Last month, we wrote about Foursquare’s potential from a business perspective thanks to its location data. This week, the service has started actively tapping that potential by alerting users when locations close to them are offering special deals.

As you can see in the image, a large blue alert now appears at the bottom of check-in pages on Foursquare’s iPhone app to let you know if there is a deal at a place close to the place you’re at. With the headline “mayor offer nearby”, these deals reward mayors of particular places.

Users can become the “mayor” of a location on Foursquare by checking in at a place more than any other user over a 60 day period. For businesses, that’s obviously something that would be good to reward. And something like a free beer seems like a very small price to pay for getting people excited about coming to your place more often.

While there aren’t a lot of places offering these mayor deals yet, a number of establishments in New York and San Francisco (the cities where the service is most popular) are starting to pop up. There have also been some deals in places like LA and Denver.

In confirming that Foursquare is now actively promoting these mayor deals, co-founder Dennis Crowley also tells us that they’re working on doing some new “ad system stuff” for the app, but didn’t elaborate on that. It seems logical Foursquare will eventually partner up with local businesses to notify users of other types of deals — basically, a location-based coupon system.

Crowley also confirmed that a new version of the iPhone app, 1.4, should be out soon with a lot of new “bells and whistles.” One of those new features will be the ability to see who else is checked in at a place that you’re checked in to. That should do wonders for new friend discovery.

And Crowley sounds excited about the new Twitter geolocation API announced today. He says they’re going to try to squeeze some of it into the new build if they can. As I noted earlier, it would be a great feature if when you tweet out your Foursquare check-ins, it could also attach the location of the place so people reading your tweets don’t have to manually look it up.

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There’s no shortage of websites that enable you to tune into electronic music streams (Digitally Imported leaps to mind), but that doesn’t mean there’s no way to better the offering. Just take a look at Play.fm for example, which we covered favorably earlier this year when they launched their public beta.

A new serious contender that is making its debut today is Mugasha (from ‘music-gather-share’), and its strategy is to focus on the top DJs in the world primarily rather than having the largest collection of sets.

The upstart positions Mugasha as the ‘Hulu for electronic music rather than YouTube’, indicating that it focuses on quality rather than quantity. If you’re into dance music, you’ll dig the DJs the fledgling company has managed to persuade into collaborating: Tiësto, Markus Schulz, Andy Moor, Matt Darey and Menno de Jong are some of the names it’s launching with.

As a recovering electronic music addict, I enjoyed testing the service a lot and the content - which includes both DJ sets and music podcasts - really is high level. Mugashan, which started as a small project at Startup Weekend in Portland, sports a very intuitive interface and a couple of nice features. For instance, you don’t need to register for the service to stream music, only if you want to express your opinion on sets or even individual tracks by ‘liking’ or commenting on them.

You can subscribe to shows and the artist profile pages include links to their other social networking presences, to allow you to dig deeper into specific artists’ work and personal life. When you click through to a specific set - e.g. Francesco Pico’s Magnitude - you’ll notice that you can jump from track to track using the playlist or by sliding the bar on the timeline on top. You can easily share a set or individual tracks on a variety of social networks, and you can also head straight to iTunes or Amazon to buy the music you’re listening to. It’s very slick, and the only thing I thought it lacks is a decent search box on the homepage.

Mugasha aims to make money, apart from running advertising on the site, by collecting affiliate fees on digital music sales originating from their website. It’s notably hard to generate any serious revenue that way, as countless online music startups before them have already proven, but at least the project is entirely bootstrapped by founders Akshay Dodeja and Justin Thiele which means they don’t need to worry about investors breathing down their necks as they make their way. As the title reads: if you’re into electronic music, you’ll be loving this.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some Tiësto sets to go listen intensely to.

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As an online free mapping service, Google Maps is a great product. But it’s lacking in certain parts of the world. And rather than pay people to go get information about those places, Google has smartly been using a service called Map Maker, which lets locals and people knowledgeable about the area edit it themselves. And this week, Google has added a couple important areas to the list: Mexico and Eastern Europe.

“These two launches have doubled the number of users who can map their country on Map Maker,” Google notes today. That’s impressive, but even more impressive is the full list of countries that can now use Map Maker to improve local maps. And while Map Maker doesn’t work in places like the U.S. and other well mapped-out areas of the world, you can edit things on U.S. maps such as place locations. It seems clear that Google Maps is a wiki of sorts now, meaning the community is responsible for a lot of the data on it.

Now, Google still looks over this new country data, and then allows certain portions to “graduate” to actual Google Maps. But still, it’s a great idea to get more information in your system for free. I wonder how long it will be until Google lets users in the rest of the world in on the fun to edit roads and other features that are incorrect or not listed? Maybe you’ll be able to put in information when you know a road is under construction for a set period of time, for example. That data is out there for large projects, but it would be very useful on a day to day basis for small jobs when I’m trying to get somewhere on time.

Below find an impressive before and after picture of Lahore, Pakistan, after Google Map Maker did its thing.

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We certainly can't knock the 4GB Atree J100 when it comes to its well stocked arsenal of goodies: it has a three-inch touchscreen, an e-dictionary, DMB digital TV tuner, video playback, and microSD expansion -- and it plays music too. Audio formats are also plentiful, with MP3, WMA and OGG for the commoners, and FLAC and APE for the lossless fanatics. Too bad it's held back by the chunky casing, which looks big enough to have fit a five-inch screen if the designers were so inclined. With slicker-looking competition from the likes of Cowon and Samsung, the otherwise entirely useful J100 might struggle to stand out, but if you're willing to look beyond its superficial shortcomings, it's available now for 198,000 KRW ($158).

[Via PMP Today]

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

Atree J100 gets lost in the forest of Korean PMPs originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 Aug 2009 21:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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