Brightkite has teamed with McDonalds and Visa to power a unique rewards program centered around checking-in to McDonalds locations to earn a $5 Visa gift card.

Following similar programs with brands like Starbucks, The CW, Sharpie and Dentyne, this rewards campaign marks the largest brand play to date for Brightkite.  McDonald’s and Visa got together to launch the ‘Easy’ badge for Brightkite users to earn by checking in to their nearest McDonalds.  The first 500 people to earn the badge  receive a $5 Visa gift card, courtesy of Visa and Brightkite.

To highlight the campaign, Brightkite is also running a location and activity targeted ad campaign that launches an on-screen spinner that highlights the McDonald’s dollar menu.  The Brightkite campaign is integrated with other media including online and out-of-home.

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The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) announced recently that its beginning to reposition itself within the mobile marketing industry to better “promote and enable the global mobile marketing opportunity” and provide stronger benefits to its growing list of members.

In a press release issued yesterday, the MMA said the move is aimed at enhancing the association’s effectiveness at the global, regional and national levels to keep up with the fast evolution of the mobile marketing industry.  The repositioning is based on feedback from a survey of members and non-member companies across four regions regarding a global market assessment, the MMA’s challenges and opportunities and the expanded MMA global presence.

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If the act of whipping out your cell phone to checkin on Foursquare has gotten to be too much of a hassle, Vlingo has you covered.  The voice-triggered app for Android now allows complete voice-based control over Foursquare, including checkins, shout-outs and other socially-related voice-commands.

Using just your voice, the app allows you to update your location status on Foursquare by saying something like “check into Starbucks,” or locate your friends with commands like “where are my friends?” and “who’s nearby?”  In addition, the app also lets users update their status on Facebook, Twitter and/or Foursquare at the same time by saying “social update” and saying the message.  Pretty cool.

Available only for Android devices sporting 2.0 or higher at the moment, Vlingo plans to add the functionality to its other apps in the near future.  In addition to the new social functionality, Vlingo still offers users the ability to do a number of other voice-based tasks including sending text and email messages, searching the web, navigating Google maps and more.

Distimo, a startup focused on providing app store analytics, has published its latest report detailing the mobile app ecosystem across the Apple App Store for iPad and iPhone, BlackBerry’s App World, the Android Market, Nokia’s Ovi Store, Palm’s App Catalog and the Windows Marketplace for Mobile for July 2010 in the United States.

Similar to previous reports, Distimo primarily looked at pricing characteristics across all major app stores to determine the proportion of free vs. paid apps and the average cost of which, which continue to rise.  The Android Market continues to have the largest share of free apps compared to the others, with 60% of the total, compared to just 29% for Apple’s App Store for iPhone and 26% for the iPad App Store.  Android has more than double the amount of free apps than any of the other six App Stores in the report.

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Mobile is immensely popular in India, as evident in new figures out by SMS GupShup that indicate the text-based social network has reached 35 million total users while adding over 1 million each and every month.

These figures show SMS GupShup surpassed July traffic on Facebook (with 21 million unique visitors) and Orkut (with 20 million unique visitors) — two social networks who have long fought for social dominance in the region.  Granted, SMS GupShup differs, but it shows mobile’s dominance in India.

There are roughly 550 million mobile phone users in the country and only 50 million web users, according to the company.  With a 10 to 1 mobile-to-PC ratio and SMS serving as the most popular communications platform, the market is ripe for SMS GupShup to take off, which it obviously already has.  The startup currently processes more than 500 million messages a month and accounts for over 5 percent of all texts sent within India.

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Gowalla has long had an interest in stepping beyond the confines of the ubiquitous “checkin” to leverage location in other useful and unique ways.  The company today announced a new addition to its service that does just that.

Called “Highlights,” the new addition aims to define places using user experiences rather than checkins.  Here’s how it works: a user is asked to tag real world places based on a set of criteria, so for example, you’re asked to name your favorite “Date Night” spot, the place you think has the “Best Tacos,” your “Alma Mater,” and your favorite “Watering Hole,” among other things.  Each of these answers reveals a bit about who you actually are, and where you spend your time.

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NBC Universal Digital Studio has teamed with human-powered answering service ChaCha for a unique mobile engagement initiative for NBC’s new “FCU: Fact Checker’s Unit” series.

The series, based on a short film of the same name, follows two overzealous fact checkers employed to confirm or disprove various statements made in articles scheduled to be published by a magazine.  Viewers and fans can participate by joining the show’s mobile alerts and “Check Your Own Facts” by texting ChaCha on the show’s site and engage more deeply with the content by experiencing a live feed of fact checking questions.

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