With a long Easter weekend and holidays coming up and you’re looking for places to go with your children, if you have overseas visitors and are in a quandary where to take them, or a party-goer looking to attend hip party scenes or limes, D’ Junction Mobile app is for you.
What started off as an app designed for tracking your friends in bands during the Carnival season has now morphed into a year-round hub for entertainment and activities. D’ Junction’s new layout and features were unveiled to rave reviews at an official launch at Roll Sushi Restaurant and Lounge, Ariapita Avenue, last Tuesday night.
Speaking to the Sunday Guardian at the event, entrepreneur Ria Karim, who came up with the idea and concept of the app said D’ Junction is an absolutely unique mobile application that has been designed to serve as the entertainment hub of T&T.
“It’s a single, central new media platform for searching for and advertising events for a number of types across T&T.
“With a resource like this audiences will not be limited to Trinidadians,. It’s also for anyone who wants to come and spend some time here and plan ahead.
“The app is really designed with two audiences in mind, the average user like myself who wants to be au courant with the happening events, where to get tickets to the hottest parties taking place in T&T.”
Karim said the user can use the app to view a wide variety of the hottest events and activities in T&T by category and date right on their mobile phones. She said this eliminated flipping through newspapers, talking to people, combing countless social media sites. Her friends, she said, experienced the same problem trying to figure out what to do over the weekend.
She said it was also for planning for the long weekend, what kind of activities parents can do with their children for the upcoming holidays, where to carry family and friends visiting from abroad. And most important, the app is free. The app is also beneficial to event organisers and promoters who do not have massive budgets for conventional advertising.
She said the mobile app gave promoters an invaluable access to an entirely new audience group and people could build their brand awareness and promote what they want to do for free.
Karim said the reason why most people associate D’ Junction with Carnival 2016 was because the one-of-a-kind app was set up to track various bands on the road in real time using their mobile phones.
Ten bands took part in the initiative such as Entice, Fantasy, Yuma, Passion and Island People in the north, Kalicharan mas in South, and Junabo J’Ouvert in Chaguanas. She said everyone was pleased and impressed with the quality, timeliness, responsiveness and accuracy of the app which was very reliable.
Karim said foreigners and visitors who were here for Carnival and didn’t know the layout of the island discovered the app and used it to find their way around. She said she expected the use of the app by locals and foreigners to continue and grow.
Karim said the genesis for the app came about during Carnival 2015 when she and her friends wanted to come into Port-of-Spain to look at mas. She said some of them played mas, she couldn’t reach her friends on her cell phone to find out where they were because of a weak signal and so the seed to build the app was planted.
The Gillette Group partnered in developing the app which includes events, activities, concerts, parties and fetes, religious activities, conferences and seminars, health and wellness, and sporting events. Karim said as demand grows they can add more categories depending on what people wanted.
She said with the tremendous success of this initial functionality, D’ Junction will be unveiling a host of new, innovative features which will revolutionise the way Trinidadians coordinated, promoted and planned for entertainment and activities.
D’ Junction is available for download at iTunes and Google Play stores at no cost. Among the guests and friends were Karim’s father, former minister of tertiary education and skills training Fazal Karim, his wife and family, chairman of the National Carnival Development Foundation (NCDF) Mahindra Satram-Maharaj, Gillette Group technical director Gregory Loe and other members.
About Ria Karim
Ria Karim is an accomplished executive with over 15 years combined experience in marketing, communications, public relations and strategic management. Having worked in and consulted to a wide variety of industries, she is an extremely versatile professional with exceptional acuity for identifying opportunities and charting courses for development and achievement of goals.
Karim is an open national scholarship winner. She graduated cum laude from Georgetown University in Washington DC and holds an International MBA with distinction from the Arthur Lok Jack Graduate School of Business.
Karim, former CReative TT CEO, is the creator of D’Junction mobile application and management consultant.
