The Singapore-based company Easter Egg Pte Ltd developed an application that changes the way you approach gift giving. The application is now available on Google Play and Apple App Store and has hit the Indian market.
According to the Indian newspaper The Economic Times, the application has already had transactions worth $50,000 since five and a half month of its launch.
Easter Egg currently works in India and Singapore, with services said to expand to Canada, United States and Dubai soon.
India is rapidly becoming one of the prospective markets for Blockchain-based technologies.
Thursday, Cointelegraph wrote about an Indian bank partnering with Deloitte to use Blockchain to reduce trade finance processes from weeks to hours.
Creating experiences
Picking up birthday presents or anniversary gifts is tricky enough but what makes things worse is if you have to do it across the world. Now it’s possible to send friends and family vouchers that enable them to get products and services of their liking using Blockchain technology.
What is nice about Easter Egg is that not only can users gift each other vouchers for restaurants and pubs etc. They can also share experiences like Yoga or Karaoke with each other.
This makes it easier to pick gifts for friends who have varied interests.
Akshay Ananth, co-founder of Easter Egg told ET:
“You can be anywhere in the world and if you have friends or family in Bengaluru, Pune or Singapore, you can gift them digital vouchers to varied experiences from a beer to a foot massage or a trip to an organic farm or a museum.”
Reinventing loyalty programs
Blockchain technology has the possibility of redrawing and reshaping loyalty programs and point systems.
At the moment if you are using a loyalty program at a store or an airline or a hotel, you are tied up and have no choice but to keep using the service provider or store till you accumulate enough points.
With a Blockchain-based system, there is a possibility of freeing up the users and using a universal system across multiple vendors.
Easter Egg is a good example of that. Sandeep Sangli, a co-founder at Easter Egg says in a Times of India article:
“The advent of Blockchain technology has helped us rethink the way we look at gifting, loyalty and rewards. Today most vouchers are tied to a brand and they cannot, in most cases, be shape-shifted to be used with another brand. Our solution will bring vouchers, loyalty points and payments, all on one single platform.”
Funding
Services like Easter Egg are a great idea in theory but unless and until they get popular, they can’t really get off the ground.
A Singapore-based early stage investment company Wealthy Ideas has put in $400,000 into Easter Egg, reports the Hindu Business Line.
This sort of funding can hopefully help the firm get off the ground. People, however, truly need convenience and ease of use at the end of the day.
Going through the reviews the users have been writing for the app, most people do seem to like it but as one user Gowri Shannon Shanmugam wrote on Easter Egg’s facebook page,
“It’s a nice app and a good initiative. But it’s a bit frustrating because when it was to be used, we found out that the salon we went to had no idea it was even tied up to the app. Hence, they were quite in a frenzy figuring it out.”
Possibly teething troubles due to early days but apps need to translate into crease proof experiences on the ground to be successful in the real world and that is the key to success in long-term for such initiatives.