How often have you booked movie tickets online, but unable to keep a date with the big screen, agonised over the wasted tickets? Or, waited eagerly at the ticket counter, five tickets in hand, without finding a single buyer? Though many groups have cropped up on social media to help people exchange or swap these tickets that become especially precious over the weekends, they all have inherent privacy risks.
Chennai-based NFN Labs has come up with a solution — the BuySell Tickets app that launches this evening.
Gokul Visweswaran, the co-founder, says that thousands of tickets could go abegging thus for a big-budget star-spangled film. “In social media groups, you don’t have any way to ‘verify’ the seller’s identity; we have heard so many stories of the same tickets being sold to three different people who meet and argue in the theatre,” he says. Also, the listings do not reflect the current position, and there is always the possibility of tickets being marked at a premium.
NFN Labs, a 35-member, design-driven development company, hit the headlines some years ago with their application Extragram, a web interface for Instagram. BuySell Tickets was polished over a month, and Beta-tested for about 10 days before being launched.
The idea for the app came during a routine In50Hrs internal hackathon, during which the teams came up with various ideas; this one struck everyone as being exceptional. “Our movie-crazy gang developed it in just two months,” laughs Gokul, introducing his band of boys — ideator Shankara Subramani, 22; Android developer Jaison F, 24; server developer Ranjith Kumar, 26; designer Sai Ashwin and tester Abdul Muthalib.
Shankara makes frequent movie plans at the last minute with his friends, but says finding tickets is a chore. Sometimes, a movie with a ‘housefull’ board has many vacant seats. “Through the app, we provide a searchable, filter-able list; an in-app chat, so that no phone numbers are left in the public domain; tickets that are priced at cost incurred (for example: Rs. 120 plus 3D glasses fare, plus online booking charges: Rs. 180); and where the status is automatically updated,” says Gokul.
The app is being done as a service to the film-loving audience, and the team hopes money will be generated later, once they integrate wallets into the app. “For now, we want to make the cinema veriyargal happy,” says Gokul. “And yes, our film-crazy team too. They won’t have to worry about last-minute movie plans anymore.”
