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If you’re toting around an iPhone in one pocket and a bulging wallet stuffed with loyalty cards in the other, let us respectfully say this: You’re doing it wrong. With only a bit of legwork, you can lighten your load by scanning or manually adding your cards for your supermarkets, book stores, pet shops, sports stores, and the library, and stick them on your phone with an app like CardStar.
Version 3.0 of the free card-minder is on its way to to the iPhone App Store, and it’s packing some pretty major feature changes, including integrating social-networking service Foursquare.
Open up CardStar 3.0 for iPhone and click the merchant record, then the new Foursquare button, CardStar will return a list of results for nearby stores. Star one as a favorite, and the app can recognize it, automatically checking you in at that specific location on subsequent visits. The company intends to reach out to other location-based services as well, possibly Loopt, Gowalla, and others with open APIs.
CardStar
CardStar has been telling CNET for months of its plans to go big by folding social networking hook and coupon offers into what is otherwise a dry, static storage app, and the Foursquare integration is a fair start.
In addition, version 3.0 also sees CardStar branching out with CardStar Connect, a cloud-based backup and restore feature that will soon make it easy to transfer the bar codes and pin numbers you’ve already entered once to CardStar other mobile devices.
On the user interface front, CardStar gets a second panel on its home screen to help manage apps. We’d prefer a different placement but suspect CardStar did this to draw attention to its newly wrought ability to create accounts. There’s also a new Extras tab, which is the access point for Foursquare check-ins, and a Favorite list that facilitates location-driven check-ins.
Look for CardStar 3.0 in the App Store this week.
