Latest Project from IZEA – WeReward

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of WeReward . All opinions are 100% mine.

Since January, we’ve had a small development team here at IZEA working on WeReward.com , breaking us into a whole new market here. If you’ve ever heard of Foursquare or Gowalla, WeReward is similar, but builds on them with some neat additions.

How it Works

Let’s say you’re looking for a place to go out to eat. You can search WeRewards for the type of business you’re looking for (restaurant, pizza, wings, subs), and see what’s close by. That part you can do on a million other apps — but what makes WeReward special is that the results will have rewards of various amounts. The default amount is 5 points (5 cents) of businesses not claimed by the owner. Once an owner claims a business, they can up the reward to whatever they want.

Some places might offer a 100 point ($1.00) reward for completing a specific objective. All objectives are in the form of a picture to verify. Usually this means taking a picture of your meal, your receipt or your happy face smiling at the business.

After you take the picture, you can also share it on Twitter, Facebook or Foursquare. If you share it, a link to your checkin will be posted, where others can see the picture you just took. I like it because it combines the checking with the image post – and makes people click through to see the picture you just took.

What are these Task Things?

In addition to checkins, WeReward also has a separate section for tasks . Tasks are similar to checkins in that you have to complete some objective and take a picture — the only difference is that you usually don’t have to be at a specific location.

There are dozens of tasks in there right now. Here’s a few examples…

• $5 from EyeFi – Take a picture at Best Buy or an Apple Store with an employee and an Eye-Fi package.
• $1 from T.G.I. Fridays- Take a picture with Friday’s Bartender, your Waiter or Waitress.
• $0.52 from Target – Take a crazy picture of yourself with the Target logo at a store. Share with @target!

Get the App Now!

Getting the app into the app store a fun ordeal. WeReward was launched at Techcrunch Disrupt 2010 , which meant that the iPhone app should really be available by then (the phone is kind of essential for everything I’ve listed so far). We went through a few rounds of the app store approval process, but eventually got it pushed through and approved within a day when the app was presented. Luckily most the companies presenting had prototypes and ideas, so WeReward being a public app that was being released right there stood out due to the polish.

The app is available for iPhone and Android right now, with a Blackberry scheduled for late August. If you have any questions about the app, you can checkout WeReward.com for more information on how it works and how to use the app.

• WeReward for iPhone
• WeReward for Android