The Shopkick iPhone app, which will be debuting next week, looks well positioned to usher in the next generation of geolocation devices. Shopkick offers promotions to shoppers as they move from store to store, and event within stores. As a geolocation device it is extremely well positioned to influence consumer behavior. It tells retailers when you are actually inside a store. The app will offer “kickbucks” coupons redeemable for goods in return for playing along. All of this has privacy rights advocates concerned since it means a further surrender of personal data to retailers and others.

Shopkick App Pushes Bargains, Aisle by Aisle – NYTimes.com.

Former Newsweek President Mark Edmiston and a small group of former print writers and editors are launching Nomad Editions, a publication that will be published specifically for mobile devices. The launch, slated for the fall, will be focused on a number of niches. None are named specifically but surfing and movies are offered as two examples. In a not too subtle swipe at Demand Media‘s low pay scale, Edmiston said that the time is ripe for an online publication that will compensate its writers fairly. He said that writers could make up to $50K-$60K if their nice editions attract 50,000 subscribers. First impression: Sounds like a lot of readers for a startup and a niche publication. Also sounds like a lot of articles, especially since each one will presumably require much more work than what required to together a Demand Media piece.

A Magazine Meant for Mobile – NYTimes.com.

Here’s an interesting coincidence – on Tuesday, TechCrunch told us all that consumers have shaken their iPhones in order to randomly find a restaurant using the hugely popular iPhone app, Urbanspoon, half a billion times. And also on Tuesday, Yahoo! announced two new iPhone apps at the CTIA conference, one of which makes use of the shake technique and the other of which helps you find a restaurant while you’re out and about.

Shaking your iPhone to have it (or it’s apps, more appropriately) perform certain functions isn’t exactly what I’d call an amazing feature. But it’s one of those things that people just have fun doing. It’s the  “hey, look what my phone can do” effect. To my knowledge, not even Android phones have the shake capability – made possible by the iPhone’s built-in accelorometer – and so it’s just a neat little extra that iPhone users can enjoy, which makes them feel even more like they’ve got some really fantastic device at their fingertips.

Anyway, the point of this post isn’t just to talk about the iPhone’s shake capabilities. It’s actually to introduce you to Yahoo!’s aforementioned latest iPhone apps, one of which just so happens to include a shake function.

So Yahoo! Search is the (obviously extremely creative) official name of the first app Yahoo! announced. As you might have guessed from that esoteric name, the app aims to help make smart phone web searching easier and more robust. It accomplishes that through a few different features.

One being voice search. So instead of typing in a search term or phrase, users can push the little microphone button at the top right corner of the app’s main screen and speak the term or phrase they want to search for into their iPhone, and the app will then search the web for related results.

Another interesting feature is the localization capability. And what I mean by that is – for any applicable search, not only will Yahoo! Search display a list of results, but it will also show a map of your location and pinpoint relevant businesses and landmarks around you on that map that relate to your search. So let’s say I’m looking for a good slice of Manhattans finest pizza. I search “pizza” in Yahoo! Search and along with the list of results, it also gives me a map with little pins and labels for each pizza place that’s remotely close to where I’m standing.

Also, Yahoo!’s new app also makes suggestions both while you are typing and once you’ve executed a search. So if I’m searching for pizza, not only might Yahoo! Search suggest search terms like “pizza delivery” or “domino’s pizza,” but those terms will also show up near the bottom of my search results once the search is executed, just in case I really did want to search for “pizza delivery” and pulled the trigger too quickly. I can then just click on the little magnifying glass next to that other term and Yahoo! Search will give me the results for that term in addition to those of the term for which I had originally searched.

And last but not least – at the risk of making this feature sound rather anti-climactic – Yahoo! Search lets you clear your search by shaking your iPhone. No, it’s not a ridiculously mind-boggling function. It may not even be that interesting of an idea. But we know how much people like to shake their iPhones, so I’m sure it’s bound to get plenty of use.

The second app Yahoo! announced, which I think is even cooler, is aptly titled, “Sketch-A-Search.” It’s not as feature-rich (if you want to use that term) as Yahoo! Search, but it does give you a really cool way to search for local restaurants. The basic idea is this – when you open the app, the first screen you’ll see has a map of your location that covers about half the screen, along with a little button in the center that instructs you to tap it or draw a line to search…

What you’re really doing by tapping the button and/or drawing a line is searching for all of the businesses located along that line you’ve drawn (or within it if you’ve drawn a circle). You can then review the results as is, or you can filter them further by the type of cuisine, ambiance (for example, “elegant,” or “fun,” or “quiet), and rating (either three, four or five stars) of the type of restaurant for which you’re looking. That’s it. Nothing extremely complex, but definitely something useful that employs progressive mobile technology in order to accomplish it’s less than complex task.

So it seems like Yahoo! is making good on it’s recent initiative to really offer consumers products with current feature sets and technology. It may have lost much of it’s historic foothold in the search and email markets, but at least that hasn’t discouraged it from continuing to provide useful services (like these apps) to consumers.

If you have an iPhone, I would certainly recommend downloading both Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Sketch-A-Search, and tell us what you think!

First of all, I still can’t process that it hasn’t even been three years since Apple unleashed the first iPhone on the world. Since then, over 50 million of them have been eagerly snatched up by us ravenous mobile-loving consumers. It has arguably transformed the mobile medium. Blackberries and Treos undeniably came before it, but the innovation iPhone offered when it first came out was above and beyond anything we had seen on a mass market mobile phone. Apps! For free! Real internet browsing! It was almost like a liberation from what now seem like phones from the stone age, the most innovative aspect of which was maybe a camera that shot video and still photography.

So now here we are in 2010. The iPhone is still great, but recently its greatness has faced its biggest challenge yet – Androids. Android phones offer many of the same things the iPhone does, and even some things the iPhone doesn’t.  While obviously Apple’s main focus has been the iPad of late, that doesn’t mean they haven’t noticed the need to address the iPhone’s shortcomings.

You’ve gotta admire Apple’s PR strategy. Knowing that the iPad was their biggest news, they announced it two months early, let consumers ruminate and bloggers speculate, hype hype hype, and finally, they released it last weekend. Then, while they were still riding the iPad media high, they announced the new iPhone OS and their mobile advertising solution, iAds less than a week later.

I say this because really, OS 4 and iAds are just Apple keeping up with the Joneses, or more appropriately, the Androids and Googles. Sure, they give Apple and the iPhone a competitive bump that they will probably need by the time OS 4 drops this summer. But OS 4′s biggest new feature – multi-tasking – is something those with Android phones already have. And Google‘s Ad Mob acquisition, which just about coincided with their first foray into mobile, means they’ve got a head start on Apple in the mobile ad department (doesn’t mean they do ads better, though).

Still, multi-tasking isn’t the only thing that’s new in OS 4. Another exciting feature is the addition of folders. So whereas previously, iPhone users only had spots for 180 apps, by replacing those spots with folders, each of which can hold up to 12 apps (I believe), iPhone users can now have up to 2,160 apps at their disposal.

Plus, don’t underestimate the value of home screen wallpaper. It may not be the techiest innovation, but I’d be willing to bet that most iPhone users aren’t exactly the techiest people. And let’s not forget, iPhone’s aesthetics are one of its most notable features.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out the social gaming feature. Gaming really is one of the most popular mobile functions, and the ability to challenge your friends (or just a random stranger) in real time, is pretty exciting.

Beyond that, there are a number of other new features in OS 4, including a unified inbox, the ability to open email attachments right in the mail app, iBooks, better data protection, and task completion – which will allow an app to run until it completes some specific task even if the user closes the app while the task is still being executed. But really, the meat of it is multi-tasking and folders.

Of course, the one major caveat that I’ve yet to relate is that OS 4 will only work on the iPhone 3GS (there will also be an iPad version come fall). So unfortunately, that means iPhone 3G and iPod touch owners won’t get to experience the wonders of multi-tasking and folders.

As for iAds, Apple claims that it was aiming to make mobile ads more effective, more interactive and more engaging. The way they felt they could do this was to integrate iAds into OS 4 itself (developers embed the ads into their apps), and unlike in the past, if a user clicks on an add while running a particular app, they won’t have to leave that app to get the full ad content. Not to mention, iAds are more interactive and include full screen video (rather than just flat banner or text ads) in some instances.

Anyway, even if OS 4 and iAds aren’t the most life-changing things Apple has ever done, they will definitely improve the iPhone experience significantly. Now, for a more direct (and detailed, since I don’t want to bombard you with a 1,000 word post) explanation of all of this, check out the video of Steve Job’s presentation from yesterday.

All the way back in December (which in this digital age seems like it was years ago), we let you know about a startup called Square, which was founded by Twitter co-creator Jack Dorsey. Square is a mobile payment system that – with a little dongle add-on for your iPhone – allowed you to accept credit and/or debit card payments from anyone, anywhere. It was the first I’d heard of anything like it, but as with everything else in the digital world, it’s hard to be the only one doing something for more than several days. And indeed, as of earlier this week, Square’s got some company in the form of a licensing agreement between PayPal and Bump technologies.

Both PayPal and Bump’s apps have been part of the iPhone app store for quite a while now. PayPal’s app is pretty much an extension of what it offers on the web – the ability to transfer money to others, or any other of the various transactions you can make through PayPal’s website. But Bump’s app features significantly sexier technology. With Bump, any two iPhone users who both have the app can physically bump phones to transfer their contact info from their phone to the other user’s phone.

So the agreement between PayPal and Bump means quite an upgrade in functionality for the latest version of the PayPal app.

First and foremost it means users can transfer money to any one else who also has the PayPal app with just a bump of their phones. The way it works is, you select the “Bump to Send Money” option, as seen in the screen shot below and you and the recipient bump iPhones to ensure you’re “connected”…

You’ll know you are connected because you will see a screen that looks like this…

From there, as you can see, you can either choose to send or request money, and the person on the other side can either pay or receive your payment through PayPal, right there on the spot.

It’s not quite the same thing as Square, but it’s awfully close, and fortunately, it doesn’t require you to buy any iPhone add-on.

So next time you go to dinner and your friend asks you to spot him because he’s conveniently out of cash, you can whip out your iPhone and say “it’s cool, you can just get me back right now with PayPal.” Of course, that assumes your friend has a PayPal account, has linked his bank account or credit card to that PayPal account, that your friend has an iPhone, and that he also has the PayPal app…but you get the idea.

Anyway, beyond the Bump integration, the new and improved PayPal app also has a few other upgrades to offer.

One of the cooler ones, in my opinion, is the “Split Check” function. Going back to the friend who asks you to spot him because he’s fresh out of cash scenario – say you’re out to dinner and you want to split the check but your friend still can’t help you on that front for whatever reason. You can use the “Split Check” function to figure out how much each of you owe, including a tip of 14% or more (I’m sure servers everywhere would thank them for not going any lower than 14), and send your buddy an invoice for his half.

Another new feature is the ability to “Set A Reminder,” which you can use to (surprise surprise) set reminders for yourself to pay bills or maybe even collect money from people you have billed.

And finally, it now gives you the ability to transfer money from your PayPal account to your bank account right from within the PayPal app. Certainly not mind-blowing, but nevertheless potentially handy.

So, go check out the exciting new PayPal app and let us know what you think!