If you heard about blockchain before August 2018, you are likely to know about the grandiose “International Blockchain Congress” held in Hyderabad between August 03 and 04, 2018. The event was a massive gathering of Ministers, entrepreneurs, bureaucrats and the elite of the elites.
At the helm of the event was Nucleus Vision, an IoT and Blockchain based startup founded by a young Harvard Dropout Abhishek Pitti, 33. Pitti’s Nucleus Vision raised USD 40 Million in the Initial coin offering, but the unkind bear market currently gripping the cryptocurrencies has sent the ranking of NCASH, the Nucleus Vision token to 165 on Coinmarketcap at the time of this writing.
When the story from ET published, I was thrilled to learn a lot more about Nucleus Vision and Abhishek Pitti himself. But one thing caught my eye.
Nucleus Vision Deployed its Sensor at Big Bazaar store in R City Mall in Mumbai two days after ET sent the queries.
Economic Times
I was in Mumbai when the report came out and I literally was hanging out with a friend right behind the location. So we decided to check it out ourselves and write about it or make a video showing Nucleus Vision sensor in action.
When we got to Big Bazaar at the R City Mall in Ghatkopar, we asked for the store manager, who wasn’t available and we were soon greeted by the Store’s Operations manager Rahul Bijawar.
Bijawar told us that he has no knowledge of any deployments in the store by Nucleus Vision. He went on to confirm that there were no new devices installed in the last three months, as far as he can recall. According to the report, the installation should have happened anytime between Sept 10 and 12, 2018.
But this isn’t the end of story.
The Nucleus Vision Sensors and IoT device will allow the store to know your phone number (with your consent) and will be able to provide offers tailored to your preference. Nucleus Vision can send you information such as how much of your loyalty points you can use at the store you’re in or what are the best offers in the store and so on. We reached out to Nucleus Vision to know more about the active users of such sensors as well.
Nucleus Vision informed Coin Crunch they could not comment on implementations, partnerships or share any data due to non-disclosure agreements.
Later in the day, after the article was published, we re-investigated at the Big Bazaar store upon insistence from anonymous sources who reached out to Coin Crunch India.
We called Bijawar, the operations manager. He confirmed this time, the sensor is indeed installed, going back on the quote from last time, but could not recall when exactly it was installed. One other person from the store who does not wish to be named also confirmed a sensor’s presence but also doesn’t know when it was installed.
To be thorough, Coin Crunch later independently verified the claim as well, but our representative was not allowed to take a picture of the sensor by the security guard.
Before we could edit the story and publish it with our recent findings, a person on twitter by the name Rahul Alluri replied to Coin Crunch with a video of the store and the Nucleus Vision Sensor.
Boss, do your research properly. The sensors are right there in front of you!! pic.twitter.com/uedskYsrOl
— Rahul alluri (@rahulalluri) October 1, 2018
The sensor in the video was confirmed to be the same seen by our representative who visited the store today.
But we could not entirely figure out how someone from Hyderabad was able to get his hands on a video from a store in Mumbai specifically created to film the sensor while the security of the same store did not let our guy take a photo. That’s a mystery we will try to solve some other day.
What started off as negative story turned out quite positive by the end of it, much like all of the movies we watch, except Avengers Infinity War ofcourse. That reminds me, next time you’re at R City to watch a movie or do some shopping, do hop by Big Bazaar and look up for the Nucleus Vision sensor by the corner of the entrance as shown in the video.
Update: The story and headline have been updated based on new findings.
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