Last week, TechCrunch wrote about the recent acquisition of GraffitiGeo by Loopt.  We're excited about the possibilities this new arrangement can offer.  We've had an interest in local discovery, particularly with restaurants and activities.  With Loopt, we can help do this on a larger scale.

We don't currently plan on shutting GraffitiGeo down.  Your accounts will remain active, and we still encourage you to create mobs and invite your friends.

We will work with Loopt on bringing some of the fun aspects of Graffiti into their core applications, which will probably happen gradually over time.  Keep checking out Loopt's products and watch for changes in the updates.

Approved in 2 days--this has to be a world record.  You should be able to update to GraffitiGeo 2.0 from the App Store as of today.  Cheers!

We submitted Graffiti 2.0 today.  Hopefully this one won't take so long to get approved ;)

Here's a quick sneak peak of the upcoming version with the CEO feature.  Those who check in most at a venue will be promoted to the venue's CEO.  CEOs of course can be replaced by someone who is more committed to the job (or restaurant).  We'll be offering specials soon through restaurants who choose to participate.  For example, if you check-in 3x during the day, you could get a free drink.  Or maybe the restaurant chooses to give free drinks to the current CEO on certain days.

More to come soon!

And also, a sneak peak at the business owner's dashboard for creating quests and seeing who is checking in and performing various activities at their restaurant.

New features in v1.2:

• Search
• Improved maps
• Facebook Connect
• Ability to see menus (in certain restaurants) and vote on specific food/drink items individually
• Mobs moved to "profile" screen
• Ability to claim territories under the mobs screen

Woot @buckie!

We've grown to over 15,000 iPhone users in the past few weeks.  Unfortunately, with the increase in users, we've also noticed an increase in spam or comments that can seem irrelevant to someone looking for recommendations.

We need a police force to help us take down bad graffiti and arrest (or warn) the bad graffiti artists. Being part of the force has its perks:

- You get a police badge and unlocked features in the app to allow you to disable particular comments

- You get to help us grow the Graffiti community in a positive way

- You help ensure that others using the app can quickly find high-quality recommendations

Think you can help? We only ask a few things for interested candidates:

- You need to have at least 250 street cred (in other words, you've been using the app for a while, your comments are not being downvoted, you have established a mob of your own, etc)

- Send the following to police@graffitigeo.com: your (1) full name, (2) e-mail address, (3) city/state, (4) Graffiti username, (5) iPhone UDID, (6) why you feel you'd make a great addition to the police force.

Cool fact: Our first GraffitiGeo Police Force member is a real-life police officer ;)  So watch out!

Direct link to Forbes article here.

"Web Squared" is an abstraction of a much bigger concept. Buzzwords aside, we think Tim O'Reilly made great points on how smart devices are becoming.

Mobile technology is in a huge shift right now. Our ultimate vision is something that the average, non-Silicon Valley tech gadget wizard can use (even though early adopters will always get to see the work in progress). Something intuitive, simple, and helpful.

People often ask us if this "augmented reality" thing is overhyped.  We think it's a huge step in the right direction. The right solution may not be what we're seeing in its current form, but we hope to be one of the first to figure it out. We were at Dogpatch Labs last week, and someone joked that we might want to start by renaming it something other than "augmented reality."

Are you wondering where people are at in your city right now? This might give you a clue as to which places people really like simply by virtue of being there.

We're very excited to be working with Jon Steinberg (@jonsteinberg) and Bill Piel from SocialGreat.com by providing them with updates of what our users are doing. Here's how this works:

Let's say you write a comment or vote a restaurant up with the GraffitiGeo iPhone app. This counts as a "check in" at SocialGreat.com, and activity will appear on their web site.  This data is aggregated to create a "pulse" for various cities.  Cool huh?

Note: Our users' data remains anonymous in the process, the only thing we display is activity in an area. Your personal information is never shared because that would be creepy ;)

We got our fourth rejection notice from Apple today.  We think Apple could drastically improve the acceptance process by doing a few things.  Here was the last e-mail we received:

We can only think of one possible thing this applies to: the inability to create a mob until you've accumulated 100 street cred.  You can actually join any mob without getting any street cred, but there's more than enough functionality available right off the bat.  You can comment, vote, create walls, just about anything you could do with Yelp without shaking the phone.

But that's just how we've setup the gameplay aspect, and our users seem to enjoy it so far (we've received upwards of 1,300 downloads today as of writing this).  You don't get the best weapon in the game when you start out do you?  Just like you don't earn every badge without achieving certain goals.  Similarly, mobs are a feature we've set aside for users who have been using the application for a while.

We received a similar message from them in the last update:

We thought this was because we sent a "debug" build of the application, instead of a "release" build.  We did not include the words "beta" or "demo" anywhere in the app (unless it's right in front of us and we're just missing it).  In that case, a screenshot would be really helpful.

The feedback loop with Apple could be improved quite a bit from what it is now.  Instead of sending one problem per e-mail, batch them all together in a list.  Here's an even earlier rejection notice from Apple with a completely separate problem:

It would have been nice to know about the problem with the "beta" or "demo" at the time (maybe Apple has since changed their rules?).  I'm having trouble tracking down an even older e-mail where Apple had requested us to make another small UI change.  All of these things can be handled once, together, in a single e-mail.  It would speed things up both for Apple, for us, and our users.

Interesting memo.  While some of us got to see a few of the start-ups present, and we would have enjoyed presenting at TC50, we sort of agree with Sarah Lacy on this one.  But in the defense of fledgling start-ups all over the world, we have to ask: was Google, Facebook, Microsoft, PayPal, YouTube, Dell, or Twitter revolutionary when they started?  We're not too sure.

If Google were revolutionary to start off with, perhaps Yahoo! would have picked it up.  Facebook was just another social network, where the killer feature seemed to be finding people in your classes.  Far from revolutionary at the time, though definitely a fun application for college students.  Microsoft started to write BASIC interpreters for a box with lights on it.  PayPal started as a cryptography library for PDAs.  YouTube was a dating site.  Dell sold computers directly to customers.  Twitter was just an online SMS service (depending on who you ask, it was "oh God, they stole the Facebook Status Update and created a company around it").

These are just a few examples, and they could probably be met by others who had really good beginnings and people knew it from the start.  We knew the iPhone would be huge when it came out; it was something we all wanted to have, and it has since changed the mobile market for the better.

While it may seem that start-ups are not very exciting at the beginning, we think they should be given time to grow and change.  We have lots of ideas, but doing a start up is hard work and takes time to become successful.  It's common that start-ups don't quite have their business model set in the first couple of months, and that's alright.  We've seen some people comment that even the most revolutionary ideas (space travel, planet colonization, etc) are not the most profitable, which is unfortunate.  The market can seem to reward sub-par business ideas at times, but being able to predict which ones will be big is going to be difficult this early.

We hear you loud and clear.  Some start-ups can seem boring early on.  But give them time, they'll get there!