Best Buy Launches Shopkick Automatic Checkins and Rewards at 257 Stores. Best Buy is readying 257 of its U.S. stores for a digital loyalty program that rewards customers who walk in and automatically check in via the Shopkick iPhone app and future Andriod app.
The Best Buy Shopkick initiative was announced earlier this month and will award offline shoppers with "kickbucks" — the Shopkick virtual currency — that can be redeemed in-store or converted to Best Buy gift certificates online. Shopkick has been integrated into Best Buy's point of sale system, allowing customers to give their mobile phone number to the cashier to redeem discounts. The program is set to go live tomorrow in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Jose, New York City and Chicago markets, with 70 additional stores in Dallas, Miami and Minneapolis set to support the digital rewards program by October 1. Shopkick's iPhone app (which also goes live tomorrow) is designed to automatically check shoppers in to retail venues; no manual entry or GPS required.
[img credit: Ron Dauphin] The Top Idea in Your Mind. July 2010 I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I'd thought.
I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I'd go further: now I'd say it's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower. Everyone who's worked on difficult problems is probably familiar with the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing, and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something else. There's a kind of thinking you do without trying to. I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. What made this clear to me was having an idea I didn't want as the top one in my mind for two long stretches.
I'd noticed startups got way less done when they started raising money, but it was not till we ourselves raised money that I understood why. I'd hated raising money when I was running Viaweb, but I'd forgotten why I hated it so much. You don't have complete control, of course. RainyMood.com. The Echo Nest. JS-909. An Introduction to Sine-Wave SpeechMatt Davis MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit Chaucer Road Cambridge CB2 7EF. 1) Introduction: Sine-wave speech is a form of artificially degraded speech first developed at Haskins Laboratory.
Several seminal experiments on the perception of sine-wave speech are described here: Remez, R.E., Rubin, P.E., Pisoni, D.B., Carrell, T.D. (1981) Speech perception without traditional speech cues. In this work, Remez and colleagues demonstrated a dramatic change in the way in which sine-wave speech sentences are perceived, depending on listener's specific prior knowledge. Most naive listeners hear this as a set of simultaneous whistles, or science fiction sounds. Listening to the sine-wave speech sound again produces a very different percept of a fully intelligible spoken sentence.
Davis, M.H., Johnsrude, I.S. (2007) "Hearing speech sounds: Top-down influences on the interface between audition and speech perception. " 2) Generating Sine-Wave Speech: