Recently I had lunch with Loopt’s CEO, Sam Altman, where he pulled out his iPhone and showed me a new version, called Loopt Star, that gives you incentives to visit major retailers. I talk with him about that in the video embedded on this post.

I’m working on a longer post about the location-based services that are out there and I’m getting tired of the data silos that are being built up here. I’d love to see someone take more of an integration approach and do that first before going after the monetization like Loopt is here, although I understand why Loopt is doing that.

That said, this is an interesting new entrant. Will it get me to check into it along with Foursquare? That’s the big question and I don’t see enough utility is here yet, but I’ll keep watching to see what the offers are like and whether that’s enough of a hook to get me.

There’s a ton of other reports about Loopt Star on Techmeme.

A few months ago Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, asked me why I work at Rackspace. “Would you still work at Rackspace, even if you won the lottery?” he asked me. “Yes,” I answered.

But it didn’t click WHY I answered that way until I saw this presentation by Dan Pink.

You really must watch it. It points out that a lot of what we think about rewards and getting the best work out of someone in this modern world is all wrong.

Is your job giving you a sense of purpose? Does it give you motivation to do better work? Does your boss get out of your way, or does he/she just give you a list of tasks to do?

I’m very fortunate to work for a company that gives me a purpose and then gets out of my way. The purpose? Help startups. Period. Note that I, and my coworkers, Rocky, Rob, Michelle, help out everyone we can, even those who host on our competitors. If you watch my videos I’d guess that only a small portion are actually of entrepreneurs who host on Rackspace.

Why? Because we have a deeper purpose than to just help ourselves. It’s why I work at Rackspace.

When we got to Israel we heard from lots of people that Soluto was a great company and had a great approach to a sizeable market: Windows users.

I’m very happy that we got the first video interview of this company in their Tel Aviv, Israel, headquarters and congrats to Soluto for beating dozens of other companies to win Techcrunch Disrupt.

Speaking of which, Techcrunch Disrupt was a great event with much better speakers than TC 50. Congrats to that team, too, for stepping up the game quite a bit. Oh, and the wifi rocked.