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If your Foursquare check-ins could be limited to backyard outings and trips to the mailbox, you may be interested in a new mobile application called Miso. With this service, a startup from Bazaar Labs, also the makers of a social network called Flixup! for movie chatter, you can perform Foursquare-like "check-ins" when watching a particular TV show or movie. Homebodies, this app is for you.

Springpad, a rival to Evernote's popular cross-platform note-taking service, has just bumped the competition up a notch with a new release that integrates semantic technology to automatically enhance the notes you save with relevant info. What this means is that if you save a movie, Springpad is smart enough to know it's a movie and it will offer you showtimes. If you save a product, Springpad displays price comparisons and links to shopping sites. Save a recipe and you get menu suggestions. And the list goes on. In other words, Springpad doesn't want to just be a note-taking app, it wants to be a fully realized digital assistant.

Ever wonder how the people in your neighborhood are feeling? How about those that work downtown? Are people really happier on a Friday than a Monday? A new mobile application called Glow will tell you. Designed for the iPhone, this app lets you share your feelings using a simple star-based rating system that you manipulate using a swiping gesture. Once you've added your "feeling," it's displayed a map so you can see how those around you feel, too. The feelings on the map are represented by glowing colored orbs that range from blue (happy) to red (unhappy). In addition, an augmented reality street view lets you see those same feelings layered on top of real-world photos.

Have you ever heard someone proclaim that if you don't vote, then you shouldn't complain? Well, whether or not you vote, we have the perfect iPhone app to make your complaints heard by whatever government official, agency or otherwise - DIY Democracy.

This handy little government 2.0 app will let you make that wheel squeak even louder, all while informing you of your rights. And for the true civic participant on the go, you can even petition to run for office without interrupting your day.

iPhone applications are no longer just toys for techies. There are now thousands of iPhone apps in the App Store designed for mainstream usage. Yesterday we looked at examples of health and fitness iPhone apps, today we check out what's available for a current big sporting event: the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

There were relatively slim pickings, but at least one Winter Olympics app that is a must-have for sports fans!

The Apple App Store, the company's one-stop-shop for over 100,000 different mobile applications, is getting a new rival - the Wholesale Applications Community. Twenty four individual mobile companies are joining together to form the group, which will represent over three billion customers world-wide.

While the applications will not be for the iPhone, and therefor not direct competition to the App Store, a centralized location for mobile applications may lure potential customers away from Apple and its iPhone.

What important Web browsing feature is sorely missing from mobile Safari, the iPhone's built-in browser? If you're like us, you probably said the ability to search for text within a Web page. We're accustomed to using this feature in the grown-up Web browsers on our desktop and laptop machines, but sadly, it's lacking when we switch over to the mini-browser built into our mobile phone.

Until now, that is. In yet another case of "there's an app for that," there is, in fact, a new iPhone application that adds the "find within a page" feature to the iPhone browser. And it's well worth the $0.99 fee to finally have this function at our disposal again.

Swiss researcher Nicolas Seriot claims it's possible for "rogue" applications to make their way into the iTunes App Store where they could then be used to steal personal data from victims' iPhones. According to Seriot's research, the problem has to with Apple's lax approval process for applications as well as a flaw in an iPhone security feature that provides access to more data than is necessary. If a malicious application was installed on someone's iPhone, it could use this loophole to quietly harvest personal data including phone numbers, address book information, the phone's unique identifier and more. Then, using the phone's Internet connection, it could send that data back to remote servers, all unbeknownst to the iPhone's owner.

Micello, one of the more exciting startups to debut at the most recent DEMO conference, is a mobile mapping solution that is basically "Google Maps for the indoors." Where traditional mapping services show everything in the world outside, Micello's goal is to map the world's inside spaces - places like shopping malls, convention centers, retail stores, airports, college campuses, and more. Today, the company is launching its service by way of a mobile application for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Apple has just booted a major iPhone developer out of the iTunes App Store along with their catalog of 1,000-plus apps, a number so high it represented almost 1% of all the apps in the store. The developer, Molinker Inc., has been accused of attempting to game the ratings system where application users are allowed to review the various programs using a five-star system. As discovered by an unnamed Internet user and a reader of the iPhoneography blog, the ratings scam involved a set of iPhone application reviewers who only rated Molinker apps, giving them each a five-star review. Most of the apps in question ended up with 50 or so of these five-star reviews, representing what was clearly an attempt to boost sales by pumping up ratings through artificial means.