One of the most interesting conversations I’ve had about the open social web lately is with Laurent Eschenauer, arcitect on OneSocialWeb.

We have a long conversation about why you want to help build a federated open social network.

Is he your savior?

Based on conversations people are having over on Google Buzz about this video, yes.

I was very skeptical of Tawkon, a company that helps you avoid cell phone radiation exposure, before I visited them in Tel Aviv, Israel, home of their founders and engineering team. First of all the World Health Organization has been studying mobile phone radiation and hasn’t found any link between radiation exposure and disease. That and I’m not really all that willing to give up my mobile phone, even if there was some slight risk of increased health problems found, so I sort of wanted to avoid the discussion altogether.

But when I visited with the founders, I found a team passionate about engineering and studying wireless networks. They are building algorithms to study whether a phone spits out more radiation when turned vertically vs. horizontally, for instance. Now, what else could that kind of study help? Well, battery life, for one. If your phone is working harder to get a signal to a cell tower (which is why radiation levels would be going up) then it’s also potentially more power.

How about connection quality? On Freeway 280 there are a couple of dead zones. But sometimes I find I can drive through the dead zones without losing signal. Why? Because of how I’m holding the phone. What if the phone could tell you the best way to hold it to get the best signal strength?

So, remove whether or not radiation from mobile phones are hurtful, this company could have huge spinout benefits to battery life and signal strength monitoring. That’s why I’m a fan and hope that Apple works with them to get their app approved (Apple has, so far, refused to distribute their app because Tawkon are using undocumented APIs and that’s not allowed by Apple).

There’s more about Tawkon on Techcrunch this morning because they are shipping on Blackberry now.

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Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare, and Alexa Andrzejewski, founder of Foodspotting, are the hottest people in location-based services. Foursquare has a million users. Foodspotting has 100,000. Both are growing very quickly and getting lots of attention. I sit down with them at the Big Omaha conference and talk with them about the location-based service business.

In the interview Dennis tells us how Tokyo is about to become the #1 city, overtaking New York. He also tells us what he sees the future of Foursquare and location-based services are, which include maleable social graphs, which means it’ll show us tips from people who are like us. We talked about what he’s learned by running one of the hottest startups in the world and why he’s turned down deals to acquire Foursquare (it’s been rumored he turned down a $150 million offer from Yahoo).

He also talked to me about what he learned from running Dodgeball, an earlier location-based service that was acquired, and killed, by Google.

Alexa talks about the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, including how she deals with competitors like Fiddme, which I got excited by when I visited Tel Aviv.

Why are these two companies top in the location-based service field? Because users have adopted them faster than other services. It’s interesting to talk with both of these leaders, especially to hear their insights on growing their companies and what they are thinking of when it comes to acquiring companies to grow their teams. Thanks to Alexa and Dens for sitting down with me at the Big Omaha conference, which is the best entrepreneur conference I’ve attended lately.

Oh, and sorry for the tweeting birds in the background, it was like Twitter was there to cause noise, but when you get a chance to sit down with two industry leaders you gotta just turn on the camera and go with it.

UPDATE: Techcrunch’s MG Siegler also talked with Dennis on Friday and he got out of Dennis that he’s very confident in the upcoming fight with Facebook over location-based services. That’s an interesting interview to read too.

You can join me on Foursquare at http://foursquare.com/user/scobleizer and I’m now on Foodspotting and its competitor, Fiddme as well.