Ukrainian tech startup Nimses – founded with an ambitious plan of monetizing the time people spend online – is rolling out an online trading platform so its users can spend the virtual money they generate on a range of goods.
Nimses is a smartphone social media application that creates one unit of a virtual currency for each minute a user spends online. These are called nims, and people can also get them by receiving “likes” for pictures they post inside the app.
The startup’s developers claim that 1,000 nims are worth $1, but checking their value has been tricky: nims could be spent only at certain shops or cafes that accepted them. Moreover, businesses also limited the amount of goods that could be bought with the currency.
On Aug. 4, however, Nimses introduced in Ukraine a feature that allows users to buy goods from shops with nims online. Called Nimses Goods, anyone can open up a virtual stall there and sell goods for virtual money. The only requirement is that sellers undergo verification by the startup.
There are already about 50 shops that function at Nimses Goods, selling coffee (1,500 nims), Chinese food (4,000 nims), tickets to conferences (500,000 nims), discounts for dental services (144,000 nims) and so on. In most cases, however, the brands available there only offer discounts for nims, with the rest of the payment being in cash.
Inside the Nimses Goods interface, users sees all the offers within a range of 15 kilometers. There is basic info about a particular store, its location on the map, and other goods it sells for nims.
As it is still in test mode, Nimses Goods restricts users from buying more than one service or item per day. Once users buy something, they get a receipt, which has to be shown to a shop in order to collect the item purchases. The receipt expires within a day.
For more information on the Nimses social medium, read a Kyiv Post interview with one of its founders here.
The Kyiv Post’s IT coverage is sponsored by Ciklum. The content is independent of the donors.
