Mangaluru (The Hindu): Keen to know the new arrivals and offers in city stores? Students of National Institute of Technology, Karnataka (NITK), Surathkal, have come out with a mobile App that can surely attract you to the nearest shopping mall or shopping street.

Named “winkl,” the app takes you through a virtual tour of the selected shopping mall or the street. At present, offline shopping, though accounts for over 90 per cent, is promoted through newspaper advertisements, banners and flyers, says Rahul Singh Thakur, a final year B.Tech student of NITK. As such, the team has designed the new App, which he says, first of its kind in India, to improve users’ experience by providing engaging and useful information for shopping.

Winkl is a startup by four, Mr. Thakur, Nikhil Kumar (final B. Tech), Pratham Pramod and Supreeth Deshpande (both third B. Tech). Once users download the Winkl App from the Google Play Store, real time shopping feed including allthe latest arrivals, trending, offers and recommendations would be displayed on the phone.

The App works at home as well as at designated shopping malls/ streets. At home, one can view all the details and when one walks into a mall or street and passes by a shop, he would get information about the details of the particular shop. All details about the mall—floor-wise—too would be available.

A content team at the Mall or street would feed the information to the app while ‘beacons’ kept across the mall or street would relay the information to the App-users. The promoters would get their revenue from the merchants.

Mr. Thakur said at present, they have tied up with Forum Fiza Mall in Mangaluru while Forum has agreed to facilitate the App in all its stores across India, including Bengaluru. The team also has plans to rope in merchants in shopping streets of Bengaluru—M.G. Road, Brigade Road, Indiranagar, Koramangala etc., in the coming days.

Photo credit: The Hindu