Adorable ZocDoc mascots. (Photo: Screencap)

We've all been there: You dash down to the doc's office on your lunch break, hoping you can squeeze a checkup into your lunch hour. Instead you're handed a stack of forms you're pretty sure you filled out on your last visit, but the receptionist doesn't seem to have them.

Good news! ZocDoc's got your back. TechCrunch reports that starting today, the company is gradually rolling out a new feature called Check-In, which will allow you to fill out that sheaf of forms in advance. 

Unfortunately, unless the company puzzles out some feature that'll keep doctors on track and on time, you'll probably still have a good twenty minutes to kill before the nurses even start taking your blood pressure. Time needs somewhere to sell its print magazines, we suppose.

via Engadget

Google snuck in a bit of a bomb for Foursquare with the latest update to its Google Maps app for Android. Without so much as a blog post or promotional tweet, users started noticing that—Surprise!—version 6.3 would now offer an incentive to check-in to Latitude, GOOG's "all but forgotten" attempt to hit the sweet spot of mobile/local/social. In fact, the incentives will be familiar to any of Foursquare's 15 million users: You can now get points for checking-in.

Betabeat reached out to Foursquare cofounders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai to see if they were maybe experiencing a little deja-vu. After all, Facebook tried a similar lemme-just-muscle-my-way-in-here strategy with the now-defunct Facebook Places, which also let users check-in, back in 2010. Not to mention the fact that Google Latitude was the company's succession plan after GOOG acquired Dodgeball from Mr. Crowley, only to let it atrophy.

Over email, Foursquare PR manager Erin Gleason said Foursquare's plan was to stay heads down with their eyes on their own product.

"There are over 15 million people using foursquare, and they've checked in over 1.5 billion times. Far from concentrating on what others are doing, we're 100% focused on continuing to build an amazing product that changes the way people experience the world around them."

Spoken like someone who's been in this position before. But The Verge elaborates on what to expect from the new Latitude:

But if you check in to a venue on your Android phone right now, a leaderboard should pop up with a fancy animation to show you how many points you earned and how you're doing against people in your circles, just like Foursquare. The updated app has fully-featured leaderboard that'll let you sort high scores by week or all time, but for now it'll only show up when you click the "show more" button after checking in — leading us to believe that Google may have let the feature out of the gates a bit early.

It seems Google hasn't just copied Foursquare's gamification elements, but its monetization strategy as well. Says The Verge:

"Updated Google Support pages for Latitude reveal that there will also be "status levels" (visitor, regular, VIP, and guru) that rate how often you visit a venue. It sounds like Google is going to be collaborating with businesses as well: there will be specific check-in deals and business owners will be able to customize the status level icons and names for customers at their stores."

None of these features are live yet, which hopefully gives Foursquare enough time to come back swinging. After all, based on our leaderboard, Betabeat's norms friends have only just caught on.

Who knows what fun we'll have!

The marketplace for mobile apps that let you log-in your location and broadcast this information to friends is getting pretty crowded. There is our local favorite, foursquare, which pioneered the act of "checking in". And then there are giants like Facebook and Twitter, which let you record your location when you send a status update or tweet.

The folks at IAC have come up with a fairly brilliant end-run around all this. Their new app, Crowded Room, let's people log a "might go", the tantalizing precursor to the check-in. Not only do you not have to be at the actual location, but you "might go" to dozens of spots in one night without ever leaving your couch!

The notion behind the app, reports GigaOm's Ryan Kim, is to help users connect with new people. You can scope out all the other folks who might be headed where you are tonight, and after drilling down into their profile and seeing something you like, you can use the Shortlist feature to let them know you "might" be interested in meeting up at one of those places you "might go" tonight. Oh, the anticipation!

The promo video IAC cooked up for this app is terrifying. Really attractive people shout lists of eccentric interests at you. "Japanese hair straightening. Hot yoga! Book making!" Is this what IAC thinks it's like meeting people IRL? With Crowded Room, one really good looking woman talks to you in soothing tones about finding people like yourself at hip places full of like minded hotties.

In a way this app is a lot like Sonar, which tries to connect users with people they should meet when they check-in to venues. But Crowded Room seems to be more interested in building a profile and then encouraging you to go to certain places and meet certain people, almost like a very laid back dating app. It builds the profile using your Facebook, which is a smart way to seed the app with personal data.

What this app needs to succeed is a core group of really hip users in key cities. Otherwise it will just be another location based app consumers "might" use among a crowded field of much larger competitors. But on the business side, there is a clear path here. I let a venue know I might be interested in swinging by. They cross reference that with my Klout score and boom, I'm getting an offer for 50 percent off bottle service if I decide to pull the trigger on this check-in.

Nihal Mehta

Betabeat is pretty sick of "big data" as a buzzword, but the amount of personal information that consumers are throwing up on the web is staggering. Facebook has had some success advertising against this information, Twitter less so.

LocalResponse was born out of the ashes of Buzzd, a city guide that mashed up Foursquare and Twitter to help users find local hotspots. Founder Nihal Mehta learned a valuable lesson in defeat, and this week raised a $5 million round from new investors Cava Capital, Vodafone Ventures, Advancit Capital and Progress Ventures, along with its existing investors

Buzzd was a consumer facing platform, but failed to attract enough users. LocalResponse, by contrast, take the massive amount of public data being shared on Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, and turns that into ad inventory.

"Our Verizon campaign has been one of the top performers," said Mr. Mehta, who chatted with Betabeat by phone earlier this week. "When we see people tweeting out 'AT&T suck' or 'Singular is killing me' we can respond to that with a tweet from Verizon's account offering them a $100 discount to switch carriers. That's relevant, contextual advertising and the conversion rates have been off the charts."

For now the only insight we have into performance comes from Mr. Mehta himself. But LocalResponse has secured 40 clients and some very big names: Verizon, Coca Cola, McDonalds, Walgreens and more. Several of these companies have run repeated campaigns on the service, a sign that they are seeing a positive return on their investment.

"The click through rates on promoted tweets are still quite low. By comparison our campaign for Walgreens saw a 60% click through rate."

Back in August LocalResponse acquired social TV startup Philo, which added a number of engineers to their team, including their current CTO, Jessica Lowe. The new funding will be used to build our sales and marketing and to deepen the R&D the company is doing on semantic analysis.

The key to keeping their service from being spammy is only sending consumers messages that are highly relevant in terms of time, place and sentiment. LocalResponse is responding to a user's status update, tweet or check in, which gives them a great context to target their add. And because most people have these services set up with push notifications, they don't have to be in the specific app to get the message, they only need to own a smartphone, which often provides a great picture of their location. "SMS is a powerful and ubiquitous service," Mr. Mehta said.

To prove their point, LocalResponse pointed to a campaign Manhattan restaurant Baohaus, which was sending out tweets to promote its business, but seeing little response. When they started running a LocalResponse campaign, they got 40,000 retweets, and 340 people saw their discount offering for every person that sent a tweet.

This will go great with our Sonar

The newest version of Apple's mobile operating system rolled out today, and foursquare is leveraging the new technology to launch Radar, the first passive feature the company has ever released.

"Up till now, you had to open the app to learn what was going on around you. A lot of times you had to check in before you saw what friends were in your area," said Alex Rainert, foursquare's head of product. "Now we can deliver users information that is contextual and relevant without them having to do anything at all."

So for example if a foursquare user is in a new part of their city and walks close to a restaurant on their "To Do" list, the phone can ping them with an alert. During a night on the town, the Radar feature can sense when a group of friends has checked in close to a user and give them a heads up.

"This is the next stage in the evolution of foursquare," said Rainert. "The hardware and software have finally caught up to our vision of making it easy and fun for users to get more out of the world around them."

Along with foursquare's new List feature, this goes a long way towards making the service a powerful tool for travelers who want help exploring a new locale. And for heavy users who don't mind a few push notifications, this turns the app into a powerful, passive sensor for the nightlife around them.

Now if only we could get iOS5 to download...

Foursquare is clearly a global phenomenon. Along with the developers in NYC, coders  in Paris and Tokyo contributed hacks to this weekend's event.

Now that it's passed 1 billion check-ins and hired a full time data scientist, Foursquare decided to share this amazing video of what a week of check in activity looks like across the globe.

A Week of Check-ins on the Path to One Billion from foursquare on Vimeo.

Image of Foursquare's board via Fortune

While some folks might attribute the rumbling feeling that hit New York this afternoon to a 5.9 earthquake in Virginia, Betabeat now knows better. It was the tectonic reverberations of defeat, as Facebook quietly phased out the Places feature of its mobile app which everyone was screaming for months would kill Foursquare.

Checking in to a physical location is an intimate act. You're letting friends and potentially strangers, if you share to social networks, that you're home, at work, at a party or in another country. Facebook, as it did with photos, made it possible to tag other people, indicating when they were at a location with you. Like photo tagging, this spurred a high volume of early activity as superusers essentially forced other users to take part in the act of checking in.

But as part of sweeping redesign today that emphasizes privacy, Facebook is phasing out its Places feature for mobile. It's a tacit admission that Mark Zuckberg's policy of shoot first, ask questions later, of always pushing the boundaries of personal privacy, doesn't apply to all markets. And as with many features introduced by Google and Facebook in the social space, a reminder that the size of your network doesn't always guarantee you can co-opt a market from early movers.

Facebook still has a dog in this fight. In fact, MG Siegler thinks that, having killed Places, they are "doubling down" on location. We disagree. Yes, you can add your location to any status update. But without a dedicated check-in feature, it's doubtful this practice will achieve meaningful scale.

Foursquare is now is a terrific position. They have the best check-in data across the nation and perhaps across the globe. They are growing fast and flush with cash. Backend problems have given way to a torrent of new features. Serious revenue seems to be within reach thanks to the addition of daily deals. There are already more than five billion mobile phone subscribers worldwide, and that number will grow, along with the percentage who own web enabled smartphones. The king of the check in is poised to sit atop a very big business.

Check in and multiply

Monday it was lists. Tuesday it was photos. Wednesday it went global. Thursday it was events. Friday it was deep data.

As Foursquare's Dennis Crowley said back in April, the focus for 2010 and the beginning of 2011 was on scaling the company's backend and staff so that it could handle its rapidly growing user base. " A big part of the last year was just spent keeping things up and running. You remember Twitter went through all those problems, we’re not out of the weeds yet, but we went through all those problems this summer (2010)."

With the basics squared away, a new office on the West Coast and $50 million in the bank, Foursquare is suddenly announcing new features, updates, partnerships and events at a breakneck pace. Just when Betabeat was starting to complain they weren't doing enough to monetize, boom, they whipped out a whole new spate of daily deal offerings. Not only is the new lists feature drop dead simple and incredibly useful (check out our guide to Silicon Alley), but it seems to have spurred a lot more activity social activity on Foursquare.

The new feature today is aimed at merchants, the small business Foursquare hopes will turn to their specials instead of Groupon or LivingSocial.

Start-ups working in the MoLoSo (mobile-local-social) space, many of whom rely on the Foursquare API, are starting to get the same jitters Twitter developers felt back in 2010.

We can't all be da mayor.

Ahhh lurkers, where would the internet be without them. While Foursquare has growing steadily, hitting the 10 million user mark today, co-founder Dennis Crowley say that to truly hit scale, Foursquare needs to find a way to offer value to users who don't check in.

Speaking at the 92nd street Y for the #140 conference this week, Crowley pointed out that Twitter, five percent of users account for 75 percent of the activity. In fact, according to research from Sysmos, 21 percent have never written a tweet and 85 percent update less than once per day.

A lot of those users, however, are on Twitter to follow their favorite celebrities or friends. Some are keeping track of a particular hashtag to keep up with news events like the #arabspring or  #weinergate.

On Foursquare, it would be a little strange (you stalker) to follow people without participating.The service is less of a platform for public figures and more of a social network for friends to keep tabs on one another.

But with the introduction of the explore feature, Foursquare is positioning itself as a city guide as well. So it would make sense for a user to join, follow a few friends who are active users that share similar tastes, and use the recommendations generated from that activity. "As with any social service, you have a core of active people doing things like sharing or checking in, and others who are more commenters or consumers," says co-founder Naveen Selvadurai. "Having all types of people in our community makes for a better experience for everyone."

Foursquare might also consider partnering with taste makers to who could be followed by users particularly interested in good coffee, bookstores or public parks. This would be something akin to the list model created by Dinevore. Users might also be able to follow brands which could offer specials, adding economic value to these infrequent check in types.

"A lot of people will look through foursquare Tips when they arrive at a place; it's a good source of suggestions and insider info, from friends, celebrities, and the foursquare community," says Selvadurai.

As Foursquare looks to close a big round of funding this summer, focusing on a way to attract and engage casual users seems like a smart priority. "We look at how people use foursquare, and try and increase the value they get out of it. That's why we created comments (tons of people were texting friends they saw checking in), and Tips (people want to share their expertise). A big part of the foursquare experience has value even if you're not checking in, because there's a ton of knowledge that is shared within the community," says Selvadurai. "In the future, we're going to find more ways to share more of that, whether it's more personalized recommendations or better social sharing tools. We're just at the start of what we hope to be able to do."

Untappd lets users check in to what they're drinking, earn badges, see what previous stool sitters have swilled and where they can find rare craft beers nearby. The app just crossed the one million check-in mark and decided to celebrate by acquiring fellow beer check-in service Redpint.

"We're a self-funded project for now," explained co-founder Greg Avola, who is based in New York and works full time at Morgan Stanley. "Maybe it's doing things backwards, but we thought the purchase of Redpint would make us look more professional to investors."

The app was born in the summer of 2010, when Tim Mather and Mr. Avola noticed more and more of their friends using location based apps to check in at bars and restaurants. The pair of craft brew enthusiasts had worked together on some freelance programming projects, and decided to integrate their favorite pastime with this burgeoning mobile experience.

The young company offers its service as a mobile website, so there are no plans to monetize through app stores or in app purchases. Instead, Mr. Avola says they will focus on partnerships with breweries who want to find novel ways of engaging with their customers.

"Right now the brewery industry is kind of anti-social media. But we've had success working with Dogfish Head and hopefully, as our service grows, that attitude will change."