A recent graduate of the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC) is in the retail spotlight just in time for the holiday shopping season thanks to a mobile application he developed with two friends. Nolan Clark graduated from UNBC in 2009 with a Bachelor of Commerce degree in Accounting and Finance. He is co-creator of the “Smart Aisles” app, which has had more than 10,000 downloads in the past 24 hours alone.

To operate the application, which can be downloaded on both Android and iPhone, customers type in a few product specifications and are then given a list of the best deals for the product within their geographic area. This includes a “deal score” rating, based on user and customer reviews, and social media comments.

“We just thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a tool where you could type in the size of the TV you wanted and it quickly came up with the best deal in your area?’” says Clark. “There’s nothing like it out there for consumers, as far as we know.”

Clark and his co-creators premiered the app at the TechCrunch conference in New York this May to favorable reviews. “After that, we started seeing a few downloads per day, but it didn’t really start picking up until recently,” says Clark, who began working at his current employer, Price Waterhouse Coopers’ Vancouver office, shortly after graduating from UNBC.

Clark says the application’s recent boom in downloads is owed to two factors: the approach of “Black Friday,” on November 25—the unofficial start of the holiday season in the US; and the fact that they recently made their app downloadable on iPhone.  “We’ve seen downloads increase from a few dozen to a few thousand per day,” says Clark. “It keeps climbing as the shopping season approaches. We’ve also expanded the application’s uses to include many retail products outside of the realm of electronics.”

“Involvement in the JDC West Business competition while at UNBC really improved my confidence,” adds Clark, who functioned as his team’s VP of Finance. “UNBC is small enough that I felt I could really get involved, participate at a competitive level, and helped me try new things.”

The app is currently available only in the US, but there are plans to expand into Canada in the near future.

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