Shopkick Teams With Best Buy To End Fake Retail Check-Ins

Yesterday, we wrote about Future Checkin , a third-party app that uses Foursquare 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. Working in the background, the app is able to tell when you walk into a store (Best Buy, in this case) -- and where you are in the store. But the key is that the user is in the store -- not in the parking lot or close by. This works because "shopkick Signal" technology is installed in the retail stores. This isn't about GPS.