Yelp launched its iPhone application back in 2008, but announced expanded functionality for the user-review site’s foray into smartphone app stores. Today the Yelp blog showed new location-game features for the app, now available for Android, Blackberry and Palm Pre.

Spurred by the SXSW-fueled popularity of check-in games, Yelp recently released its own check-in feature. In an upcoming update to the app, users can also unlock Badges, and earn "Royal" status in return for repeat check-ins at local businesses.  While they know they aren’t "the first ones to offer check-ins," they guess they "probably won’t be the last…" But the added elements do make the app more fun and they say it compliments their existing mobile offerings, connects people and promotes local businesses.

Anyone familiar with Foursquare will recognize the use of Badges, the same term used for the prizes given for filling certain requirements such as visiting several karaoke bars or food trucks. Yelp users can earn a "Sushi Sensei" badge, for example. The same can be said for "Royal" status - instead of Foursquare’s Mayors, a user can become the Duke of a shop, Baron of the neighborhood and King of the city.

The review site has been collecting data on the success from moving to mobile. The post lists related data showing that on average, more than one in four Yelp searches come from the iPhone app. This rate increases on the weekend when more users switch from Web-based searches to on-the-go queries. Showing success rate in a different format, given figures show the following:

• over half a million calls were made in May directly from the Yelp iPhone app
• nearly one million people generated directions from the app
• Yelp for iPhone had over 1.4 million visitors in the last thirty days

ReadWriteWeb expects Yelp to leverage special check-in coupons, the only Foursquare function not adapted to the review site’s app.

Not everyone has the cash for virtual goods. Boomerang offers an alternative model for those who can’t – or don’t want to – pay.

“We help people with payments,” said Boomerang co-founder and CEO Honor Gunday, presenting at Monday’s TechRadar.

Boomerang’s Offerwall is an alternative payments platform for virtual goods that gives users currency in exchange for their signing up for offers. The Boomerang platform allows users to buy virtual goods in return for trying out a product or service: a month’s free subscription to Netflix, for example.

Offerwall works with over 120 ad networks in 160 countries, and is translated into all the major languages.

Boomerang describes Offerwall as a “user-driven virtual currency monetization platform,” which uses a review and use-based ranking system to make the best offers most visible and to bury the bad ones. Boomerang tracks demographics to better match players and offers as well.

All of this is important. Offer-based services have been sources of controversy in the past. One thinks especially of Michael Arrington’s invective/crusade against Zynga’s use of such services last year.

Gunday says that these things mean that 80 to 90 percent of Boomerang’s revenue is created by users’ acceptance of offers.

Reputation-based offers could potentially save businesses that use such services from future criticisms as the crowd outs the bad offers. And, perhaps more importantly, keep the company out of Arrington’s Scarecrow glare.

Ad-offer networks can be compelling to users but need to be especially transparent. Boomerang’s crowdsourced model should leverage that transparency and help the company compete with the major players in the evolving virtual goods market. As well, Boomerang’s focus on international markets should be a great strength.

PlaySpan is one of the leading virtual-goods marketplaces.

Mark Rose, PlaySpan’s VP of Product Development, presented PlaySpan at Monday’s TechRadar by showing how the service worked inside Turbine’s Dungeons and Dragons Online MMORPG. In an effort perhaps to shock players of traditional offline video games, Rose showed how easy it is to pause the game, enter PlaySpan’s virtual goods store and buy items and level-ups — the ideal impulse buy.

For traditional gamers, this might be seen as cheating, but for everyone else in the world, it is one of the hottest emerging markets.

Ask Zynga.

PlaySpan estimates that Americans spent around $30 million on virtual goods during the 2009 holiday season alone. Overall in 2009, 1 in 12 Americans bought a virtual gift, and the total market was worth an estimated $1 billion, with an average purchase price of $3 per good.

PlaySpan is aggressively expanding its overseas presence, which is a must for the major players in virtual goods. In Asia, for example, the sale of virtual goods in 2009 was 7 times the amount sold in the U.S.

To monetize, Rose says that services selling virtual goods need to make purchases easy, expand international audiences and extend their footprint across platforms and devices.

PlaySpan is used by more than 1,000 online games, and the goods available on its platform can be paid for using more than 85 different payment platforms. Players can also buy game goods on PlaySpan’s site, as well as on its Facebook and MySpace portals.

Earlier this month, PlaySpan partnered with Adobe to be the payment service for Adobe’s Shibuya developer platform. PlaySpan also has partnerships with other major brands like Nickelodeon, Hi5 and THQ.

There are more than 60 million Americans without bank accounts, and the market for alternative financial services for the unbanked is $8 billion a year.

The problem with the alternative services is that they’re expensive for customers, taking a sizable cut out of paychecks and imposing high fees on money wire transfers.

TransCash hopes to better serve this sector by offering a cost-effective alternative to money transfers. The Los Angeles-based company believes that the financial world should be as easy as sending email.

TransCash offers a set of two prepaid Visa debit cards, black and red. The money sender keeps the black card and the red goes to receiver. The money can be sent instantaneously to the recipient, via mobile or internet, as opposed to a service like Western Union, which takes several hours to complete an exchange.

It’s not even a wire transfer, per se; it’s just transferring an account’s money from one card to another.

TransCash saves users the time that they would spend traveling to a money-wire provider and filling out forms. It also saves users from the enormous money-transfer wire fees, which range from $9.99 to $45.00. TransCash charges customers a monthly fee of $9.99, no matter the amount of transactions.

Customers can even receive payments from employers on their card, which eliminates the need for a bank account.

TransCash president Jon Celms, speaking at last night’s Tech:Rader Payment event, said that even though traditional alternative-financial services are cumbersome and costly to customers, it is a difficult market for a new player to enter.

“We’re working with hard-working, low-income people and all they have to go on is trust,” Celms said.

“Trust makes this a tough market to penetrate,” Celms said. Banks, credit card companies and Western Union have that trust, but it is difficult for new players to establish it. Celms believes that this trust will grow virally in communities where members use TransCash.

Yesterday, a group of researchers from the University of Ottawa School of Business asked us what the new game-breaking social applications will be. No one knows what the next Twitter will be, but it’s fairly certain it will come from the mobile world.

Last night’s “Mobile Trends in a Changing World” event, hosted by L’Atelier and Stephane Delbecque, brought representatives of four of the most innovative mobile application companies together to explore the evolving world of mobile social networking and organizing.

The four companies represent the major trends in mobile: payments, media sharing, location-based social networking and mobile health care.

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Here we were Sunday afternoon, the last day of the BNP Paribas Open, where Bill Gates and his wife Melinda were attending the men and women’s finals and took the time to come over to our suite to say hello in person.

In the picture above, Mr. Gates is demoing the Concierge mapping application powered by the Microsoft Virtual Earth technology. Although very easy to use, I was surprised by his agility in interacting with Surface and asked him if he had one at home. He answered that he has one in his office.

Considering his busy agenda, Mr. Gates spent a fairly large amount of time with all of us. He went through several Surface applications including the Newsreader that aggregates the news of the week from MSNBC, and the paint program. Gates actually autographed his name using Paint (picture below).

Mr. Gates appreciated the fact that L’Atelier, once again, partnered with Microsoft - this time to introduce two Microsoft Surface tables to the VIP guests of BNP Paribas and Bank of the West.