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Yesterday, Foursquare put out a shiny new 3.0 version of its beloved check-in app for both Android and iPhone. The new app focuses on: “exploration, discovery, and rewarding loyalty.” The “Explore” feature gives users access to nearby tips from other Foursquare users, not necessarily just friends. You can enter whatever you’d like into the search box and also browse by food, coffee, nightlife, shops and arts and entertainment. Recommended nearby places surface highly tipped venues....

GroupMe, which also made our2011 list of New York City startups to watch, launched in October 2010 as a way to easily create an instant SMS style chatroom across all phones- smart and dumb. Last week, the startup darling added push-notifications, photos and location sharing to its popular group-texting app, available on both iPhone and Android. Today, the 2.1 app updates include “Joinable Groups” which are open, publishable and visible to your friends within the app....

HeyWire, a Boston based startup, offers an incredibly robust social communications hub for users worldwide to tap into its free, mobile SMS network that connects with Twitter, Facebook and Google Talk. HeyWire aims to take on group chat competitors like GroupMe andFast Societythis week in Austin, Texas atSXSWi. Today, HeyWire announces its latest version of the app, which features an integrated group texting platform. Within the third iteration of HeyWire’s app, a user will be able to group text multiple mobile numbers, people in their Facebook chat or GTalk contacts and simultaneously update their status on Twitter by including “40404....

The Internet has shaken things up over the past few years. I dare say the ubiquity of the web has changed nearly every aspect of life as we know it. Two of the web’s most dramatic and arguably positive effects on humanity- the rise of the mobile workplace (aka the end of the 9-5 cubicle lifestyle) and the increasingly popular idea of a renter’s economy (Zipcar, Netflix, etc.) have given space to one of the sweetest apps I’ve seen in quite some time....

Sydney-based cloud computing serviceOrionVMlaunched today, and according to cloud benchmarking siteCloud Harmony, has the fastest network-backed storage performance in the world. The project began in a dorm room in early 2010 as a collaboration between University of Technology students Joseph Glanville, Alex Sharp and Sheng Yeo, with the goal of becoming Australia’s highest performing cloud computing platform. They built the platform on $6,000, working at night after university classes and their day jobs....