Foursquare is celebrating! With just over a year of being active, and somewhere close to 750,000+ users 4SQ has flipped the game when it comes to location based social networks. With deals in place with Bravo, HBO and Starbucks it can only stand to grow.

4SQDay which was started on a whim by a Tampa Bay Optometrist, yes and eye doctor who dabbles in social media grew in strength seemingly overnight via Facebook and Twitter. No doubt that when the Foursquare guys heard about all this they were stoked to say the least. With 4sqday.com you can check out whats happening today in over 50 different cities, things like swarm meetups where 50 or more people checkin to a single venue to get the illusive swarm badge, to seeing what venues are promoting deals.

All of this bodes well for the location based startup, and while gowalla and brightkite are also great services, i’m finding there is a bit more heart with foursquare users, myself included. want to watch a neat little video about 4SQ? See below.

Strategy Magazine puts Koodo’s El-Tabador in the spotlight:

Launched last month, the effort developed by Toronto-based Taxi 2 with media handled by Toronto-based Media Experts, features a new Koodo character, the masked mobile revolutionary El Tabador. The animated Lucha Libre fighter promotes the telco’s $0 Tab offering – a phone without a fixed-term contract – through cinema and TV spots, online content and a game, wild postings, TSAs and OOH ads with the tagline “Tab in for phone freedom.”

Full Article

Microsoft launches new Windows Phone – 7 Series. This new OS joins the iPhone, blackberry, Android, and Palm OS. Here’s the engadget review.

Way back some time a co-worker of mine left for NYC to head back to school. Upon his return he spoke of a service called dodgeball that a friend of his had been working on. a SMS based service that would let you check into different places and let your friends know where you were once checked in. I though this service sounded rad and was quite disapppointed that it was only available in select US cities. A short time later some company named Google swept up Dodgeball and then did nothing with it. Some time around SXSW last year the Dodgeballl people were free to do their own thing, Google had shut the doors on Dodgeball. Foursquare came out of the closing of DB and with the gaining momentum of GPS enabled mobile devices Foursquare was a hit at SXSW. A native iPhone app and old school sms were used to get the service going again. My hopes were high that it would come to the north, I kept begging my friend Mark to find out when it was going on.
(more…)

Europe is on the eve of its first Femtocell deployment. On July 1st, Vodafone began selling home networking routers that replace home Wifi and extend the coverage of Vodafone’s cell network at the same time. Right now the router costs are too high to justify for anyone but the most dedicated technofile, but the trend has started.

What this means for the world is that cell network coverage will soon be extended incrementally by home users in an organic fashion. As a consumer, you will buy your very own base station that extends your carrier’s network while giving you wireless home networking similar to Wifi. The overall advantage is, that in this future age you will have 3G or 4G networking on your phone, laptop etc that continues to be 3G or 4G when you’re at home, but routes the calls and data ubiquitously over your home internet connection.

Eventually this will turn the phone, Wifi, wireless data, and home internet data markets into one thing that services all of those functions. Of course this will also reduce the overall costs of devices: your cell phone will no longer have to have a wifi chip, a edge/3G chip and a tri band baseband in it. Instead, one protocol will route all the different types of voice and data over the femtocell when you are at home, and the general cell network when you are out.

Cell phone/data providers will be able to leverage their client base to expand their network making big companies bigger. Consumer issues like “I don’t use mobile provider X because their coverage in my house is shaky” will be a thing of the past.

It’s yet unclear how this will play out in Canada. This is once again an case of technology moving faster than the industries that are powering it let alone the governing bodies trying to control it.