When it comes to local commerce, the ultimate prize everyone is going after right now is how to close the redemption loop. The redemption loop starts when a consumer sees an ad or an offer for a local merchant, and is completed when the consumer makes a purchase and that purchase can be tracked back to the offer. If you know who is actually redeeming offers and how much they are spending, you can be much smarter about tweaking and targeting those offers.

Groupon, LivingSocial, and other daily deal sites have created enormous value by pushing the redemption loop the furthest. When someone buys a daily deal, for instance, that translates into cash for the merchant. But for the vast majority of their deals Groupon and LivingSocial do not track whether or not they are ever redeemed, much less the amount each consumer actually spends at the store or restaurant once they show up.

In order to complete the circle and track offers all the way through redemptions, it is necessary to either tap into the payment system or create an alternative way to track redemptions. Different companies are tackling this problem in different ways, but they almost all rely on a shift from emailed coupons to offers delivered through mobile apps.

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American Express is going all in on the daily deals business, striking a deal with Facebook that is similar to the one it already has with Foursquare. Through a new Facebook app called “Link, Like, Love,” AmEx cardholders can link their cards to their Facebook accounts (just like they can already link their cards to their Foursquare accounts. Once they do so they will get a dashboard of deals from brands such as Whole Foods, Dunkin’ Donuts, Virgin America, and Sports Authority.

Unlike Groupon or LivingSocial, these AmEx deals don’t require anyone to pre-purchase anything or present any coupons to merchants. One of the biggest challenges for the daily deals industry is how to measure how many offers are actually redeemed at thousands of different participating businesses. But AmEx has an advantage here in that it is already a payment network that is set up and accepted in businesses large and small around the world. All people have to do is buy the deal item with their AmEx card and they will be credited the deal amount. The Facebook twist is that the deals you see are influenced by what you and your friends “like” on the Web using the Facebook like button.

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Foursquare is expanding its relationship with American Express to provide local deals to people who sync their cards to their Foursquare accounts. AmEx did a trial at SXSW, and that went well enough that it is rolling out the deals more broadly.

The discounts, such as $20 off a $50 purchase at Sports Authority, are automatically applied to your AmEx account when you check in via Foursquare to a participating merchant before a purchase. Everyone in local commerce is trying to figure out how to close the loop between deals and payments. Once companies can tie mobile ads or deals to payments, they will be able to measure directly the sales generated by these mobile promotions. And one day that could potentially be a huge new business. But for now, it’s making absolutely zilch for Foursquare, which remains a revenue-free zone.

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Former Twitter recruiter Morgan Missen is joining Foursquare today as Head of Talent for Foursquare West.

Missen (née Missentzis) was the first Technical Recruiter at Twitter responsible for all backend engineering hires. Prior to that position she was Technical Recruiter at Google for three years. Missen’s Foursquare hire is important because it solidifies the check-in service’s ongoing San Francisco expansion; Foursquare is also closing in on an office in SOMA, and is planning on leasing space for between 30-50 additional engineers.

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The Gillmor Gang — Dennis Crowley, JP Rangaswami, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — waxed prophetically in the social garden. Crowley has been the focus of some media attention about a slowdown in checkins, but he seemed more excited about his market position than worried. With good reason, as the Gang explained in a dissection of hyperlocal and personal data harvesting.

Rangaswami sees the various outputs of these social tools as providing nuanced clues into the nature of what will get viral at Scoble scale, while Crowley demurred about the view of Foursquare as a media property only to describe just such a nextgen service. As we debated what media is becoming, the consensus emerged of a social landscape where each and varied signals provide a valuable composite sense of where we are and are going next.

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Today brings two different news items from two huge companies both related to the same thing: check-ins. This morning, All Facebook found an area of Facebook’s site pointing to the ability to check-in to events. And just now, Google has pushed an update to their Latitude iPhone app to allow users to check-in for the first time also. Is a new check-in war brewing?

Well, yes and no.

Neither of these updates today by themselves are huge — just yet. Facebook has had the ability to check-in via their Places service for several months now (though the feature is still rolling out worldwide). Google, meanwhile, added check-ins to Latitude on Android this past February (and noted that it would be coming for the iPhone too). But both of the subtle updates today point to big things.

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Over the past few days, Foursquare has made headlines for a partnership with American Express, and for a completely revamped version of their mobile experience on the iPhone and Android phones. And they’re not done yet.

The latest bit of what co-found Dennis Crowley calls Foursquare’s “shock and awe” campaign (leading up to SXSW later this week), may be the most important. It certainly will have the deepest ramifications for their eventual business model: a totally revamped Foursquare Merchant Platform — one that is completely automated.

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We’re now just days away from SXSW. And a service that launched there two years ago and made a name for itself last year, is aiming to make another splash this year: Foursquare.

The service will tonight launch an updated version of their app, 3.0, which will contain a number of feature upgrades. Chief among them: a new “Explore” section, new types of deals, and a revamped leaderboard for points earned in the app. Yes, Foursquare is putting some fun back into the game element of the service.

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Foursquare has just announced some staggering growth stats via an infographic today. The company said that it has now hit 6 million registered users, grew 3400 percent in terms of check-ins and saw a total of 381,576,305 check-ins in 2010.

And it only took the location based social network a month and a half to add another million users. Foursquare’s largest event by check-ins was the Rally To Restore Sanity with 30,525 check-ins. The infographic also includes stats on post popular venues by category, and most popular brands on the network (MTV and Bravo are at the top of the list).

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Now that it’s 2011 and we’re back in the swing of things, a lot of startups are already undoubtedly laying out their launch plans for the year. And while anytime seems like a good time around these parts, a lot of startups pencil in the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas as a good potential launching point. Why? Because it’s early in the year (early March), with a ton of people and hype, and a few of the most successful launches in recent years took place there.

You can always tell the most successful launches because the press the following year will say, “who is going to be this year’s ______ of SXSW?” The two most obvious companies that fit that bill are Twitter and Foursquare. (Well technically Twitter didn’t launch at SXSW, but that was definitely their coming out party in 2007.) And coincidentally, two founders of those two companies have taken to Quora today to both answer the question: What is the process involved in launching a startup at SXSW?

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JAKARTA– You’ve probably heard about the swell of Internet users coming from Indonesia. It’s already the second largest market for Facebook, after the United States. It’s “only” the fifth largest market for Twitter, but it’s number one in terms of the ratio of people online to Twitter adoption. And Google trends ranks Indonesia as the top Foursquare country– two slots above the United States.

Six months ago all of this was newsy and surprising. Since then, Indonesia’s love affair with social media has only been growing. But as love affairs go, it’s a staggeringly unrequited one.

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There’s been much hype, crazy valuations, and overall market excitement about businesses that promise to unleash the power of the social graph, location, recommendations and group buying. Facebook’s latest valuation according to SecondMarket is now about $30 billion, Foursquare raised $20 million at a post-money valuation of $115 million while still at a pre-revenue stage, Yelp, short of selling for $550 million to Google, raised over $25 million at an undisclosed but very high valuation, and finally Groupon raised $135 million at a whopping $1.35 billion valuation. So besides their huge success with the investment community, and their users, what do these companies have in common, and what does all this have to do with disrupting Local Commerce?

Editor’s note: The following guest post is by David Marcus, founder and CEO of Zong, a mobile payment provider for Facebook Credits, AT&T and hundreds of leading destination websites and mobile applications

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In terms of brand recognition, it’s hard to top a huge live display billboard in Las Vegas. But Foursquare has managed to do it. As you can see above, they now have a massive, multi-level and multi-angle display practically screaming about the service to all those in Times Square in New York City.

“Check in, find your friends, unlock your city,” the ad reads. In smaller print at the bottom it talks about checking in to American Eagle for some kind of special. Foursquare head of business development Tristan Walker confirms that American Eagle is behind the ad, which he says is the “largest digital billboard in Times Square.”

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This is a guest post by Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) who conducted a survey of 500 Foursquare users to better understand their check in behaviors and motivations. His obsession with Foursquare is unrelated to his day job leading the consumer product team at YouTube, although he did at one point hold the Mayorship of their San Bruno headquarters.

Have you noticed “Off the Grid” [OTG] appearing in your Foursquare feed recently? No, it’s not the latest trendy West Hollywood club or SF food cart. OTG is Foursquare’s “privacy” feature where you check in to a location but don’t disclose it to your friends (while gaining any applicable points, badges, etc). What purpose does it serve to notify your friends that you’re out on the town but to hide the location? And what does it tell us about the future of location-based services & privacy? This was the question I set out to answer by surveying nearly 500 Foursquare users.

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If you’ve used Foursquare, you’ve likely seen the little badge that appears in the corner of your mobile phone’s screen when a deal is nearby. It’s a good way to alert someone to a location-based offer, and it seems to be working well for the company. A new startup, TappLocal wants to take that idea and expand upon it to create a new location-based ad network.

The way this works is that TappLocal uses their backend to create a geofence around certain partner venues. When a user crosses that boundary and happens to be using one of the partner apps, a deal indicator will pop-up. A quick click on this area will open a larger area explaining exactly what the deal is. Simply click one more time to verify you wish to use the deal, show it to the store that it’s valid at, and you’re good to go.

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Up until a few months ago, I was using Facebook the same way I was using Twitter. That is, I was allowing anyone to follow me. But it was different. With Twitter, anyone can follow me without my approval. On Facebook, everyone needs my approval. Though perhaps ill-advised, I was simply blindly approving anyone. Then I stopped.

There was no single reason why I switched my Facebook habits, but I decided that I was going to start using the service the way Facebook made it seem it should be used: befriending only actual friends. I was a bit more lenient — I friended anyone I’ve actually met in person. Everyone else? Gone. I purged several hundred people, cutting my “friends” in half in one day. But now I’m realizing that’s not good enough.

With the launch of Facebook Places, there’s a lot of talk about it being creepy or a potential security nightmare. I think all of that is and will continue to be largely overblown. That said, I’m also sure there will be legitimate causes for concern with the feature — but mainly because people aren’t using Facebook the “right” way. Nor do I think Facebook actually wants them to.

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At an event on Wednesday, Facebook unveiled Places, their new location element that allows users to check-in to venues. Obviously, this mimics the core feature of smaller startups like Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, and dozens of others. The move of the big boys into this space was inevitable, but it is somewhat surprising that it has taken this long. The next question may be: will Twitter follow suit?

It was almost exactly one year ago to the day that Twitter first announced their intentions to enter the location space. At the time, this simply meant that the API would start supporting longitude and latitude coordinates attached to tweets which third-party developers could expose if they chose to. Now, obviously, twitter.com has this element baked in, as does Twitter for iPhone (the app which Twitter purchased that has long had the geotagging feature). But this is still just a layer of meta data, there is no explicit way to “check-in” as it were.

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Foursquare may have a tenuous partnership with Facebook Places— but don’t let the Kumbaya presentation fool you, these frenemies are gunning for the ultimate mayorship and Dennis Crowley is feeling very confident.

On Friday’s taping of Gillmor Gang with former TechCrunchIT Editor Steve Gillmor, Kevin Marks and John Taschek, Crowley discussed the opportunity for places, outlined his plan for the next iteration of Foursquare and knocked Google for its social awkwardness. While his disgust with Google’s mismanagement of the ill-fated Dodgeball is well documented, in his explanation you don’t need to read between the lines to understand he’s also talking about Facebook and how he plans to beat Goliath.

“It’s difficult to build services that are supposed to scale to you know 30, 50, 100 million users right off the bat, because they got to be kind of tailored down, by definition they have to be a little bit generic to speak to that large of an audience.” Video ahead.

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The countdown is officially on for the big Facebook location backlash. How long will it be? One week? Two weeks? We all know it’s coming, it’s just a matter of when. And that’s too bad because I think Places is actually pretty great — potentially.

The ACLU wasted little time yesterday trying to start such a backlash (their post on the matter came what, a whole 30 seconds after the press conference ended?). Evelyn already did a nice job deconstructing many of their arguments and showing why a few were ridiculous. All I can add is to say that thank god the ACLU doesn’t design consumer apps — it would be like Facebook’s current nightmare of settings multiplied by a billion. We’d have settings for individual minutes in individual days for when individual users could see individual profiles. It would be the the least social social network ever.

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Look at the image above. There are three services listed on the San Francisco Giants’ scoreboard during a baseball game. Twitter. Facebook. Foursquare. The first two are ubiquitous. Each has hundreds of millions of users and a firm place in pop culture. The third has about 2.5 million users. And much of the world has no idea what it is.

But is it on its way to entering that pantheon of great services?

This is a particularly interesting question given that on Wednesday, Facebook is expected to unveil its initial push into the location space. Earlier, BoomTown cited sources stating this would be the case. We’ve since heard from multiple source as well that location will be at least a part of Facebook’s event (which we’ll obviously be at). With location, Facebook has long been seen as the 800-pound gorilla in the room. And now they appear ready to check-in for the first time, as it were.

So Foursquare is dead, right? Don’t count on it.

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It’s hard to imagine anything more vapid than a daytime soap opera. They’re seriously the worst things in the world. But they’re also great for parody as LG is obviously aware. Sure, their The Young and the Connected YouTube series is one big ad, but it’s also pretty damn hilarious.

In the series of short clips, LG has beautiful people talking seriously about the things many of us use everyday. You know, like Facebook, Twitter, and even Foursquare.

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Those of us who have been on Twitter for several years remember the good old days fondly. Things were nice and quiet back then. There was no @aplusk, no @britneyspears. Oprah’s arrival was a couple years out. Instead, it was a service that early-adopter geeks used to follow one another. You know, like Foursquare is today.

As we all know, Foursquare is now growing at a rapid pace. That said, it’s still a relatively small social network and a lot of people have no idea why they’d ever want to use it. Of course, that’s the same thing that was said about Twitter back in the day, and Facebook before that, etc. But a tweet sent by Snoop Dogg today indicates the tide may be starting to shift in a more mainstream direction for the service.

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Earlier today, location-based service Gowalla formally unveiled their new Check-In API. This is big news because it means third-party apps can write to Gowalla’s API for the first time. Looking over the documentation for this API reveals some interesting things. Notably, there are six “commandments” that Gowalla says developers should follow.

Behold, Gowalla’s 6 API Commandments:

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For any of you who haven’t earned a Foursquare mayorship yet, you can now buy a physical Mayor button at the newly launched Foursquare store today. The company is announcing a online storefront where you can buy t-shirts with Foursquare logos, buttons with badges and stickers.

The products are actually pretty cool, and range from a $5 pack of buttons to a $20 Mayor t-shirt. Badges for the buttons include Blue Mayor, I’m on a Boat, Douchebag, Photogenic and Groupie. You can also vote for which badge will be featured in a t-shirt next. According to the announcement, Foursquare also plans reward those who unlock badges with real-life swag.

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In the battle of Foursquare versus Gowalla in the location space, Gowalla is often thought of as “the pretty one.” But Foursquare has been attempting to improve their look and feel recently with a number of changes. The latest comes today with new profile pages.

As you can see, the new user pages have a much cleaner design. Just as with the recently redesigned venue pages, Tips are now more clearly labeled and To-Dos are explained better. It seems clear that Foursquare is trying to move the service beyond the check-in and attempting to provide more utility to users with their other features.

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This part Friday at our Social Currency CrunchUp I was joined on stage by Tristan Walker (director of business development at Foursquare), Kara Nortman (Senior Vice President of Publishing at CityGrid Media), and Shiva Rajaraman (a product manager at Twitter) to talk about check-ins, coupons, and commerce. You can watch the entire conversation in the video above, but I wanted to highlight a few key parts of it.

Overall, an element that kept popping up during the talk was the idea that the check-in is just the first (or base) component of location. All parties seemed to be in agreement that the field was going to expand far beyond that. Obviously, Foursquare is one of the key players there (and popularized the term itself), but even Walker agrees that they are going to have go beyond this first phase. He notes that the key to Foursquare is to “socialize loyalty” no matter how that is done.

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Yelp’s CEO Jeremy Stoppelman deserves credit for trying to play nice with Google, even appearing onstage at the Social Currency CrunchUp with John Hanke, a Google VP of Product Management. As expected the tension was palpable, as Hanke and Stoppelman discussed Google Places and the goliath’s heavy reliance on Yelp’s content.

Beyond the professional veneer, there’s no question that Stoppelman feels burned. The recent developments, he says, were unexpected:

“Well I think we were surprised because we hadn’t participated in Place Pages over the years. Like we were in sort of the precursor to Place Pages back in something like 2006 and then we left because we weren’t really happy in the direction it was going … And then yeah, we found our content was showing up there and it is ranked dead last right now. I don’t think that’s sort of a permanent situation from what we gather from talking to Google, they are sort of headed in a new direction that which hopefully will be more positive.”

Full video ahead, along with Stoppelman’s thoughts on taking on Foursquare and Groupon.

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“Location Check in is so 2010,” Mark Cuban writes today on his blog. His thought is that facial recognition hardware/software installed in public venues is going to replace the need for users to actually check-in to a place.

I absolutely agree. But I think we’re ten years away from that happening. And maybe more.

If you’ve seen the Steven Spielberg movie Minority Report, it has a similar technology to what Cuban envisions. At a few points, main character John Anderton (Tom Cruise) is walking through a public place and a retina scanner picks up his unique eye signature and offers up customized advertisements and specials for him. “John Anderton, you could use a Guinness right about now!” American Express recognizes that Anderton has been a card member since 2037.

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“Foursquare gets all the hype.” It’s something I hear just about every day from just about every other location-based startup. And it’s true, though I would argue that it’s warranted — and investors seem to agree. But it’s also important to keep some perspective. While Foursquare is just shy of 2 million users, other services like MyTown have quickly surpassed that number. Same with Google Latitude, which is at 3 million. And you can put Loopt on that list as well, as today they’ve hit 4 million total users.

Loopt was one of the first location-based services to get a lot of hype — even getting on stage at the Apple event first talking about the App Store way back when. But as we’ve noted numerous times, they started out at a disadvantage because the iPhone didn’t allow third-party apps to run in the background. And that was Loopt’s model, continuous location updates. But with iOS 4, the iPhone does finally allow for that functionality — and specially for background location. And Loopt is benefiting from it.

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As iPhone apps push out their updates to be compatible with the new iOS 4, most are focusing on adding simple fast app switching capabilities. Many are also giving their apps a quick new coat of polish to make them look a bit nicer on the new Retina display found on the iPhone 4. The location-based service Gowalla is focusing heavily on the latter.

Version 2.2 of Gowalla, which just went live in the App Store, is the first version of the app that is iOS 4 and iPhone 4-compatible. In the update notes, Gowalla, which has always been more design-oriented compared to its competitors, remarks on their excitement for the new Retina display:

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