Check-in growth on Foursquare has nearly tripled in a year, going from around 200 million in July 2010 to almost 750 million in June 2011. The company claims the one billionth check-in occurred last week, but no additional details were given on who checked in or where it happened.

“Growth has been outstanding the past few months,” Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley told VentureBeat in an email. “And as the product matures, we expect to see growth accelerating. We still have lots of work to do.”

One billion check-ins isn’t the only thing Foursquare is announcing today, as it also released a new versions of its iPhone and Android apps. The biggest addition appears to be the Lists feature, which was previously announced and allows users to create and share their favorite locations with friends.

On top of all that, Foursquare quietly added the very welcome ability to hide home addresses to its privacy features. We’re sure Foursquare’s more than 10 million users will appreciate the privacy updates along with the new mobile apps.

Foursquare also shared a video of what one week’s of check-ins looks like on the service. Enjoy.

For example, users can see guides to locations such as Disneyland or the University of Texas, which highlight some of the more important or interesting sights at the theme-park or campus. The guides are professionally curated by partners or created internally by Gowalla. But Gowalla users can also participate by adding photos and fleshing out a guide for other users. As people check-in to those places in the guides, they unlock more information from the guide about the venue.

“Check-ins are a bit more of a transactional model, we wanted something that was faster and more connected and saved that memory in a way that I could share with my friends,” Gowalla founder and chief executive Josh Williams (pictured) said. “Our goal is to inspire people to get out.”

Anyone can take a photo while they are using the guide and upload an image to that guide, creating a film strip for each “story” — basically an individual’s participation — within a guide. They can tag friends in the photos, which brings them into the story.

“It helps fuel not only the guide that this story is a part of, but it creates this beautiful photo grid stories on the web,” Williams said. ”All this we brought to the web, these same guides bubble up in a way that can be easily browsed from your iPad.”

Gowalla unveiled the new application at TechCrunch’s Disrupt 2011 conference in San Francisco. The next version will be launching “very soon” and will include 60 city guides created by Gowalla and 25 guides made by the company’s partners.

[Photo credit: Matthew Lynley]

Similar to how current local business specials are displayed within the “explore” tab, the new deals will show in real time and enable users to quickly secure a deal with just a few clicks. To avoid any spamming of unwanted deals, the company notes that deals will be delivered based on check-in history, location and time of day. Still, I’m not 100% sure that means I won’t be receiving manicure and pedicure deals.

Noah Weiss, product manager at foursquare, provides additional insight saying, “We’re using all of the recommendation technology from our Explore tab to provide highly targeted Specials to our users.  When we recommend a Special, we also provide an explanation of why we showed them this Special (e.g. “5 of your friends have been to this place” or “You’ve been to 3 similar places.”) Providing users with these personalized recommendations makes the offers they’re receiving even more appealing.”

Foursquare will be generating revenue from these partnerships, although it hasn’t disclosed specifics on what that revenue share will look like, according to Mashable. Notable daily deals giant Groupon wasn’t included in this group of partnerships. However, rumors exist that the two companies are in discussions for some kind of partnership.

Foursquare, founded in 2009 and based in New York City, has raised more than $71.4 million in funding to date. It currently has more than 70 employees in its home town and an engineering office in San Francisco.

LevelUp

Essentially, consumers will be able to connect their American Express cards to LevelUp and be able to redeem in-store deals.  Once connected, users can simply swipe their cards at the point of sale and the deal will be immediately redeemed and show on the sales receipt.

The first brand to launch with this functionality is Levi, which will offering progressively valuable offers on $10 purchases in several cities, including San Francisco, Boston and Philadelphia. Though only one store in each city will have the functionality working immediately, probably for testing purposes.

The functionality works using American Express’s Smart Offers API, which was actually debuted with Foursquare at South by Southwest Interactive to redeem merchant offers without coupons, special codes or showing a phone. The two companies plan on rolling out the functionality in the months ahead.

LevelUp is a funded pilot from the founders of Scvngr, a service that asks users to check-in to physical locations and complete activity challenges for incentives.

The young startup, based in Malmö, Sweden, got some exposure this week at the Global Mobile Internet Conference’s G-Start Up competition in Beijing, where it was picked as one of 20 startups to pitch an audience of China’s top tech players. The company is trying to get exposure in Asia and is working on partnerships with augmented reality and mobile enterprise service companies in China and Singapore.

The technology has strong commercial possibilities in retail. Using QPS, a developer could build an augmented reality application that could provide additional information about products in a store. Take this concept and carry it forward to finding booths at trade shows, touring through museums and improving employee workflow.

Qubulus demoed the technology this week in Beijing. Using a technology called “radio fingerprinting”, it allows a mobile phone to listen to radio signals from surrounding networks. The unique signal strengths are then used to identify a specific spot indoors. Once you build up a grid of those spots and link it to a map this creates positioning which is accurate to three meters, which is better than anything currently on the market.

Google and Apple are both in the positioning game and have both recently come into the news for collecting our personal data to improve their location abilities. They are gathering location information to build massive databases capable of pinpointing people’s locations via their cellphones. These databases could help them tap the $2.9 billion market for location-based services, which is expected to rise to $8.3 billion by 2014 according to Gartner. Generally, when companies have collected data from users it has been from personal computers. The data gathered through this medium can be tied only to a city or area code. The rise of internet-enabled cellphones allows the collection of user data that is much more personal and can be tied to locations on a more granular scale.

What sets QPS apart from the competition is that its technology not only works on a horizontal axis but a vertical one as well. This means that you will know what part of the skyscraper you’re in and what floor you’re on, since the vertical positioning is accurate up to one meter. Current methods use triangulation and are accurate to 10-20 meters, which isn’t helpful, since there could be many walls between you and your destination.

Qubulus said it is attempting to minimize the impact to privacy if someone were to hack into the system. It is doing so by using historical data without unique phone identifiers. It analyzes this data to see how a group of users acted in a specific location. Analyzing batches of historical data lends itself to use pattern recognition rather than the ability to target your location. Plus your data would be a part of a group, so an individual could not be identified. However, carriers are still looking to exploit the same location abilities that Google and Apple are trying to create. The carriers that Qubulus is in pilot programs with have asked for real time data from phones, but this will be opt in.

The inability to opt in or out of location-data collection on Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android platform is why Google and Apple have been getting into hot water with privacy pundits lately. Using historical data lends itself to analysis, since it has nothing to do with where you actually are. The temptation with real time data is push advertising. Using current data provides the ability to push or pull information from your current activities.

Qubulus currently has two pilot projects going with carriers in the US and UK.

Location-based services have already grown into a billion dollar industry, and since 70% of cellular calls and 80% of data connections originate from indoors, having a more precise positioning technology that works indoors will become increasingly more important.

Smartphone app startup Ripple Mobile today debuted its PhoneTag application, which uses GPS-based technology to help mobile device users share a user’s real-time location and coordinate connections privately with their friends and contacts.

PhoneTag lets a user select as many people as they want to be in a session — whether those people are contacts from their address book, someone they just met, business associates or anybody else with a smartphone. Users can set the duration of the session, or meeting, from one minute to “never ending.”

The system then sends a text message with a unique URL to the people the user has invited.

When those people accept and download the app, everyone in that session can see each other on a map, set a destination, text and call, get directions to each other, or simply chat.

Only the people who are invited to a session are able to see the location of others in the session.

If someone doesn’t have the app, they can still see the session and everyone who is actively in it through the website URL texted to them.

The Dublin, Ohio-based company said its new app is designed to help users connect and even send step-by-step directions to each user’s location without broadcasting that news across all their social media networks.

This is a departure from similar apps, such as Foursquare, which automatically and publicly displays where a user has recently “checked-in,” or MeMap because of its privacy options.

Me Map puts data shared on Facebook and Facebook Connect by third-party location-based social networks like Foursquare, GoWalla,Buzzd and others on one centralized map.

Ripple Mobile said its core technology platform was specifically designed to keep that information private, so that users looking for a spontaneous meeting can now share and receive location-based information for events and people along secure and confidential channels.

The company made news earlier this year when it debuted its OnTime mobile app, which syncs all of a user’s calendars and keeps track of meetings, tasks, to-do lists and local traffic patterns.

Co-founder Kevin Miller, who helped create the company in late 2010, told VentureBeat that it is currently aiming at a community of “smart device” owners that number around 200 million people.

Thus far, it has done well with PhoneTag, seeing a 40 percent growth during its public beta over the last few months despite the fact that it hasn’t advertised the app until today.

Ripple Mobile is currently self-funded and said it has no immediate plans to look for outside money.

Flirtomatic’s app, which had connected members on the basis of preferences, interests, location and other information stored in their profiles, now includes a location feature and allows members to search for, and connect with, people who’ve been or will be in the same location at another time. For example, a user could reconnect with a college crush by setting their hometown as a past location, or could meet new people in the country they will be traveling to in the upcoming weeks.

The new app also includes tools to help customers improve their flirting abilities. A dashboard has real-time updates, notifications, and daily messaging trends, and allows members to see when their favorite friends are online. Members can also share feed updates on Twitter and Facebook and can check their own flirting stats with a new analytics tool.

Online flirting is a hot space, with flirting and dating companies such as Tagged.com showing real success with users and revenue. Tagged.com recorded 100 million registered users and predicts revenue of over $50M in 2011. Flirtomatic has out-competed companies such as eHarmony and Match.com in the mobile flirting space and has raised $9M in VC funding.

That includes data shared with Facebook and Facebook Connect by third-party location-based social networks like Foursquare, GoWalla, Buzzd and others.

The San Francisco-based startup said the new app puts Facebook on one central app accessible by mobile devices. The app is available only on the iPhone, but the company says an Android app is in the works.

To connect, a user simply downloads the app, logs in via their Facebook login and they can immediately visualize their social network on the map.

MeMap does this by making sense of geo-data from check-ins and Facebook users’ “current cities,” and then plots the data on a real-time map.

It also includes status updates, wall posts and other key Facebook functions.

The company said it is hoping to target any iOS Facebook user interested in seeing their social network in the real world.

“People don’t want to join new networks, and with MeMap they don’t have to,” Matt Farnell, founder of MeMap, told VentureBeat. “As an open network built on top of Facebook Places, MeMap is a powerful aggregation tool at the center of the social networks people already love.”

He said that with no barriers to entry, and offering the ability to visualize the data their friends are already sharing, MeMap returns immediate value for everyone, not just early adopters.

“The 100 million iOS users on Facebook are already signed up,” said Farnell.

The app offers single tap check-ins, but isn’t “always on,” and has privacy features that let users blast all their personal data.

Users who like to compete and earn rewards can also check in to their favorite locations and participate in a scoring system.

The startup said that funding is bootstrapped so far but that it is actively interested in seed rounds to include other location-based social networks, not just from a direct login through Facebook.

Calling all mobile executives: This April 25-26, VentureBeat is hosting its inaugural VentureBeat Mobile Summit, where we’ll debate the five key business and policy challenges facing the mobile industry today. Participants will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. The invitation-only event, located at the scenic and relaxing Cavallo Point Resort in Sausalito, Calif., is limited to 180 mobile executives, investors and policymakers. We’ve pretty much finalized the invite list, but have a few spots left. Request an invitation.

We hinted to the recommendation engine back in September when co-founder and chief executive Dennis Crowley announced the possibility in front of Picnic, an annual three-day festival for sharing concepts in Amsterdam. The new feature is being called “Explore” and will utilize user’s past check-ins, along with other user’s check-ins and tips, to recommend places for a variety of categories, including food, coffee, nightlife, shops or A&E (arts and entertainment). Crowley also notes that things like time of day and week will affect recommendations.

Additional updates include a revamped leader board, which makes sense as it’s currently one of the ways Foursquare keeps users checking in to locations. Another popular way to encourage check ins is through Foursquare Specials, which now have been split up into seven different types: Swarm Specials, Friends Specials, Flash Specials, Newbie Specials, Check-in Specials, Loyalty Specials and Mayor Specials. As seen by the names, each special is associated with the type of check in by the user. For example, if it’s your first time at a coffee shop, a check in could land you a free drink with the “Newbie Special.”

For Blackberry owners, there will be an update that includes some 3.0 functionality later in the week.

It’s probably no coincidence that Foursquare is launching its new version less than a week before South by Southwest Interactive, the tech conference where it launched two years ago. Gowalla, a competing location-sharing app, has also announced new features in advance of the conference.

Foursquare, founded in 2009 and based in New York City, has raised more than $21 million in funding to date. It currently has more than 50 employees in its home town and an engineering office in San Francisco.

For more details into each new feature, check out the very long Foursquare blog post.

Echoecho is trying to make that process a little easier by showing where nearby friends are on a map and suggesting nearby locations to meet. The company unveiled its iPhone application at the Launch Conference in San Francisco today.

When one Echoecho user finds a nearby person they want to meet, they can send them a message through the app. They can text message their friends or call them directly from the application just by touching them once or twice. The two users then share each other’s locations through the application and determine where to meet from there. Echoecho uses the phone’s existing address book contacts to build a social network of sorts within the application.

If the other person has the application, they get a push notification that takes them to a map and shows what storefronts are nearby. If they don’t have the application, Echoecho sends the other person a text message that has a link to download the application.

The application is already on the Apple app store, where it has a score of two and a half stars out of five. It’s also available for Google’s mobile operating system Android, Symbian, BlackBerry’s operating system and Windows Mobile.

So far Echoecho isn’t too worried about making money. But it might rely on lead generation — basically letting merchants pay for a top spot in the recommendation list — to generate revenue once it gets rolling. One other option would be adding advertisements to the map, but the company doesn’t plan to try that strategy because it would mar the user experience.

Google

While in the past users where able to share their location, it wasn’t based on a specific physical location, like a restaurant or bar, but just longitude and latitude coordinates — a dot on a map. Now, you can actually check into a place, which adds context, like a caption to a photo.

The check-in feature is just one update; Google has also added the ability to receive notifications as a reminder to check in when you arrive at location. For those who may not be hardcore users, this is a good way of building “active” users and creating a routine.

Additional features include the ability to create automatic check ins to places of your choice. Interestingly, you can also be automatically checked out — you wouldn’t want your friends arriving after you’ve already left.

If you’re wondering if there’s any kind of incentive, Google has made is so that users who check into places often can secure statuses, including “Regular,” “VIP” or “Guru,” which would show up on the location’s Place page, a sort of mini website with an address, number, directions and other important information.

Competition in the check-in space is abundant. Services like Facebook Places, Foursquare, Scvngr and Whrrl all give users check in capabilities . However, Google appears to be the only one with the combination of features that let you not only check in, but have notifications and the ability to check out, which could help the service attract new users — perhaps even from competing services.

Users now have a limit on the total number of friends they can have as well as the number of friend requests they can send, a change first noticed by AboutFoursquare.com.

For the average user, this may not be an issue: Most users don’t want thousands of people knowing where they are at any given time. So the policy is likely targeted at businesses looking to take advantage of creating a profile on Foursquare. Like Twitter, the microblogging network for posting short status updates, Foursquare allows businesses to create profiles in the same way that people do. That liberal policy is unlike Facebook, the dominant social network, which only allows real human beings to create profiles and requires businesses to use a different format called Pages.

Some companies have been randomly sending friend requests to thousands of Foursquare users, like Bastardjeans.com, which currently has 61, 923 friends. Why would they do this? Well, the benefit comes when one of those users checks in to a venue where Bastardjeans.com has left a tip. Since friends’ tips are displayed first, Bastardjeans.com gets more visibility.

Other advantages include being able to know where these users are from their check-ins, as well as being able to send them messages, since many Foursquare users share contact information with friends. All of these could be advantageous to a business looking to promote itself — though it’s probably not how Foursquare or most of its users envisioned the service operating.

Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley told VentureBeat that the startup is constantly working to adjust the balance between letting businesses engage with users, while at the same time trying to keep a positive user experience. Asked what the limits on friends and friend requests would be, Crowley said, “I think they’re still in flux right now.”

As of right now, Foursquare’s major competitors, Gowalla and Scvngr, do not have plans to restrict total friends or friend requests.

While Foursquare is still young and most users have few friends compared to the bigger social networks, one wonders if the restrictions may push some avid users to eventually go with another location-based applications with fewer restrictions. That happened with Friendster, an early social network which cracked down on fake profiles and lost ground to the less-restrictive MySpace.

Foursquare, based in New York City and founded in 2009, has raised more than $21 million in funding. It currently has more than 40 employees in its hometown and a new engineering office it’s opening in San Francisco.

Foursquare cofounders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai have been dropping a lot of hints about a major revamp to Foursquare, a popular location service used by 5 million people who announce their location to friends by checking in on an app or a mobile-optimized website. Foursquare has been collecting a lot of data on its users’ whereabouts — and it now may be ready to use that data to recommend new places for them to visit.

The company also recently released a new API in beta which may help third-party developers harness the new recommendation tools, too.

Word of the “recommendation” feature first surfaced several months ago when Crowley mentioned the company was testing ways to recommend places and friends to users while speaking at Picnic, an annual three-day festival for sharing concepts in Amsterdam.  

Another feature may include photo sharing, according to a recently surfaced screenshot first discovered by Mashable. Giving users the ability to add photos to a check in and share with friends could be a popular feature that may help the company in its continued quest to grow. Some third-party apps like Instagram allow users to post a photo and tie it to a location by simultaneously checking into Foursquare.

Foursquare isn’t the only location-based service updating its app. Most recently, Loopt unveiled its 4.0 version to be more robust and competitive. Gowalla just releases its own new version that most notably lets users integrate with Facebook Places and Foursquare.

The New York City-based company, founded in 2009, has raised more than $21 million in funding and currently has more than 40 employees in its hometown and a new engineering office it’s opening in San Francisco.

Google launched Latitude in early 2009 as a way to easily keep track of your friends’ locations in real-time. Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Symbian users have been able to take advantage of the service for some time with background updating, which automatically updates their Latitude location. Now with an official app, combined with background GPS updating features in iPhone OS 4, iPhone users, too, will be able to take advantage of all Latitude has to offer.

Apple blocked Google’s first attempt at releasing a Latitude app last year (Google said Apple was worried users would confuse it with the Maps app), so Google released a Latitude web app that let users manually update their locations. Being a web app, it couldn’t offer the convenient background updating feature found on other platforms.

Latitude is the second rejected Google service to get an official iPhone app in the past month. Apple finally approved an official Google Voice app last month, after similarly rejecting it last year. Google also went the web app route with Voice after Apple’s rejection, but just like Latitude, it was no replacement for a native app. Apple’s change of heart can be traced back to its relaxed iPhone app rules announced in September.

I’ve only had a short while to dig into the Latitude app, but it seems pretty straightforward. You can view a map of all of your friends’ locations, change privacy settings and invite more friends to Latitude. The background location updating seems to work just fine, and it can also be turned off easily. Now that Latitude is fully functional on the iPhone, I’ll definitely be inviting more friends (who don’t mind being stalked) to use the service.

Google says that there are over 9 million Latitude users on other mobile platforms. I expect that number to explode now that iPhone users can take full advantage of it.

The Latitude app requires iPhone OS 4 and is compatible with the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad and the 3rd/4th generation iPod Touch. You can view a video demonstration of the app below:

In addition to being the main user group, the group may also be heavy online influencers as 38% of them claim that their networks ask them for their opinion before making a purchase decision. It would be interesting to know what types of products their networks ask them about before a purchase. Most likely, it’s probably electronics.

Finally, the data shows that the group may also be heavy mobile researchers, meaning that they are more likely to search for information on products or services as well as look up ratings and reviews. If the user group is constantly checking in to locations, then they are probably also using their smartphones for the following.

The nifty graph below spotlights more specifics location-based service users to US online adult users.

Unsocial users can connect their LinkedIn accounts, or create a unique account for the application, and immediately find potential business connections within a few miles. Users can contact people directly through Unsocial, as well. If the potential connection has a phone number listed with it, users can call them directly. Otherwise, they can send them a message through the application — including sending their own “business card.” They can also find events in the area — such as a trade conference — and see an attendee list and announce their intent to attend the event.

Unsocial is looking to raise some capital to expand to other mobile devices and operating systems (it currently has apps for Android and iPhone devices), and expand to include conferences and tracking in new locations. Today, Unsocial is limited to San Francisco and New York.

Bruce Brown, former CEO of communications companies Vertel and Efficient Networks, has taken the reigns of the company as it has begun its first fundraising round. Tom Mooreland, a former executive of communication technology provider Sitrix Systems and a partner of Next Gen Consulting, is taking over the executive vice president position.

Since launching its private beta at DiscoveryBeat, Unsocial has already picked up about 10,000 users. Unsocial, founded in March 2009, currently has more than 12 employees.

The new application is supposed to be released with the start of the new season later this month and will focus on giving fans the ability to check-in to games both in-person and while watching on the television. A smart move as many fans aren’t able to physically make it to an arena, but may be avid fans –  watching every game from home.

A fan who checks-in will have their location and update shared with the majority of the major social networks, including Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. However, the app won’t just be for check-ins, but also offer fans real-time game stats and highlights as well as discounts and rewards if physically at a game.

As pointed out by the WSJ, the NBA isn’t the only one looking to take advantage of fans checking-in to games. The National Hockey League started using Foursquare to give fans tips and hints for finding freebies within venues. Some National Football League teams, like the Washington Redskins, are also experimenting with Foursquare as well as location-based service newcomer Scvngr, which is about to hit 500,000 users according to the company’s Blag (yes, Blag – they are Bostonians).

The application will be free and available for Blackberry, iPhone and Android devices.

Loopt users will now be able to seamlessly connect their Facebook profiles with the Loopt application. Through the connection, users will be able to not only see where their Facebook friends are on a map (see above), but also have dual check-in capabilities. For example, a user checking in to McDonald’s through the Loopt app will also have their location shown on Facebook Places. The Loopt app will also allow users to see their Facebook friends in their Loopt friend list.

The company is one of the early leaders in the location-based space, but has seen a lot of competition from other companies. Gowalla, a check-in service, is already integrated with Facebook Places and continues to work on building out its partnerships, including recent scavenger hunt with NASA. While Foursquare’s chief executive and founder Dennis Crowley may still be deciding on Facebook Places and how it may work with the service.

However don’t count Loopt out just yet, the company continues to make waves with a recent major hire of mobile industry veteran and former senior vice president of mobile at Yahoo Steve Boom as its first president. In addition, Loopt recently launched Loopt Star, including its availability for Android users, which allows users to check-in to places and get rewards.

The Mountain View, Calif. based company, founded in 2006, has raised a total of $17 million from Sequoia Capital and New Enterprise Associates. It was incubated by Y Combinator.

Placecast is partnering with O2 (owned by Telefonica) to deliver ads on the mobile carrier’s O2 More service in the United Kingdom. Previously, O2 More delivered offers based on customers’ age, gender, and interests to more than 1 million subscribers. Now it’s adding location.

The two initial advertisers in this partnership are Starbucks and L’Oreal, which have both activated “geo-fences” around their UK stores. So when an O2 More user gets close to the store, and if they’ve expressed an interest in what the stores are selling, they’ll receive a special offer on their phone via SMS or MMS.

Customer interested in food or drink who approach a Starbucks will be offered a discount on Starbucks instant coffee. Customers interested in beauty who approach a L’Oreal store will be offered a “buy one, get one free” deal on a L’Oreal hair product. Placecast says 1,500 stores are involved in this effort.

And again, it’s an “opt-in” program, so the only people seeing these ads are folks who said they wanted to receive promotions from O2. The alerts are also capped at 1 per day, and customers are never supposed to receive the same message twice.

Placecast has raised $12 million in two rounds from Quatrex Capital, ONSET Ventures, and Voyager Capital.

The four virtual items can be unlocked when a Gowalla user checks in to a specific NASA venue, including NASA visitor centers, agency-related locations, or one of the more than 400 museums, science centers, planetariums, observatories, parks, nature centers, zoos and aquariums that are part of NASA’s Museum Alliance, according to a NASA announcement.

Once unlocked, users have the option of swapping the virtual items, dropping them into locations or keeping them in their Gowalla vault according to the company’s blog. If a user is lucky enough to collect three of the four items, they will get a special pin to show off in their profiles. If you’re one of the first 100 to find 3 items, you’ll win a special edition map dubbed “Search for the Moon Rocks” designed by creative agency Jess3 (pictured below).

One of the virtual items, moon rocks, can only be found where actual moon rocks are on display. NASA notes that Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17 missions all brought back samples, which can be found in various museums and planetariums around the world. The company specifically notes that some of these location are not open to the public. We’d highly recommend not breaking into a location just for a virtual moon rock. Not sure they trade well in jail.

As far as we can tell, the Gowalla and NASA partnership is the first time a location-based game has teamed up with a government agency to incentivize visitors. For Gowalla, the partnership brings a very recognizable name, just what the company may need to compete with check-in giant Foursquare, who has more than 4 million users and whose chief executive and founder Dennis Crowley was just named one of Fortune’s 40 under 40, a list of business’ hottest rising stars.

When I asked Crowley if Foursquare has any plans to target government agencies for partnerships, he gave me his usual default response saying, “Maybe we’ll do something like that someday ” Stop smiling at me, Crowley!

MyTown, built by Booyah, reminds me a lot of monopoly, but without the board and family. Players can buy locations that are close to them and have other players who check-in to those places pay them rent — all in virtual currency. Once the owner collects a certain amount of rent, they can upgrade to increase the location’s value and thus earn more from rent. Back to Monopoly, it’s like going from owning Baltic Ave to Boardwalk.

A new feature with the game’s global availability includes integration with Google Places, a directory of real local businesses. Users can now locate and lay claim to any location that appears on Google Maps. Within those locations, the game also allows users to scan barcodes to unlock virtual currency.

Other location-based services are available globally, including popular mobile check-in game Foursquare, which started its global push at the end of last year and now covers the entire world, and Gowalla.

San Francisco-based MyTown has raised close to $29.5 million in funding and claims to have more than 3.5 million users in just a few months time. With the global availability, the app may continue to see rapid growth.

Update: Oct. 6 – 12:30 am (EST) Aaaand Foursquare is back! “And we’re back. Web, API, and apps are up and running.”

Update: 10:45 pm (EST) Foursquare’s new “Status” blog is now down for what the site calls “maintenance”

Update: 10:28 pm (EST) Latest from Foursquare, “Running on pizza and Red Bull. Another long night :/”

Update: 9:00 pm (EST) Foursquare is currently experiencing downtime, again, and is claiming it is has to do with yesterday’s problems, according to the newly launched Foursquare Status blog.

Popular location-based mobile service Foursquare is reporting that its service was down for about 11 hours yesterday, according to a recent blog post.

While the post is a bit to technical for my tastes, the company is obviously taking this seriously and looking to not only explain exactly what happened, but better its communication with consumers when problems occur.

To keep it simple, Foursquare basically had an issue with storing check-ins to what they call shards, a technical term for a portion of a distributed database. One of the shards became overloaded. When Foursquare tried to add another to balance out the problem, the site crashed—for a long time. Looking back, the downtime appears to be the longest in the company’s history.

To better communicate, the company will launch a new status blog at status.foursquare.com as well as post hourly on the @4sqsupport Twitter account, retweeted by the main @foursquare Twitter account. A more informative “error” page will also be used from now on that will share status updates.

Foursqaure isn’t the only one experiencing downtime lately. Facebook recently had its worst downtime in 4 years when the service was unavailable for 2.5 hours. Also, Twitter had a bit of downtime, which happened to correspond with its announcement that COO Dick Costolo would be replacing Evan William as CEO, according to TechCrunch.

The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company says it can aggregate daily deals from almost 100 sources and put them all in one place. Center’d previously launched an iPhone app that has been downloaded more than 175,000 times in its first six weeks. The app sorts through more than 350,000 local deals and coupons and makes them available to consumers where they want them on web sites, social apps, daily emails and mobile apps. More than 375,000 people get these updates daily. The service can filter by 10 business categories and eight deal types.

Sifting through the chaff is a big part of daily life. If your mobile phone can help you do that, it will become an even more indispensable part of your life. Consumers and businesses can upload their own deals to Dealmap, so the company takes advantage of user-generated content. This app can aggregate daily deals from companies such as Groupon and Living Social. It then organizes the deals and maps them, using relevance algorithms.

Center’d has raised $10 million from Norwest Venture Partners and KeyNote Ventures. Angel investors include Bill Harris, former PayPal and Intuit chief executive. Competitors include 8coupons and Yipit, neither of which have a mobile app yet. Center’d was founded in 2007 and the Dealmap web site launched in May. The company has eight employees.

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The app uses a specialized image-recognition technology from Canadian startup TinEye. Most wine labels are on a curved surface, so the software must be able to find images that are slightly rotated, warped, cropped, blurred, have skewed colors or have been taken in a location with low lighting like a restaurant. In fact, identifying where to buy that wonderful house wine is one of the main scenarios in which you might use Snooth’s app. Others include price comparison when you are in a wine shop.

820,000 wines are searchable via image recognition, and Snooth links to 11,000 wine merchants worldwide. Snooth is not the first company to consider this application for image recognition. The most notable is Google Goggles, but the Goggles database never actually listed a useful number of labels.

Snooth Wine Pro is available in the iTunes App Store for $4.99. Users can also install Snooth Wine, a free, ad-supported version. Snooth’s core product is a social, wine review site whose business model is based on lead generation and selling data to wineries and wine merchants on where potential customers might be located. Snooth is based in New York and is privately funded.

Getting content noticed is a challenge for everyone making apps. We’ll cover the topic at DiscoveryBeat 2010. Startups and big companies alike are encouraged to submit their discovery tactics to our Needle in the Haystack competition. Early bird discounts are available until September 22. Sponsors can contact us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To buy tickets, click here.

Placecast

The San Francisco company says that the LocalBox can be used in any country and on any carrier’s system. For instance, a phone maker that wants to add real-time social media updates, venue information, and ways to make money — banner ads, coupons, discounts — can do so with the flip of a switch.

In the video below, you can see how LocalBox generates a live page with an offer for a local theater. If you pass near the theater, you an offer for a discount or other coupon. LocalBox takes a bunch of real-time information, including tweets, cleans it up and then puts it together for a user to digest all at once. The real-time nature of the information is what makes the technology so useful, since information about places changes all the time, and it’s hard to keep apps up-to-date. LocalBox sources data from a variety of open application programming interfaces and reconciles them, cleaning up errors and aggregating it as desired.

Placecast is five years old and has more than 20 employees. It has raised $12 million in two rounds from Quatrex Capital, ONSET Ventures, and Voyager Capital. The company will be announcing partners later. Rivals include Simple Geo.

The new partnership is with Runkeeper, a mobile application for tracking your running and jogging activity. When users connect their accounts, they can earn Foursquare badges for their activity in Runkeeper, for example earning a Marathon badge when they run a marathon. Foursquare says this is “the first badge you unlock by doing something, not just checking in.” That also means the badges won’t really be connected to your location, at least not in the way Foursquare’s other badges are — you earn a Gym Rat badge by going to the gym, while you earn Runkeeper badges by running anywhere.

Foursquare says it’s pursuing similar deals with “a handful of carefully selected partners.” This seems like a smart way to keep users connected to Foursquare even if they’re not using the app.

And these partnerships should also help Foursquare keep its badge concept fresh. When I first started using the app, I seemed to earn a new badge every couple of days as a reward for checking in at different locations. I still use Foursquare, but I haven’t earned a new badge in months, which suggests that the current badge system has limitations. (Or maybe I’m just doing it wrong.)

I’m very curious to see who the other partners are, and if, like Runkeeper, they’re only loosely connected to location. If these initial partnerships are a hit, Foursquare could expand beyond location in a more ambitious way. (The latest update to the Foursquare app, version 2.0, also suggests the company has become more interested in activities and activity recommendations.) That could mean trouble for less-established startups that are built around the check-in and badge concepts that Foursquare popularized — you know, the kind of company that describes itself as (for example) “Foursquare for TV.”

Now, I think that a lot of these startups (including Miso, the Foursquare for TV app that I mentioned above) have smart ideas about how to take Foursquare’s basic concepts into new areas. But as Foursquare expands its activity beyond location check-ins, it might turn out that the “Foursquare for X” is actually Foursquare itself.

The milestone comes after Location Labs was granted access to Verizon’s network — giving it location connectivity to all four major US carriers.

The company offers three major services: Geofencing (available for iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry) runs in the background to let applications know when users have entered a specific location; the aforementioned Universal Location Services; and privacy management, which lets users know exactly how their data is shared.

Over 2,000 developers have signed up for Location Lab’s ULS across verticals like “mobile marketing, couponing, fraud prevention, compliance, and logistics tracking.” ULS gives developers an easy and scalable way to access location data. It can also detect both smartphones and less sophisticated cellphones.

The company recently announced a partnership with Citygrid Media that granted it access to data on over 15 million local businesses. Location Labs was originally called WaveMarket, but it changed its name in June.

Location Labs is based in San Francisco, Calif., and has raised $26 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, BlueRun Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures and Intel Capital.

Getting content noticed is a challenge for everyone making apps. We’ll cover the topic at DiscoveryBeat 2010. Startups and big companies alike are encouraged to submit their discovery tactics to our Needle in the Haystack competition. Early bird discounts are available until September 22. Sponsors can contact us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To buy tickets, click here.

PapayaMobile

The Beijing-based company, which makes a social game platform for Android developers, has updated its software development kit to enable the addition of location features. It adds functions that resemble the check-in games on Foursquare, giving players the ability to earn medals and badges or directly challenge their friends in location-based competitions. With location added to the SDK, developers can simply include PapayaMobile’s service on their own apps, rather than build up their own database of locations for user check-ins.

Si Shen, chief executive of PapayaMobile, said that the location feature on the company’s own games has been so popular that it decided to make it broadly available.

PapayaMobile started as an app maker. It has since created a platform that can be used to add social features such as sharing, leaderboards or challenges to games, in the hopes that those will make users more likely to tell friends about the app. The company competes with such rivals as Aurora Feint and Scoreloop.

Shen recently announced PapayaMobile’s Android App of the Day, which promotes quality Android games to the company’s audience of 4 million Android users.

Shen, a former mobile product manager for Google in China, started PapayaMobile in 2008 with Wenjie Qian. The company has 30 employees and raised $4 million in funding from DCM.

Getting content noticed is a challenge for everyone making apps. We’ll cover the topic at DiscoveryBeat 2010. Startups and big companies alike are encouraged to submit their discovery tactics to our Needle in the Haystack competition. Early bird discounts are available until September 22. Sponsors can contact us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To buy tickets, click here.

With its launch today at the DEMO conference, Picksie will be the most recent to enter into a growing ecosystem of location-based apps for the iPad. It displays restaurants, bars and the like to users looking for something to do whenever they get bored.

While similar to Yelp and other recommendation-based services, Picksie offers a recommendation engine based on previous “picks” and profile settings, as well as outside conditions like weather, time of day and day of the week.

Picksie consists of a five-person team built out of Ishi Systems, a 50-person IT consulting company based in Jersey City, New Jersey, which has also funded its development. It was cofounded by Ishi Systems founder and CEO Ajay Mohan and product manager Saju Thomas.

Location Labs offers three main service. Each gives developers a way to develop location-based apps that generate revenue. Geofencing tells applications when a user enters a specific area, while the universal location service can remotely locate phones within a network of 180 million consumers. Lastly, privacy management lets users control their location is shared.

With the new information, Location Labs can now deliver to developers what it’s calling a ”place-based predictive model” of using user’s location behavior to send more relevant content and ads.

A recent example of Location Labs tools can be found in a recent partnership with Placecast for their ShopAlerts service, a mobile marketing tool that businesses can customize, which uses location-triggered text messages sent from brands to consumers who opt into the service. It does not require end users to download an app to their phone.

If CityGrid Media doesn’t sound familiar, you might remember them as CitySearch, a local guide website. The company rebranding is a culmination of a company revamp that began almost three years ago.

Location Labs also rebranded itself recently, changing from WaveMarket. While one might think a name change comes about when a company is in trouble or changing focus, WaveMarket claims it was profitable – 10 million in revenue - and even thinking about an IPO.

The San Francisco-based company has raised $26 million from venture capitalists including Draper Fisher Jurvetson, BlueRun Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures and Intel Capital.