Intuit’s Love a Local Business site solicits user votes to help them award three $5,000 grants to local businesses each month (April, May, and June). To make finding the businesses you want to vote for easier, they’ve integrated your Foursquare checkin history into the search results.

Click the button to sign in with your Foursquare account and you’ll see a list of businesses you’ve recently checked in to. Choose the business you want to vote for and you’ll be prompted to enter a short message about why you voted for them. Each vote is like a raffle ticket, so the more people who vote for a business, the better its chances of winning a $5,000 grant.

At the end of the competition, the businesses who’ve previously won will be judged to determine the winner of the $25,000 grand prize.

It’s simple yet innovative uses like this that show the benefits of offering a full featured API like Foursquare’s.

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3. Foursquare set to make “Save to foursquare” button easier to implement