Who Knew MOBshop Is Now Shopkick?

So I was just asking myself, what the heck ever happened to the highly anticipated venture that former CBS mobilistas Cyriac Roeding and Jeff Sellinger were putting together?... ya know, MOBshop. The stealth venture, fueled by $2.5mil of Kleiner Perkins & Reid Hoffman money, was the source of lotsa frothy excitement early last summer and curiously my posts about it ended up being among the most popular ever (which ain't no big thing). So I can only blame too much Christmas wassail for not realizing that the company emerged from stealth mode in December and is now called Shopkick. As Cyriac explains in the video below, the big idea behind the company is making the offline shopping experience interactive with mobile phones (guess my speculation wasn't too far off target). Apparently Shopkick will not be a destination nor an application itself, but more of an enabler of a series of divergent branded initiatives, based on the aforementioned big idea.

Their first project is called CauseWorld, which is an iPhone (and soon to be Android) App that allows consumers to donate earned virtual currency (called karmas) to a variety of charities (e.g American Red Cross). The virtual transaction facilitates a real cash donation from founding corporate sponsors Citi and Kraft Foods. Consumers earn karmas by checking into participating retail locations through the iPhone App, a la Foursquare or Gowalla. Considering the CauseWorld App already has over 13k user ratings in just over a month, and that they're overwhelmingly positive, I'd say it's a pretty successful first outing for Shopkick. I think these guys are on to something and I like that they seem to be focusing on great user experiences (and blue chip partnerships), rather than screwing around with not ready for prime-time technology, like augmented reality. I look forward to seeing their next product... and I promise, this time, it won't be in the market for a month before I notice.

Wassup With MOBShop? Keepin' It Stealthy, That's What

It's been more that a few months since I last wrote about MOBShop, so I thought I'd hunt around to see if there's any more information. Well I must say, Cyriac Roeding, Jeff Sellinger and crew are doing a commendable job of keeping it stealthy. But here are a couple of tidbits:

• I'm beginning to doubt that the company will actually be called MOBShop. The name Mobshop, the .com URL and a Twitter account are owned and maintained by a French company that facilitates the creation of e-commerce stores. Also, MobShop was the name of a dotcom-bust era consumer group-buying network site backed by Marc Andreeson, that closed its D2C business in 2001

• The company has recently hired software engineers with experience in streaming video and search, and it's still actively hiring techies. From the job descriptions it's becoming even more clear that location/context are very important to this venture. I would go as far to say that it probably involves the red-hot buzz term "augmented reality" (like Layar)

MOBshop Speculation Is Red Hot

Not since the frenzy over Cold Fusion, or perhaps, the pre-reveal hype surrounding the invention that came to be known as the Segway, has there been excitement in the tech community to match that around Cyriac Roeding's stealth venture MOBshop (f/k/a Cross Platform Corp). OK, perhaps I exaggerate a bit, however, the former CBS Mobile Head and recent Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers Entrepreneur in Residence must have had a major epiphany during his well documented post-CBS worldwide walkabout...because money ($2.5mil so far) & talented people (including his CBS successor Jeff Sellinger) are aggressively chasing this new venture. Kleiner Perkins is taking a particularly keen interest as lead investor and by taking 2 board seats. Former LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman, who's also investing and allegedly not prone to hyperbole, told TechCrunch's Michael Arrington yesterday that the venture was "extraordinarily interesting" (Segway...right?). Based on the name, speculation is that it's a mobile shopping play and not just for mobile goods (no one is going to get excited about another app store or Jamster). My guess is that it's an on device application that uses mobile payment tools like Boku (which I reported on last month) & context (location, time, etc.) specific information to facilitate transactions...but who knows, maybe it's a personal hovercraft that runs on water.