in the industry to launch an app compatible with the Android wearable technology. The app will support viewing Flipkart wishlists on the wearable gear. Another significant feature with this update is that the app will now support push notifications from Flipkart on the gear.

This, however is possible only if users enable push notifications to be viewed via the gear. Possible future updates of the app include accessing order tracking related information, price drop notification & personalized offer notification.

Moto 360, which is back in stocks, was launched last month & Flipkart is now the exclusive retailer in India for three globally leading wearable technology brands – Garmin, Motorola and Martian. The latest version of this app will be compatible with all the three brands & will be the first app from India to be listed on the Android wearable technology store.

The current features available in the latest app are:

  • User Interface : Brand New User Interface and faster app
  • Happy Shopping : No Hassle Returns, 100% Buyer Protection
  • Choice of Payments : Cash on Delivery, Credit/Debit Card, EMI, NetBanking, PayZippy
  • Smarter Search : Look up products, categories or brands using text, voice or by barcode
  • Explore Your Way : Quickly switch between List, Grid and Full Screen views
  • Pinpoint Products : Find what you want with the sort and multi-filter functions
  • Never Miss an Offer : Get access to personalized and exclusive app-only deals
  • Personalized Alerts : Get notifications on personalized offers, price drops, order status & exclusive launches
  • Product Suggestions : Relevant recommendations based on your shopping history
  • Share with Friends : Suggest links to interesting products on Facebook, Twitter, Google+
  • Examine Closely : View products in great detail with the large, multi-perspective images
  • Do More with Images : Save images to your phone or instantly share them with friends
  • One-touch Wishlist : Add products to your Flipkart Wishlist with just one tap

To use the Flipkart wishlist on wearable devices, perform the following steps :

  1. Update the Flipkart application to the latest version from the app store
  2. Connect your wearable device to the phone
  3. Wishlist will automatically get installed on the wearable
  4. To download or review the app, please click here

|In: Android|Last Updated:

If you are on the lookout for All In One solution to Bill payment, DTH/Phone recharge, Online shopping etc. than Mobikwik could be the destination.

Mobikwik_new_logoWhat is Mobikwik

As mentioned on Mobikwik website, it is a Prepaid wallet powered by Zaakpay [Payments gateway founded by Upasana Taku & also Head of Merchant Operations for Mobikwik]. Adding money to your wallet lets you pay for your services and recharges in just one click, or even via SMS or by dialling a number.

User can register via their website, Android App, iOS App or Windows App.

In this article, we review the “Mobikwik Android App” & look at some of it’s interesting features …

Review of “Mobikwik Android App”

User Interface

The UI of the mobikwik app is simple & elegant. The color combination is very good. Navigating between different sections in the app is very simple. Just like other recharge applications available on the internet, in this app as well you can keep a track of “Recharge History”, “Recharge Status”, “Refund/Transfer status” etc.

Mobikwik_Combined_1

As mentioned before, user needs to add money to the wallet in order to use the services. For reviewing the app, we recharged the wallet with Rs. 100. The overall process of adding cash to the wallet was very simple & the entire transaction took around 20 odd seconds to complete. Once the wallet recharge was done, it took us merely 5 seconds to do our airtel online recharge

1-Click

As mentioned before, user can navigate through the “Recharge/Transfer history” so that “repetitive tasks i.e. recharging same mobile number” comes very handy & is a “great time saver”.

Mobile Recharge & Transfer of money

Another feature which was interesting is “Transfer of money from the wallet to another mobile user/email-id/Mobikwik user”. For testing the feature, we transferred around Rs. 50 from another Android Phone to our Mobikwik account for doing vodafone online recharge. Just like a banking transaction, the initiator receives an OTP [One Time Password] to complete the transfer. The transfer was smooth & completed within few seconds !!

Mobikwik_Recharge_Combined

Email snapshot & Mobile Update

Mobikwik_Recharge_Combined_Upload

Improvement Areas

Mobikwik is primarily a “Digital Wallet Based Application” that facilitates bill payment, recharge etc. but there are couple of features which we still feel are missing:

1. Direct recharge

Recharging Phone/DTH without maintaining balance in the wallet i.e. direct recharge option is required. This feature is available in other recharge applications like Paytm, Freecharge etc.

2. Added perks

It would have better “more appealing” if Mobikwik could provide user’s with perks on every transaction i.e. discount coupons from e-commerce companies, deals etc. There is a “Deals” section in the app but we could not find only limited number of merchants… may be it is work under progress 🙂

3. Special Recharge

For special recharges eg. 3G recharge pack [all packs apart from top-up’s] Mobikwik does not come handy !!

Closing Remarks

Keeping improvements aside, Mobikwik is very user-friendly, simple & handy application [my favorite feature being money transfer which I have been using it very frequently since the time I installed Mobikwik :)]

Do give Mobikwik a spin & share your experience in the comments section …

|In: Android|Last Updated: | 1 Comment

There is no dearth of chat cum audio/video applications namely Nimbuzz, TalkBox, WhatsApp with WhatsApp being the most popular [at least in India :)], today we review an interesting app named WeChat. WeChat is a robust, fast-performing, 100% free mobile voice, video and text messaging application with the strength of over 200 million users worldwide. For doing the review, we downloaded the app for Android from here. In the review, we look into the features of WeChat & compare with it’s close competitor WhatsApp.

Gist of “WeChat”

As mentioned above, WeChat is a free voice, video & text messaging application. Among the many features that this app has, the friend-discovery location based social features and shared streaming photo feeds from friends’ personal photo albums are something which is very unique to this. The user has the option to add contacts who are using WeChat or invite/connect with users using a unique id called QQ ID

Key Features of “WeChat”

Some interesting features of the app are:

  1. Video/Voice Calling, Text messaging, hold-to-talk voice messaging, broadcast (one-to-many) messaging, photo/video sharing, location sharing, and contact information exchange.
  2. Offers engaging one-on-one and group chat sessions with an extensive range of animated and custom emoticon and emoji art. The user can beautify the chat’s with customizable backgrounds.
  3. Supports social networking via shared streaming content feeds and location-based social plug-ins [Shake & Look Around] to chat with and befriend local and international WeChat users.
  4. Shake: Exchange ‘contact information exchange’ with nearby WeChat users, or connect with WeChat users worldwide who are eager to make new friends. I tried the “Shake” feature & could find couple of users from Korea who were shaking their device at the same time. Don’t know how useful this feature this unless you have a handful number of known people using this feature simultaneously.
  5. Look Around: Connect with nearby WeChat community members who are also looking around. This feature is quite interesting since I could find couple of my “NearBy” friends who were using WeChat.

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WeChat vis-a-vis WhatsApp

When I used WeChat, the obvious comparison that came to mind is WhatsApp. There are couple of features in WeChat which are interesting when compared to WhatsApp namely – Drift Bottle : Write a message or talk, put the message in a bottle, and throw it to the virtual sea. Soon or later a random person will take the bottle with your message & (s)he could reply to you or add you in his/her contact list. Though this feature looks interesting but just like the “Shake”  feature we could not find it usable !!!

Walkie-Talkie Feature : WeChat offers the “Walkie Talkie” feature where a person can easily talk by pressing the “Tap to Talk” button. Also, if the audio is not clear; the user has the option delete that particular chat transcript.

Contact Backup : With WeChat, user can also Backup the address book to QQ ID Website
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One simple yet effective feature in WhatsApp is “Double Tick” which indicates that the other person has received the message or not & might be a good feature that can be taken by WeChat 🙂 In India, WhatsApp has a wider adoption compared to WeChat & Reliance Communications offers unlimited access for GSM subscribers Apart from features, WeChat would need to focus on partnering with Telecom operators to increase it’s user base. There is already a shift happening to WeChat & we need to wait who wins the “Chat” race 🙂

This review is a part of the Sponsored Reviews Program at BlogAdda.com.

|In: Android|Last Updated: | 2 Comments
Last week we reviewed an Android/iOS app named VocalBee and this week, we have a Q&A with Atul Tatke one of the co-founders of VocalBee. The chat revolves around VocalBee, his views on startups and his tips for entrepreneurs. So, let’s start with the candid interview ..
Can you give a small background of your startup & it’s co-founders ?
We are four of us that are working on this venture. Two of the founder members have been working on voice & mobile technology startup Hummingbytes. Another one comes from smartphone development background. He was a part of the company which got bought over by a big technology company. The fourth one comes from Restaurant and Retail industry. He has deep experience in Business and Technology consulting.
How did you guys come up with the idea of “VocalBee” ?
VocalBee is a spinoff of the idea that got conceived in Hummingbytes. Some part of the engine was built and used in Call Center & other customer service centric implementations.
Which are the areas where you feel VocalBee would be very effective ?
We concentrate on three kind of communications – Question, Idea & Feedback. Also we are concetrating on local government and businesses. I think we will be effective where citizens and consumers want to have quick communication of above type. Location based service is also another key point of the system. Events and promotion is also another feature which is very appealing when you mix it with location based service.
In addition to above mentioned areas, we will be able to capture client specific structured feedback once business is onboard with us.
Can you explain a bit more as to how the entire flow goes from when user sends suggestion/idea to VocalBee [i.e. what happens when I file a complaint of Pothole in my area, where the complaint will go etc. and user can keep track of it] ?
Government Setup: So, if you are in an area in Bangalore and came across a big pothole. Currently there is no easy way for you to raise your concern. With VocalBee you can take a picture, write about it and send it to the city. This communication will be going to a special page that we have designed for India. Also this communication will be going to our Twitter and Facebook. We are also analyzing this data that is coming & eventually will be presenting it to the government.
We will also try to get government to buy into it and give them the account. At this time it will become a claimed account. With claimed account, government can be directly in touch with citizens. They can broadcast events like street construction, water or electricity outage etc. In the US we are working with a couple of towns and their response is very good. They are working closely with us.
Business Setup: You visit the restuarant and like the food. Currently you can go on Zomato or Burrp and give the review. The review goes in social sphere. With VocalBee you give review to the business and we will connect with the business & send your communication to them. Businesses that come on board will be able to have one-on-one connection with consumer. Businesses can also send promotions, events on this established connection. We also have a concept of Wall where other people can answer or vote on public communication. We already have more than half a dozen businesses on this platform in the US.

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