A quick search on Google and I noticed that they had a partnerships with Qualcomm, as an early user of an open source project called AllJoyn, which seems to power some of the wifi and Bluetooth side of the technology behind Lokast.  What the hell does Alljoyn do, well I can’t tell you in any great detail for sure, since I opted not to spend 2 hours reading through all the documentation and SDKs, but per their FAQs it’s “peer-to-peer technology that enables ad hoc, proximity-based, device-to-device communication without the use of an intermediary server…  that will enhance the user experience by simplifying how devices interact with one another.” And “AllJoyn was developed to solve many of the problems that exist in enabling peer-to-peer communication such as simple discovery, pairing, message routing, security, transport independence etc.”

So the takeaway from my non techie little brain is: 1. it’s location specific, 2. it’s an easy way to connect between devices, and 3. you can share stuff.

So while the use case that they seem to be pushing for AllJoyn is around gaming, and Lokast is taking it in the social direction. I think the big retailers like a Best Buy or Home Depot should have a look, not necessarily to allow me to connect to the other customers in the store at the time, but to use it as a way to provide better service to me and connect me with the store just for the time I am in there.  I am thinking of it less as true random, out in the wild peer to peer network, but more as a one super peer “authority” device (the store)  that will always be present in a store creating the foundation for a quick and easy ad hoc communication system  between a store and its patrons.

How would I like to be “connected” to the store while I am there?  Well some stuff is simple, like notifying the store that I want someone to come help me, or leaving feedback like the fact that salesman Bob really knows his cameras.  If there is some promotion happening in the store like 20% off DVDs, it would be good to know that as I make a bee line for the computer section on the opposite side of the store.

Then you could really start to get fancy, by say loading up a ton of product information and demos, so when customers want to do a little in store research of a product they’re considering buying they can get at it quickly and easily, without having to resort to a search of the entire web of data on the subject via Google.  Customers could sample clips of songs or movies in the DVDs section before buying, or peruse curated content of peer reviews of dishwashers or toys before buying. Not to mention that all the in store mobile search query data would be a massive goldmine for ad retargeting ala someone like Magnetic, Akamai/Acerno or Channel Intelligence.

I think if any of these in store retail plays like the area that Shopkick is going after will ever be successful, they’ll need to forget about the silly point schemes and game mechanics and trying to develop a one size fits all mobile app solution from their HQ in California.  I think the more successful route would be to build a simple platform that allows each retailers to take control, and build from the ground up, specifically around the needs of their store and communicating directly there locally with their customers.  Not to say that a lot of the content, like product reviews, couldn’t be one size fits all, but the implementation and people running the system need to be there locally in the store.

It seems to me something like AllJoyn could be pretty easily modified to do all this.

Causeworld
First a quick word on CauseWorld.  As far as I can tell it pretty much works like this… you load up the app on your mobile phone, check in at retailers and scan bar codes on products and earn karma points. You can then donate those points to one of the available charitable causes, and of course post your ‘achievement’ to your social network… a seemingly prerequisite these days.

It seems that at some point the number of karma points each charity has received dictates what share of the corporate donations pool they will receive.   The whole thing feels a wee bit disingenuous, consumers who check in aren’t donating anything, rather they’re casting a vote for where some big corporation donates their money. 

There is a big quote on their site from Michael Arrington at TechCrunch saying that the service encourages big corporations to give more… it’s a bit unclear why or how that is, but presumably if big corporations feel like they’re getting consumer interaction with their products, and consumer behavior data in return, it’s conceivable that it’s a better ROI on your charitable contribution than just slipping the Red Cross a check under the table and entering the appropriate amount on your tax filing each year. 

The big winners seem to be CauseWorld itself and donors. According to an article in CIO magazineCause World takes 20% for its services, and big corporations get more for their donation buck. Meanwhile presumably that 20% cut from Causeworld comes out of the charity’s pockets. For big charities this may not be the best, but the service could potentially be a big plus for lesser known charities that now benefit from the power of consumers promoting their interests in certain causes, maybe a great way to get noticed if your charitable cause flies a bit under the radar… and 80% of a donation is better than 0% any day.  The consumer meanwhile is basically trading off the time and energy to do the work and giving out information about their behavior in return for the right to steer big corporate giving and the ability to easily promote charities of personal interest and also to promote their own personal ‘achievement’.  

If nothing else, it’s an interesting combination of value creation for the various folks in this industry and demonstrates the value that different people (corporations and consumers) place on giving and receiving digitally captured information related to real world behaviors.  Consumers seem pretty happy to give it away, with little more than a little social creds and feel good in return… and corporations, well are happy to get the consumer interaction (and information), even if it means that 20% less of their money actually makes it into the hands of charitable causes.

ShopKick
Ok, so now that you get the idea behind Causeworld, Shopkickisn’t all that different… consumer still both walk into stores and scan items and get credit (called kickbucks) for  doing so, but the reasons why and the technology is a little different.

First, the motivation for downloading and turning on the app when you enter a store, and for scanning items etc is to earn points and to receive special offers. Special offers are things like 10% off anything in the store, or maybe a special item on sale.  Consumers can also earn points along the way for doing things like entering a store or navigating to a particular section of the store… points are later convertible into various things like Facebook Credits or gift cards, or with enough points you can just outright buy an item like the Twilight DVD… with 4,400 kickbucks.

And while you can still sit in your house and check into places in your neighborhood and scan items in your fridge, you only get a few measly points for doing so.  However the real intent here is that you’re in store and the unique ShopKick technology really tries to reward that.  Participating stores install little speakers around the store that transmit an inaudible signal that is recognized when the Shopkick app is running on an iPhone or android device… physical proximity to those speakers, and the ability for the device to hear the signal is what determines when the big points are awarded.

The whole business premise here seems to be around allowing retailers to better understand who is in their stores, before they buy something, and to help retailers service and reward these customers… and also to get consumers to pick up and interact with product all while providing a better shopping experience for consumers.  Since the speaker technology ensures that a consumer is actually present, there is the added benefit of knowing that real foot traffic occurred within the store. So if Best Buy wants to get more people into say the camera section they could run a promotion in the app upon entering the store that pushes customers to that section, and then measure the results… theoretically something ShopKick could get paid for helping make happen on a “cost per” basis. 

The general concepts here are good ones in theory:  measuring presence at point of sale, get consumers to pick up and interact with real products at point of sales, offering specials based on preferences and when you enter the store, not at check out, and rewarding frequent shopper.  And it seems to be getting enough traction that Best Buy is experimenting with the technology with plans to roll it out in 187 stores in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Jose, Chicago and  New York City, as of today.

But in reality from what I’ve seen so far, some of the theory isn’t really making its way into reality.  I used the application a couple of times today to check in at Macy’s and at an American Eagle Outfitter and here is the good and the bad:

The Good
- The little speaker technology that gives you points WHEN YOU ENTER worked flawlessly at both stores here in Manhattan along 34th street… earning me 110 points for the two check ins. Woo Hoo indeed! I took 100 of the points and converted them into 4 Facebook credits and I hope one day to figure out what those do.

The Not So Good 
- I fake checked in at a few more places (including a place that closed a few months ago) and got three more points, and tried scanning some products around the house but as I may have mentioned I hate scanning products and after trying for 3-4 minutes and finally getting a pack of Swiffer wipes to register I got an error message saying it was the wrong product. Beats me why, they were definitely Swiffers… maybe they secretly knew I was really in my laundry room instead of at the Duane Reade across the street… and that was just a nice way to deny me my kickbucks.

- The key goal of ShopKick is supposed to be to make my shopping experience better, but I am not sure it really did that. Checking into Macy’s ShopKick showed me a handful of ‘offers’… and two looked vaguely of interest… a pair of Nike Monarch shoes for $49.99 and some Ralph Lauren Polo shirts for $19.99 (the cheapo ones). The problem was that they didn’t have the shoes in stock, and there was nothing special about the price of either… in fact the shirts happened to be on sale for $14.99 anyway, so I felt like I was better off just looking around the store for big red “sale” signs.  The app wasn’t helpful at all in helping me find the featured item in the massive department store either.

- The experience at American Eagle Outfitters was a little bit better, when I walked in a sales associated immediately told me that all jeans were on sale and he was backed up by about three dozen signs around the shop all saying the same thing… and voila there on the first screen of ShopKick appeared to be a similar deal… which ambiguously enough said ‘Every Single Jean on Sale”.  But flipping through the other offers, ShopKick did me one better by offering me 15% off any purchase, so that may have been a better deal than just any Joe would have received off the street, I guess it depends on what I was buying.

The Bad
- It seems that in order to get your kickbucks points for being in the store, you need to fire up the application before you enter and leave it on as you pass through the main entrances (see TechCrunch “do not avert your eyes from the phone” zombies video to get the idea) so your phone can ‘hear’ the ‘shopkick signal’. I tested this in Macy’s by heading on upstairs away from the entrance and firing up the app and it didn’t work… I didn’t get my check in points.  Huge problem there… maybe easily fixable with a lot more hardware but currently not a good experience.   At Macy’s specifically they also missed some secondary entrances to the building, but that’s more of a minor glitch in the grand scheme of things.

-  In Shopkick points land it takes 4,400 kickbucks to get a $17 Twilight DVD. So from what I saw I’d have to do about 4,400 fake check ins, 176 product scans or walk into a Best Buy 58 times ( for 58 different days since it seems to not let you get points 2x in one day).  Also the number of products you can scan for points varies by store but the ones I saw ranged from 2 to 9 products, so assuming you can scan five products per store on average you’d need to go to stores 35 times (either different stores or different days to the same store) and scan five items to get enough for the DVD.

So the offers on Shopkick so far don’t seem all that special, and the points system doesn’t create a whole lot of motivation except maybe for those people who really shop a lot and really like to play mobile games to win stuff while they’re doing it… but frankly I think those are often different types of people, or at least limited.  From my own experience I certainly wouldn’t use it for the gameplay elements that it offers like becoming fans of places or earning badges, or even to accrue kickbucks.  I may potentially fire it up while in the store to see if there is a special offer for something I am looking for…  but to think that there is some massively new improvement on the phenomenon of checking-in here seem to be more hype than reality from what I can tell.  And thinking of all the specialized hardware that would need to be installed in the tens of millions of retailers across the U.S. kinda makes you wonder if all those fake checkins are really such a bad thing afterall.

• Consumer don’t mind giving away location as long as they get something valuable in return and they gave permission
• Texting is replacing emailing among the younger generation. Like receiving commercial email, receiving commercial texts is not seen as an intrusion as long as it was relevant and consumer gave permission
• In terms of ad delivery, location provides increased relevance… interestingly no one mentioned the consumer predisposition for acting on advertising when out and about… which I think is probably most important
• Going off and building an iPhone app is not for everyone. It’s expensive ($100k is not atypical) and overall smartphone penetration is not at scale. It makes sense for some demos more than others.  Good old SMS is cheaper, easier and already at scale.

With respect to mobile meets retail specifically one of the panelists Kathryn Koegel from Primary Impact Research made mention of how consumers were often using mobile devices while IN STORE to get additional product information and reviews and to do price comparisons on the items they were shopping for.  On a number of occasions I’ve found myself standing in the aisle at Best Buy, pulling up a browser on my phone trying to find out more about a product that I am standing in front of, so I get it.  It was interesting to see that I am not alone and that this was a potentially unique way to use mobile hyper local marketing more from a customer service perspective than pure lead generation.

It made me think that there is a great opportunity for someone to create a network of individual retail store level mobile sites (via either a geo fence around the physical store, or via a wi-fi access point within store) optimized for the in store customers experience… to aid in finding additional product info, reviews, price comparisons, learn about sales, leave feedback for the manager, etc?

Someone like Foursquare very effectively uses gaming mechanics to get folks to just identify that they’re at a place. But it seems that a mobile retail presence portal targeted to in store customers could get you location (at Best Buy) + intent (looking at reviews of big screen TVs) and potentially intercept some of the high value mainstream local/product search flow at a time when the consumer has very high purchase intent… directly shopping in store.  Seems like a potentially interesting expansion area for someone like Milo, Placecast or Geodelic.