In the Dunkin’ MIB3 Capture game, you play an agent who’s captured an alien in your phone. To keep Spikey happy, you have to feed him virtual DD iced coffee and donuts. The more you feed him, the more content you’ll unlock, including a laser-blaster game and tic tac toe.

Playing with Spikey (he loves tickling, spinning, dancing and more) earns you more iced coffee and donuts — as does checking in at DD on foursquare, which you can do right from within the app.

MIB3 Capture isn’t going to become your favorite game overnight, but it is a fun little app that can kill a few minutes of your time. It’s free for Android and iOS, but only available through June 30.

On top of the app, Dunkin’ Donuts is launching a few new menu items in honor of the movie. You can try the Black Cocoa Creme Iced Coffee, Undercover Black Cocoa Donut or the Chocolate Lunarmax Donut. There’s also a Twitter trivia contest you can enter each Friday in May by following Dunkin’ Donuts and answering the trivia question correctly (with the #BlackFriDDay hashtag, of course). Winners will receive a $33 DD gift card and prizes from the movie.

What do you think of the game? Are you excited for the MIB3 premiere?

Your foursquare check-ins help feed Spikey in Dunkin’ Donuts’ new MIB3 app originally appeared on About Foursquare

Checkie offers a very simple interface. It shows nothing but a list of nearby foursquare venues. All you have to do is tap to check in. You’ll see a confirmation message, along with the number of points you earned… and that’s it.

It’s this spartan interface that makes Checkie so fast and easy to use. There’s no need for all of foursquare’s Explore features, friend listings, Facebook and Twitter sharing options, etc. The regular foursquare app handles all those very well. Checkie is meant for nothing other than checking in quickly. It’s perfect for those mundane check-ins where you don’t have anything to say with a foursquare shout or for those times you’re out with friends and don’t want to leave the conversation just to check in.

Checkie was actually the inspiration behind Simple Check-in, but it left out a key component of the check-in: reporting your location in order to make you eligible for mayorships. Developer Tim Johnsen released an update to Checkie last night that corrects the oversight and Checkie check-ins do now count toward mayorships.

I’ve moved Checkie to the main home screen on my iPhone, right next to Words With Friends (don’t judge), because I think it’s so useful. I’ve grown tired of the multiple clicks (and waits) to make a regular old foursquare check-ins, so this is a much-needed app.

Checkie is free in the iTunes app store. Give it a try and let us know what you think in the comments.

Single-tap check-ins come to iOS with Checkie originally appeared on About Foursquare

Lunchbox is designed solely for browsing restaurants, coffee shops and nightlife as recommended by foursquare. It presents them in a style that mimics the Pinterest design. Large photos reign heavy in the grid layout, with other information from each venue, like tips, number of check-ins and address located below the photo.

Tapping a photo takes you to more information about the place, including a large map and a view of all the public photos that have been posted there on foursquare. Another tap lets you browse all the venue’s tips in a similar style.

Like foursquare’s own Explore feature, you can search for venues in a different area and set your target range by moving and zooming a map. A search function narrows down the results to just the things you’re interested in.

Once you’ve found a place you like, Lunchbox offers the ability to check in and add your own photo via foursquare.

Sadly, the results don’t appear to include foursquare’s personalized recommendations for you; only the generic recommendations are shown. Developer Peter Shih says he hopes to add the personalized results soon.

I review new foursquare apps almost every day, and I don’t recall any as engaging as Lunchbox. I found myself playing with the app, browsing photos and tips and checking out different areas for almost an hour. The focus on visuals makes the app fun to use and a great way to browse foursquare’s data.

Lunchbox is a universal app that works well on both iPhones and iPads. It’s free in the iTunes store. Give it a try and let us know what you think in the comments.

Lunchbox: a Pinterest-style browser for food on foursquare originally appeared on About Foursquare

Explorer, from Blackboard Mobile (the same company that builds the Blackboard tools used by many schools and colleges), uses your iPhone’s camera to display the world around you, with nearby foursquare Explore results layered on top of it. When you point in the direction of a recommended venue, you’ll see it on the screen. Tap it to find a map and more information, including a link to the venue in the foursquare app.

If you’re in the mood for something specific, Explorer has a search function where you can type what you’re looking for, just like foursquare Explore.

It’s a fun app, with a unique hook that could make using foursquare Explore results easier, especially in big cities. Explorer misses the biggest advantage of foursquare Explore, though. There’s no way to connect it to your foursquare account, so the results are generic and not personalized like the ones you’d get from foursquare’s actual app.

To me, that’s the beauty of foursquare Explore. I find the results are incredibly accurate when filtered through mine and my friends’ personal tastes. Generic Explore results are OK, but generally amount to showing the most popular venues in an area, which aren’t necessarily (or even likely) to be the places I’m interested in.

It’s a shame Blackboard left the personalization out of Explorer, but it’s a free app, so it’s worth giving it a try, especially if you like using augmented reality apps. Let us know what you think in the comments.

Explorer brings foursquare Explore to life with augmented reality originally appeared on About Foursquare

4sq Hero is an app to make foursquare cheating easier. Plain and simple.

It shows a list of nearby venues and lets the user filter them to find ones they’ve never checked in to before. Why? Because you get more points that way, of course. It takes just one tap to check in and then you’re done, ready to move on the the next venue you’re not really visiting.

The app is so focused on helping users earn points that it comes with a limit on the number you can earn (300) before you have to pay 99 cents for the full version of the app.

Also included in 4sq Hero is a badge list that can be filtered by the ones you have, ones that are retired and ones you don’t have. It doesn’t appear to include any released within the last few months and does nothing to help you earn the ones it does include.

I simply don’t understand the fascination with gaming foursquare’s point system. The points earn you absolutely nothing in the end. There’s no list of “all-time high scores,” so you’ll never get any sort of recognition beyond your own friend list. And for most people that do see it the only recognition is that you’re a cheater.

Don’t get me wrong, I love foursquare points for the streaks they identify and the things they remind me of. Messages like “12 weeks in a row at the gym” or “Welcome back! You haven’t been in Florida since October 2010″ are the reasons I like points, and I feel they’re the reason most users enjoy them. It’s certainly not from the recognition you get from sitting atop the leaderboard, because there just isn’t any to be had.

New app helps foursquare cheaters originally appeared on About Foursquare

It takes content from Twitter, foursquare and Instagram and cycles through it in a very attractive manner. You can leave your iPhone or iPad sitting in the dock and catch the content as it goes by out of the corner of your eye.

The foursquare check-ins it displays are especially nice. It names the place your friend was last seen, while the background shows a satellite view of the area. For friends who are nearby, the map zooms in to give you a better idea of their location.

Screenfeeder also has support for tracking specific hashtags on Twitter, so you can keep track of the conversation around a TV show while you’re watching. You could even show it on your TV via Airplay (picture-in-picture maybe?).

Screenfeeder is available in the iTunes app store for $1.99. It’s a universal app for both iPhone and iPad, so you only need to purchase once if you have both devices.

Give Screenfeeder a try and let us know what you think in the comments.

/Thanks to Craig Bowman for the tip!

Screenfeeder fills your iPad or iPhone screen with tweets, photos and check-ins originally appeared on About Foursquare

Today they launched an updated iOS app with a big new feature: automatic check-ins when you’ve arrived at your location.

Ever since Forecast launched last July, they’ve offered check-in reminders at the appointed time. I always found those arrived either too early (when I was running late) or too late (after I’d already checked in) to be useful.

The new feature monitors your location in the background in a battery-friendly way. When it detects you’ve arrived at your location, it checks you in (as long as you’ve opted in, of course).

I’ve never been a fan of automatic check-ins, since there’s just too many ways you could be checked in to the wrong place inadvertently. Forecast’s new automatic check-ins, though, are actually useful, since you’ve specifically asked for them ahead of time. There’s virtually no chance of being checked in to the wrong place by accident.

The check-ins are especially useful for times you’re going out and are too busy to actually check in. Since they happen in the background, you don’t even need to take out your phone.

Forecast has a distinct advantage over foursquare in terms of business model. Since they know where you’re planning to go in advance, it’s a perfect time for other businesses to try to reach you and change your mind with the right offer. I hope to see them start to put that advantage to use in the near future. The new check-ins make the product a much more compelling tool, which should help increase their userbase even further.

The update is available in the iTunes app store. An update for Android is expected soon.

What do you think of Forecast’s new automatic check-ins?

Forecast adds battery-friendly automatic check-in option originally appeared on About Foursquare

With Explore and lists, the foursquare app is good for lots of things other than just checking in. But those extra features also come at a cost — check-ins are slower and the app takes more time to navigate (and in the iOS version you’ll no doubt inadvertently turn off Radar in the process). For some of the places you check in on a regular basis you just want to check in quickly and get right back to what you were doing.

That’s the whole point behind a new free app for iPhone and Android, Swiftsquare. You add up to 10 of your favorite venues to a list. Checking in is as quick as opening the app, tapping an item on your list of favorites and touching the check in button. If you want to add a shout you can or you can opt to change your Twitter and Facebook sharing preferences from their defaults. The Android app even lets you check in to your favorites from the notification bar.

To make marking your favorites easier, Swiftsquare has a tab that shows your top venues from the past six months so you can pick the ones where you want to check in quickly. There’s also a helpful tab for checking in to nearby venues. If you’re like me and can’t remember which places you’ve added to your favorites list, you don’t have to leave the app and go to the official foursquare app just to check in.

Features like friends, lists, explore, profiles, tips, etc. are missing completely from the app, so it loads very quickly and checks you in even faster. A simple confirmation pop-up is all that you’ll see when your check-in has been completed.

Swiftsquare does indeed make those everyday check-ins like the coffee shop, work or grocery store faster and easier. For those types of check-ins, you typically don’t need all the other “cruft” foursquare provides, so why wait for them all to load?

Give Swiftsquare a try and let us know what you think in the comments.

Looking for a faster way to check in? Swiftsquare may be the answer originally appeared on About Foursquare

“We believe that your personal history is an asset,” said Rewind.me founder and CEO Craig Danuloff. “But while apps like Foursquare make it easy and fun to keep track of what you’ve done, there hasn’t been a good way to take advantage of your own past. We’re changing that – so you can get what you’ve earned and what you deserve wherever you go.”

Rewind.me’s Foursquare Edition launched today (since it is 4sqDay and all). It pulls in your foursquare history and lets you sort through it in a number of interesting ways. You can see the conventional date view, which lets you scroll back through or jump to any date in your history to see the places you checked in. A category view shows you all the places you’ve visited in a particular category.

It’s the location view, though, that’s the most useful of all. You can filter it by distance to see just the places you’ve visited nearby, so you’ll be able to remember the name of that Italian restaurant you ate at when you were last in this neighborhood two years ago.

Data from your friends’ histories is also shown in the app, as long as they’re using Rewind.me and have opted in specifically to that feature (they’ll only see data you’ve already shared with them on foursquare; Rewind.me just goes back farther). If you’re traveling in a friend’s hometown it’s easy to pull up the app and see the sushi restaurant they visit most often, for instance.

The Foursquare Edition is very useful in itself, but really represents Rewind.me’s first step toward their goal of becoming a real-world version of Klout to help you get the treatment you deserve from businesses. The foursquare histories of their users will help to determine a scoring algorithm that Rewind.me can then pitch to businesses based on a user’s expertise with certain kinds of places. You’ll be able to see how you stack up against your friends or the Rewind.me community as a whole in various areas of expertise.

Their hope is that in the future, you might not have to hunt down your friend’s favorite sushi restaurant. That restaurant would know you’re in town and seek you out — maybe even offering a discount — based on your experience eating at great sushi places and your willingness to share that with your friends.

As a data nerd, I’ve been looking for something like what Rewind.me is offering today for a while. It makes it easy to browse through your foursquare history and glean information from your own past. It’s what they’re planning for the future, though, that has me even more excited. Foursquare calculates my experience for the purposes of creating Explore recommendations, but there’s no way for businesses to take advantage of that and cater to me specifically. Rewind.me’s plan could make that a reality in the not-too-distant future.

Rewind.me is free in the iTunes app store. Give it a try and let us know what you think in the comments.

After the jump: a video from Rewind.me showing the app in action.

Make your foursquare history useful with Rewind.me originally appeared on About Foursquare

Every foursquare check-in earns you points, but there’s really nothing you can do with them. New app CheckinSave takes that concept and lets you turn those points into rewards — assuming you can find a merchant that accepts the deals.

With CheckinSave, you check in to places just as you would with foursquare — in fact, the venues come from foursquare’s database — earning points along the way (their point scale is different from foursquare’s). All your check-ins are automatically shared with Twitter, Facebook and foursquare, letting you earn even more points depending on the size of your friend network. If your friends later check in at the same place, you’ll get even more points.

Users can redeem the points for deals at CheckinSave merchants (it’s free for any company to sign up). Current deals include a $5 restaurant discount for 50 points and half off an order of business cards for 120.

“With about 800 million smartphone users worldwide, we saw that geo-location check-ins are rapidly growing in popularity but we also recognized that current systems lacked sufficient rewards,” said Jordan Brill, co-founder of CheckinSave in a press release. “So we built the CheckinSave platform completely around a financial reward model. Now consumers enjoy an added motivation for sharing their location with their social network – they earn points to save money!”

It’s a solid concept, but the lack of merchant partners is immediately jarring. There are currently eight spots where you can redeem the points — and only four of them are really considered “merchants.” All are located in the Vancouver, BC area. Without more merchants, it’s hard to see people signing up for the service, while it’s hard to see more merchants signing up without more users, presenting a real chicken-and-egg type problem.

The app is available for free in the iTunes app store or Google Play. If you give it a try, let us know what you think in the comments.

Let your check-ins earn you deals with CheckinSave originally appeared on About Foursquare