Inspiration Overload

Customers with the Shopkick app will get points (called kickbucks) for entering a store. Pick up a putter at Sports Authority, and points drop into the app. Stop in the dressing room at American Eagle, and more points arrive.

The points are redeemable for gift cards at the retailers, along with music downloads or credits toward Facebook games. It takes a lot of points, however, to earn even a $5 gift card, although the stores say they may adjust the point system to make points more valuable.

Whether shoppers will get a kick, so to speak, out of being followed — and pinged from one floor of a store to the next — remains debatable. What retailers see as sophisticated marketing, privacy advocates see as intrusive. Shopkick knows “where you are, what you buy, your spending habits, passions, excesses,” Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said via e-mail.

OK....het experimenteerseizoen met LBS is aangebroken. Tot Kerstmis zal het alleen maar erger worden vermoed ik!

the researchers wrote a simple script that automatically recognized when videos were recorded a certain distance away from a primary location, that being the potential victims' home addresses. When the "vacation distance," as it was called, was set to 100 KM, the script returned 106 hits revealing who was out-of-town in the test location of Berkeley, CA. After briefly perusing the results, the researchers came across a video from someone who was clearly on a Caribbean vacation and would have made an ideal victim.

Deze applicatie kijkt waar je staat in New York en zal je direct een aantal plekken aanwijzen waar je statistisch gezien het meeste kans maakt op een taxi op het tijdstip van kijken.

After you've tagged it, you can enter the name and address of the people in the photo, too. The photo gets submitted to our super secret servers, where a team of trained security professionals reviews every image for possible illegal activity.

Foursquare in de handen van conversatieve nutheads....

This is a new type of data. Never before has something like SpotRank been released. It will be used mobile apps and mobile ads (as Stump pointed out, it could cost more to show an ad in a busy part of a city). I can also see it being used city planners and corporate real estate agents everywhere. It will also give us great insights into human behavior.

Festival goers who check-in at music venues can earn points and collect the four custom SPIN badges. Each badge — should you attempt to unlock it — offers a unique experience of the festival and turns the SXSW music experience into a complex scavenger hunt.

Don’t expect these badges to come easy. To earn the SPINsider badge, users will need to check out three bands that SPIN editors recommend. For the Trailblazer badge, users are tasked to see three shows outside of downtown Austin. As for the Animal Collector badge, that requires seeing three bands with an animal in their name, while the Bands on the Run challenges the most diehard of fans to see seven bands in one day.

Sometimes the smallest changes in the status quo can have the greatest impact on the world. So while Foursquare may appear to be nothing more than a mobile application getting excessive buzz, it’s actually fueling the location-based mobile space with unique creativity that competitors can’t copy fast enough.