FourSquare hackathon prize winner My Next Trip, created by developer Benjamin Netter, uses FourSquare’s API to help you plan your next big city trip. FourSquare has announced its ‘Global Hackathon’ winners on its blog.

All you have to do is log into the site using your FourSquare credentials and authorize the app. You’re then given a simple search box to type in the city you’re planning on heading to.

Then the magic happens with all of the data FourSquare has collected from our check-in’s, tips, pictures, and to-do lists. The app circles around the notion of spending a weekend (2 days) in a city, and maps out a potential itinerary for you.

This is when things get really cool. Based on where and when your friends checked in, you are given a daily itinerary for each day by My Next Trip. You can see who went there and what tips they left. Even smarter, based on places you’ve gone, it tells you new places to go based on what your friends have done on FourSquare.

This really is the perfect example of what developers can do with an open API for a popular service like FourSquare, which stores tons and tons of data.

Of course My Next Trip is a simple app right now, but it would be even more useful if I could export the itinerary into another format. If it was possible to export, say a Google document by way of email, I would then be able to print it out.

Earlier this month, Foursquare held its second hackathon, with 500 developers from around the world contributing. Today, the company is announcing the winners. The grand prize goes to Plan Your Next Trip, which uses the Foursquare API to help you plan out your upcoming 2-day trip to any city in the world using the recommendations from Foursquare’s “Explore” feature.

Several grand prize finalists were also named, including Sqavenger, Intersquares and sponsor-chosen winners Near.co and VenueMachine.

Plan Your Next Trip was built by developer Benjamin Netter from Paris, France, and he will receive the Foursquare title belt (yes, an actual belt – see above) and dinner with Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai.

The other hackathon finalists are as follows:

1) Sqavenger: An app that lets you create and play scavenger hunts using text messages and Foursquare. (Built by a four-person team in NY and San Francisco)

2) Intersquares: Lets you compare your check-ins with a friends. (Built by Mihai Parparita)

3) Near.co: The NASDAQ prize winner built a website using the venue Push API for store owners that features hours of operation, accepted credit cards, Zagat ratings and, of course, a Foursquare check-in option. (Bulit by a four-person team in SF)

4) VenueMachine: The Twilio prize winner lets venue owners identify and reward their influential customers (as determined by Klout scores) in real-time. (Buit by Barnaby Malet and Namit Chadha)

Twilio is also awarding VenueMachine along with Sqavenger, fourhealth, Bimbimbab and Postsquare with $500 in Twilio credit for their entries.

Twelve other hacks won People’s Choice Awards through the voting that took place at Foursquare’s four official sites (NY, SF, Tokyo and Paris) and online. These include the following:

• Gettogether – An interface for scheduling an event with your friends.
• Magic Muggle Clock – Displays friends’ recent check-ins on a clock like the Weasleys’ family clock found in the Harry Potter.
• How ___ are you? – A way to discover interesting demographic information about the places you check in to.
• PlaceFace – Updates your foursquare and Twitter profile photos as appropriate for each check-in.
• Photosquare – Browse photos from venues near you on your iPad and add them to your To-Do list.
• DigiDJ – A jukebox system users who have checked in can add songs from their phone.
• 4SQSign – An e-mail signature that updates with each check-in.
• Check Me In – An iPad tool enabling merchants to check in customers using their profile photo
• 4square TV – Creates a video showcasing your recent foursquare activity.
• Hear I Am – Help you discover people near you when you’re out and about who have similar musical tastes.
• One More Check-in – Shows you what new badges you could unlock with just a few more check-ins.

Android: If you're curious what's going on in your community, there's always your local paper, but Proximitips wants to help you see what photos others are sharing, what people are talking about on Twitter, and where people are hanging out in your neighborhood specifically. More »

Based on the premise of the TV show How I Met Your Mother, developer Mihai Parparita (he of Google Reader and Gmail user script fame) created Intersquares, a service that compares your Foursquare check-ins with any other Foursquare user to determine all the times you've been at the same place at the same time, whether you knew it or not. More »

Just last week, foursquare passed 1billion check-ins on its service after opening up the location-based social networking platform to over 1.5 billion more people by integrating five new languages. 1 billion check-ins represents a huge metric for the company launched in 2009.

To celebrate, foursquare put together a birds-eye view video of the world as it populates with foursquare check-ins, along with an updated version of its mobile app that now displays its new Lists feature. As for the video, the official foursquare blog adds, “It’s even more awesome in full-screen, in all its HD glory.”

Check it out below.

Location based app Foursquare has just one billion checkins, it just announced on its blog. The app has grown from 100 million checkins in July, 2010 to 200 million in Oct 2010 to 750 million checkins in June 2011.

Along with the milestone, Foursquare has launched a new version of its app now available in the app store. The biggest change in the new version has a tab for its new Lists feature which it launched late last month.

The gamification of our daily lives is something that we’re seeing more and more of in apps and websites. Checking in on Foursquare gives you badges and lofty titles. Empire Avenue rewards you for your social network interaction. The latest online game, Paris-based Onefeat, takes a slightly different approach, by taking the focus of the game off the screen and into the real world.

Playing Onefeat involves a series of missions which you can choose to complete, by taking a photograph that fits a certain description or criteria. You can create your own missions, encouraging other people to complete them, as well as complete other people’s missions – or in Onefeat lingo, perform a feat.

We caught up with one of Onefeat’s co-founders, Souheil Medaghri who told us a little bit about what inspired them to launch the game.

“We are 3 kids from the East of Paris, friends for a very longtime, who grew up passionate about music, game, business, design, tech, innovation, sociology…kind of a Generation Y cliché. We are just graduating and we were not really happy about joining a big boring company so we decided to check what we could do together to have fun. We are all big Foursquare users and we loved the way it was implementing gaming aspects on everywhere we go, but real life games (SCVNGR/Foursquare) had some limits for us.”

Souheil and his co-founders Arnaud Ferreri and Julien Dao analyzed each limitation that Foursquare gaming imposed and decided to find alternatives to that limitation.

“These games define you based only on where you go, not what you do. Locations are such small parts of our lives compared to all the amazing things people can do everyday. We are missing a big chunk of what real life is. Let’s forget geolocation for a while.

The other limit was in the lack of emotional dimension in a “check-in.” It’s boring, you have no reason to do it and it does not allow you to express yourself in your unique way. We thought we’ve got the right ingredients to create a completely new game based on what people do in real life, using photography as proof, because it is the most emotional, simple and universal way to express the fact that you are doing something with social elements.”

Onefeat, Souheil explains, takes elements from the hottest online trends today – gamification, photo sharing and social media – but takes it off the screen and into the real world.

“There is a strong vision behind Onefeat, it’s ‘You are what you do.’ In your life, you can dream, think about the things you could experiment but in the end, before you die, only what you did counts. We’re simply giving people a way to do more stuff in real life. Our goal is to stop this ‘Exodus to Virtual Worlds’ (Castronova) that is happening with Facebook, Twitter and traditional social games. People are escaping real life in masses because it’s easy to interact online while reality is way better!”

Onefeat is starting an accelerator program in Paris next week at Le Camping, which is will be an ideal opportunity for the team to focus on any major features they will be adding to the game. Souheil tells The Next Web what to expect in the game in the future:

“Our priorities are building great game mechanics and creating a “game layer” (badges, points, items) which will be really engaging and fun. We will then focus on our customer acquisition strategy. The monetization part will come only once we’ve reached decent traction and on that part too, awesome things are planned. One of our other goals is also to win LeWeb ’11 (the biggest European Tech Event) that will be held in Paris in December.”

So how exactly does Onefeat work? From extremely easy missions (take a self portrait), to missions that require a bit of digging at home (find the oldest object in your room) to missions that you have go out and about to complete (shoot a great example of street art), there’s a huge variety of tasks to complete.

The more difficult a mission is, the more points its worth. As you collect points, you move up to the next level. There’s a ton of fun missions to catch up on – which you can browse by category, by week, or by level.

After selecting a mission, hit the ‘Accept the mission’ button, and once you have your image ready, hit the ‘Finish the mission’ button to upload your photo.

Gaining points doesn’t just come from accepting and completing missions. Onefeat is, after all, a social game and if other users add your photos to their favourites, you’ll gain more points, which will help you get from one level to the next a whole lot quicker. You can also follow other users, leave comments on their photos, and share their photos on Twitter and Facebook.

Of course since Onefeat turns your entire life into a game, it’s only natural that there’s an iPhone and Android app that makes it easy to check out the latest missions, and take photos using your phone.

The Onefeat scoreboard features the people who have the most points, the most likes per feat, and other interesting statistics.

So why play Onefeat? Unlike other online games, Onefeat is an integral part of your life, so rather than simulating an imaginary life, it plugs right into what you might be doing on a daily basis. And because you can play the game using nothing more than your phone, it’s pretty easy to get addicted.

There are also a lot of ways you can use Onefeat as a useful tool. Photographers can use the missions as inspiration to take photos on a daily basis. If you and your friends get into the game, it can be a great way to discover new and interesting things about each other, and it also will encourage you to try new and different things, especially when you have to go out of your way to complete a mission.

Onefeat is currently in private beta, but we’ve got invites for the first 50 readers who sign up using this link. Be sure to come back and let us know what you think of the game!

Over 1.5bn more people now have access to foursquare thanks to the recent language expansion. Now available in Bahasa Indonesian, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Thai, foursquare hopes to meet the global demands of its international members with native-language access.

Why these languages specifically? According to the official foursquare blog, these are the areas that represent the most growth for the app.

You can either check out the foursquare website to see the changes yourself, or update your phone now to see the mobile version.

Hot on the heels of Klout‘s recent integration of Foursquare and Instagram, another social influence measurement service, Empire Avenue has announced that it is adding support for both those services.

Empire Avenue is similar to Klout and PeerIndex, in that it measures influence of its users on social services like Twitter and Facebook, but throws in the twist of letting others buy and sell stock in users, speculating on their future value. It uses virtual currency, but brands are getting involved and it’s a attracted a niche of users who love the game.

Now Foursquare and Instagram usage will count to players’ share price. As they check in, get followers, take pics, receive comments and the like, their connection scores will go up. Initially, newly connected accounts will take around a week to affect a user’s score.

Canada-based Empire Avenue divides people between those who are enthralled by it and those who really can’t see the point. Some influential people clearly believe it has a future though, it’s also announced $1.2 million in fresh funding today, in an investment round led by San Francisco-based Crosslink Capital, whose portfolio includes Pandora, Bleacher Report and Carbonite.

Foursquare has launched its Tip Lists features today, attempting to capitalize on people’s unending desire to create lists about locations, like Top Five Coffee Shops in SF, etc etc. Up until now your Foursquare Tips have sort of roamed free on the app, without rhyme or reason or real incentive to add more. Today the company is trying to improve on the Tips experience and get users to fancy themselves local experts. After all, you must know something about some place in the city you live in right?

If you visit your Foursquare profile on the web today you will see an option to start making lists, and suggestions based on your already existent checkins (mine are “Top picks for Coffee Shops” and “Top picks for Bars” which reminds me that I should probably check into more art museums or libraries or something). Creating a list is relatively easy, as the entry field auto-populates with places. There is also a collaborative functionality, which lets people who you’re friends with edit a list.

Thus far you can only create a list on the Foursquare website, but the company plans on more functionality for the mobile app. Users who wish to check out the lists on mobile can view them from the To-Do list tab, and users can find out when friends are following the same lists through the Notifications Tray. The Tip Lists will also feed into Foursquare’s Explore functionality, which serves up recommendations for Food, Nightlife and Coffee based on your friends’ Checkins and Tips.

Essentially this is similar to what startups like Journly are doing, allowing users to become curators of their environs. Yelp also has a Lists function, which seems to be, like Foursquare’s, pretty difficult to search. (Please Foursquare let me search for public user lists like “Best places for discount Miu Miu in SF,” please.)

The most interesting part about Foursquare Lists is their potential if executed correctly; Obviously this is a huge marketing opportunity for brands. “With Lists, brands, businesses, celebrities, and other organizations can easily organize and share their expertise and insights with our millions of users,” says Jonathan Crowley, Foursquare’s director of business development. Foursquare partner Lucky Magazine already has its Favorite LA Home Stores, MTV has its Hot Music Video Locations and People Magazine has built one for Star-Gazing Spots! Yeah.

Related: Tristan Walker’s lists are awesome, especially this one about “Dream Sandwiches” and this one curated from the Quora answers to “What restaurants in the world have the best views?” I want to go to there.