Kicking It Mobile Style

If you've got a lot of friends with smartphones, you might have heard of Foursquare. It's a mobile app that lets people "check in" their location and their friends see where they are. If you go someplace a lot, you become the "mayor" - at least until you're unseated by an even more frequent visitor.
What's was missing, however, was a benefit to the user in the real world. Foursquare and other rivals (none of which I'd ever heard of before this New York Times blog post) offer companies the chance to use these check-ins as the basis of loyalty rewards. However, GPS or Wifi based check-ins are far from an exact science: Foursquare's new automatic check-in service checks people in when they are within 300 meters of a location. That could mean quite a few storefronts they never had any intention of entering in a big city - or a mall.
Now start-up ShopKick is trying to change that. Shopkick installs small devices in stores that send out an inaudible noise. Cellphones with the Shopkick app pick it up with their microphones.
Stores can offer personalized discounts which shoppers redeem by giving the cashier their cellphone number. Shoppers also earn "kickbucks" for entering a store, even if they do not make a purchase. Retailers choose how much they want to pay for each customer that walks in the door, and Shopkick earns a mark-up on that price.
Stores will eventually be able to customize rewards based on where in the store someone visits.
Shopping rewards also have the potential to help close Foursquare's gender gap - more men than women use the service, but as well all know, way more women than men like to shop. (Though it seems likely that no amount of coupons will do the job without fine-grained privacy controls that allow women concerned about stalking to determine who knows where they are.)
Meanwhile, 1,000 lb. gorilla Facebook has entered the fray with its own location-based feature, appropriately entitled Places. And in the upcoming issue of Gifts & Dec, new We Ask retailer Tara Riceberg touts Scvngr. The vowel-impaired site takes interactivity to the next leve, allowing businesses to post "challenges" for their customers to complete.