By the end of the year, the m-commerce company intends to transition its operations entirely to smartphones and tablets.
It shouldn’t come as much of a shock to many people that Flipkart has had an exclusively mobile strategy up their sleeve for some time now, but what has come as a surprise is that it looks like these intentions are already underway.
The company has started to prepare to move entirely over to the mobile commerce side, stepping off the standard web.
A new report has been making its rounds of the media and has indicated that Flipkart will be constructing an entirely mobile strategy based on a new application platform. In this way, they intend to provide consumers with a shopping experience that more closely mirrors that of the real world. What has not yet been revealed is exactly how the m-commerce company intends to actually accomplish that goal. That said, it has been shifting a considerable amount of its engineering and infrastructure resources over to the pursuit of that goal.
Their mobile strategy appears to be a novel one and is one that will turn its current app entirely on its head.
The mobile apps from Flipkart are already known for providing an extremely user and consumer friendly experience. That said, the company appears to feel that it can improve that experience even further by adding a more realistic approach to mobile commerce.
Flipkart’s chief product officer, Punit Soni, explained that the company feels that the current mcommerce apps are highly influenced by the PC environment. For that reason, in order to enhance shopping in a way that is more true to real life, the applications need to be completely overhauled. The purpose is to create an application that has been designed for mobile from the ground up, without falling back onto established concepts from the desktop ecosystem.
The new mobile strategy will also rely quite heavily on social concepts, as it will allow people to be able to browse for products and obtain recommendations from friends. In fact, it may even allow several people to shop “together” online through the upcoming m-commerce app platform.
This application provides a heat map to show an area’s “happiness” level and make marijuana legal in more countries.
A man named Paulo Costa, from Brazil, has been using cannabis to help to control the seizures that are associated with his epilepsy, and is now using a geolocation based mobile app to help to spread “happiness” and encourage the decriminalization of cannabis use, particularly for medical purposes, in more countries around the world.
The increasingly popular mobile app has been nicknamed “Foursquare for Stoners” in Brazil.
That said, as playful as the tone of the tongue in cheek geolocation app may seem, and as much as it has been designed to be fun to use, it also has a more serious purpose, underneath. Costa has been using cannabis to help to control his seizures since he was first diagnosed with epilepsy at the age of 18 years. A growing body of reputable evidence has been suggesting that the promising results that Costa has been experiencing are not isolated to himself. Studies are showing that controlled use of medicinal marijuana can help to improve the quality of life of epilepsy patients.
The idea for using geolocation in a mobile app came to Costa when he was hanging out with his friends in Brazil.
Together, they came up with the “Who is Happy” mobile app, which uses location based technology to create a heat map of cannabis users around the world that allows them to create a real time broadcast of their “happiness”.
To use the mobile app, the idea is to simply tap the green “happiness” icon on the smartphone screen whenever cannabis is being used. This adds a haze of green smoke to a 1 kilometer radius around the current location of the individual on the map. This suggests that an application user is “happy” in that region of the world. By zooming out on the map, it becomes possible to see other local and more distant regions of the world where there are others who are “happy”. This allows for the collection of happiness stats.
Of course, it is not just happiness that is being recorded through this geolocation app. The idea is to help to add to a broader effort to decriminalize the use of marijuana in countries around the world. It has already found itself among the top 30 app downloads in Brazil and is rapidly increasing in popularity worldwide.
