The latest from TechCrunch
- Did Shopkick Just Change The Check-In Game? You Be The Judge [Video]
- Tuenti, The Spanish Facebook, Goes To Telefonica For $99 Million
- Facebook For Android Gets A Much-Needed Overhaul (And Support For Events)
- Push Notifications Meet Dating: meetMoi NOW Alerts You When Matches Are Nearby
- Blippy Has Pretty Much The Best 404 Page Ever. What Does It Mean?
- Why Checking Into Foursquare With Your Phone in Your Pocket Won't Always Work
- Shopkick Teams With Best Buy To End Fake Retail Check-Ins
| Did Shopkick Just Change The Check-In Game? You Be The Judge [Video] | Top |
| Earlier, we wrote about shopkick , a company with a different take on the whole check-in revolution as it relates to retail. But it’s one thing to read about it, it’s another to see it. That’s exactly why shopkick invited several members of the press to a Best Buy in San Francisco this morning to see the app in action. As you can see in the full 15-minute walk-through video below, the execution is impressive. The minute you enter a Best Buy location, your phone recognizes it and you get points and a message that there are deals available at this location. You can also use it to scan items and get more points and other potential deals. Unlike other location-based apps, this doesn’t use GPS (or even WiFi triangulation), instead this is a custom hardware plus app system shopkick created and installs in partner stores. This means no more fake check-ins and it allows the app to do some other potentially interesting things. The most impressive element may be one that is still in the works. As you can see in our demo, as we walk around the Best Buy, our phones get pinged as we enter a new area with special deals — the home entertainment area, for example. That type of technology is already working obviously, but shopkick says that at first they’re going to focus on the more basic walk-into-the-store experience. While shopkick isn’t a full-on rival to the popular Foursquare and others in the check-in space, it is interesting that they’re going after the type of experience that those guys are trying to establish between consumers and retailers. As Foursquare’s Tristan Walker said at our CrunchUp event last week , they’re attempting to “socialize loyalty.” He also noted that everyone was looking for a location-based coupon Holy Grail that doesn’t exist. Shopkick seems to think it does, and that they’ve found it. CrunchBase Information shopkick Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Tuenti, The Spanish Facebook, Goes To Telefonica For $99 Million | Top |
| Back in May we reported a rumor that Telefonica was in talks to acquire Tuenti, the 'Spanish Facebook', for €80 million" ($104 million), but Tuenti vehemently denied it at the time. Now, according to Spanish news site Expansion , the two sides have "virtually sealed the deal" whereby Telefonica will take 90% of the share capital of Tuenti, valuing the company at around €75 million or close to $99 million. There is further confirmation from Martin Varsavsky, founder of FON who has been informally advising the company, who repeats the Expansion story and adds that "all shareholders of Tuenti but management sold all their shares to Telefonica." | |
| Facebook For Android Gets A Much-Needed Overhaul (And Support For Events) | Top |
| Facebook for Android, long something of an ugly stepchild to its iPhone counterpart, has just gotten another major upgrade. The new version adds some key new features like Events (which you couldn’t access in the old version), friend requests, and video playback. There’s also a nifty feature that the iPhone doesn’t have: a stream of thumbnail photos that sit at the bottom of the Facebook homescreen, each of which represents a friend’s recent shared photo, video, or photo album. Here’s the full list of feature changes: An updated homescreen with: The ability to post a status update or search for friends with just one click A new photo reel that enables easy viewing of photos and videos from friends in your News Feed A draggable Notifications drawer where you can easily see if a friend posted a note on your wall, commented or liked a post or tagged you in a photo Video playback from the app. Similar to the Facebook for iPhone application, we are using the H.264 baseline profile for encoding videos Support for Events. You can now review your upcoming events, read your event details, and even RSVP – all from the application Respond to friend requests without leaving the application Another small change that’s going to save a few headaches: it’s now easier to open links that your friends have shared on Facebook. Before now, tapping on a friend’s status update that contained a link would take you to your friend’s wall — in order to actually open that link, you had to long-hold the update until a menu popped up. It was quirky design, and I suspect some people never figured this out. In the new version tapping a link will take you your friend’s wall; tapping a second time will actually open the link, no long-hold necessary. In general, the app feels nicer than the older version, from the more polished header image to the fact that most of Facebook’s main features are finally available. Still, they aren’t all here yet — it looks like Chat didn’t make the cut. CrunchBase Information Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Push Notifications Meet Dating: meetMoi NOW Alerts You When Matches Are Nearby | Top |
| Launching today on the Android Platform is meetMoi NOW , a mobile dating app that alerts users when a match is nearby and lets the brave find a date on the spot. What’s unique about meetMoi is that it weds geo-location and push with dating; You can download it from the Android Marketplace , login or use Facebook Connect , and then just walk around while it searches for potential beaus. The app runs in the background persistently updating your location (when you choose) and then pushes matches to you when they are within 1 mile of wherever you are. When a suitable person is spotted their photo is pushed to your screen, with a 60 minute expiration time on the option to meet. If you both say “yes” then you have the option of chatting for 30 minutes and then meeting up in real life. Says former SixDegrees founder and meetMoi NOW CEO Andrew Weinreich, “There’s lots of people into mobile dating, but nobody is saying ‘What is dating going to look like 10 years from now?’” When asked about competitors, Weinreich responded that while traditional sites like Match.com and OkCupid (who both have mobile apps) are about browser pulling, meetMoi is entirely push based. Weinreich’s philosophy is that people looking for dates should not have to sit at home browsing, “There is intelligence in the cloud and it should follow you wherever you want to be followed.” The initial launch of the app, available today , is in beta; MeetMoi expects to add premium features like Yelp API integration in a future release. An iPhone app is also expected to be in the App store within the next four weeks. CrunchBase Information MeetMoi Andrew Weinreich Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Blippy Has Pretty Much The Best 404 Page Ever. What Does It Mean? | Top |
| Creating 404 pages (the error page you get when a page on a site cannot be located) has become something of an artform. Startups can earn major bonus points in the geek community for having a humorous one. And Blippy has just tapped a perfect meme for their’s. As you can see here , Blippy’s 404 page features a glorious rainbow. And while it’s not exactly a double rainbow, the cute unicorn child creature seems to think it may be. “ What does it mean…, ” he wonders. Well if you click on him, you can find out… It’s a double rainbow all the way! Keep clicking… OMG A TRIPLE RAINBOW! As a sidenote, some people may think Twitter has the most famous 404 page these days with the Fail Whale. But that’s not actually a 404 error. Technically, the Fail Whale is a 503: Service Unavailable, error. The Twitter 404 page is much less exciting (below). CrunchBase Information Blippy Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Why Checking Into Foursquare With Your Phone in Your Pocket Won't Always Work | Top |
| Updating your location in the background on mobile apps is gaining momentum as a use-case, most recently with an app allowing you to Check-In On Foursquare Without Taking Your Phone Out Of Your Pocket . Problem is—though this sounds really amazing—such uses of background location services are bound by hardware / software limitations and aren't quite ready for primetime. The Future Checkin app (which is obviously an innovative example of using Foursquare's API ) reveals why: this app specifies a 300 meter check-in radius, which is equivalent to about four city blocks. Imagine being in Union Square in New York and the app deciding to "check in"—to where exactly? You could be close to 10-20 places you've already checked into in the past. Not only could you have tons of previous check-ins within a small radius, but you may just be walking (or in a taxi) with no plans to stop anywhere. The Future Checkin app intelligently uses “favorites” to mitigate this, which are locations that you or it tags automatically when you frequent them enough, as well as recent-check-ins. For me, this reduced “nearby” locations to around eight when I opened the app in Union Square. In less-populated areas which people frequent occasionally, this could help, but in cites like New York the technology feels like it’s not yet ready for primetime. The main issue preventing these types of great ideas (granular geofencing , passive check-ins, pushed coupons) from becoming reality is the fact that GPS radios consume incredible amounts of power. For this reason Apple precluded use of GPS on iOS 4 location backgrounding. Instead, cell towers are used to approximate a subscriber's location. Cell tower triangulation has long been considered a joke. Though it's been really useful for safety features such as 911 call-locating and for applications like geo-tagging photos within a city radius, the inaccuracy and infrequency of updates really mitigate the promise of broader applicability. Also, 300 meters is overly-optimistic. Accuracy of background location on iOS 4 depends on how quickly you're moving, the relative frequency of cell tower updates, and hardware (iPhone 4 makes better use of triangulation than iPhone 3GS). In non-optimal conditions, one kilometer accuracy is about all a person could expect (a 12 city block radius!). The truth is that as much as Apple wanted to provide granular LBS with iOS 4, there's a disconnect between the maturity of the technology and the goals of the people who dream up product ideas. This passage from Apple's iOS reference library shows where Apple hopes developers will go: "You might use region monitoring to alert the user to approaching landmarks or to provide other relevant information. For example, upon approaching a dry cleaners, an application could notify the user to pick up any clothes that had been dropped off and are now ready" But it's kind of comical when you see Apple product people pushing ideas that almost certainly won't produce an "Apple experience". Unless they think that you’ll want to be alerted to pick up your dry cleaning when you are 12 blocks away, this isn't going to fly. This problem isn't limited to Apple however. Android has issues as well because successful background location depends on GPS. And today it’s simply not feasible to leave the radio connected or your phone will die within several hours. Issues such as poor indoor reception and time to first fix (TTFF) complicate this further. So what's the solution? Eventually the GPS radios inside phones will become more sensitive to location and will consume less power. Broadcom recently won the iPhone 4 GPS design (from Infineon), and it is producing highly integrated chips and multi-function radios that will do wonders to enable low power background updates. Modes like assisted GPS will allow the GPS chip to turn on and get a fix within seconds (instead of the standard 40 seconds for a cold start) even without any satellite information. They do this with aid from the cellular network (time and frequency data). In between updates, the chips will go into a “sleep” state, consuming up to 1000 times less power, but can still wake within seconds, since after the initial fix the receiver can predict where the satellites will be a certain time later. But these advancements are still a minimum of one year out, so don't get excited too soon—it's unlikely that even next year's iPhone will solve all of the hardware and software issues around checking-in with your phone in your pocket. Photo credit: Flickr/ Roanish . CrunchBase Information Foursquare iPhone 4 Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Shopkick Teams With Best Buy To End Fake Retail Check-Ins | Top |
| Yesterday, we wrote about Future Checkin , a third-party app that uses Foursquare’s API to check you in to a location without you having to actually hit any buttons to check-in. In fact, you can keep your phone in your pocket and it will work. Today, shopkick is teaming up with Best Buys around the U.S. to offer something similar. But with an important twist: without doing anything, you are rewarded for walking into retail stores. And you can’t fake a check-in with their method. “ This is the intersection of the mobile and the physical world ,” shopkick co-founder Cyriac Roeding says. “You turn an offline store into an interactive experience, ” he continues. All of this works by way of a mobile application. The app is able to tell when you walk into a store (Best Buy, in this case) — and where you are in the store (that’s the future plan anyway, but shopkick demoed it today). But the key is that the user is in the store — not in the parking lot or simply close by. This works because “shopkick Signal” technology is installed in the retail stores. This isn’t about GPS. This signal can’t pass through walls, shopkick says. Again, they’re trying to make sure no one can game this system. " Check-Ins are a really nice start. Unfortunately, most of them are fake ," Roeding says. " That's not so great when you have a business model in mind that's supposed to do something for both parties ." With this tech, a consumer walks in the door and they automatically receive deals for that store. To redeem them, they can simply tell the cashier their phone number and the deal is automatically applied. There’s also a new virtual currency shopkick has created called “kickbucks” — these can be redeemed for Facebook credits, songs from Napster, or immediate cash-back rewards at partner stores among other things. You can also use these kickbucks to donate to charity. This is all about foot-traffic. So far, no one has nailed a way to entice people to actually come to the store that makes sense to the retailer, Roeding says. “ This is the physical world equivalent of an online click ,” Roeding says. We’ll have some videos up shortly showing this app (which will be out in the next few weeks) in action. Update : And here’s our video walk-through . CrunchBase Information shopkick Best Buy Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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