BOSTON, MA -- (Marketwire) -- 08/12/10 -- The great 19th century thinker John Stuart Mill once declared, "Utility, or the Greatest-Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness." But did Mill have the ability to share that thought from his favorite watering hole with everyone in his social graph? No, because back then everyone was still using the Motorola RAZR.

Regardless of device, we here at SCVNGR don't think this idea should be limited to Neoclassical philosophy. Utility belongs with you wherever you go and across your entire social graph of Facebook, Twitter and more. And starting today, Utility and Happiness come to your entire mobile social world with the latest release of SCVNGR.

After launching to the general public two months ago, we've worked with tons of great companies -- Warner Bros., Sony, the New England Patriots and Journeys to name a few -- to enable them to build amazing challenges you can play at hundreds of thousands of locations across the country on top of our game engine. We also rolled out the ability for businesses to reward you for playing SCVNGR wherever you go.

But there's so much more to SCVNGR, and you guys have not been shy about telling us what you want. We love it and we're working tirelessly for YOU, the user of our app, to make SCVNGR the best mobile-social-geo-whathaveyou out there... and, hopefully, the only one you really need.

We've built the top four most-requested features you've sent us. Starting today, here's what you can now do on SCVNGR:

• Add challenges to your favorite places right from your phone! Create fun stuff for your friends, colleagues and anyone else to do at the places you care about. Love all of those micro-brewed IPAs offered at your favorite local pub? Now you can add the "[insert your name here]'s IPA Challenge," or whatever else you want others to do at that place! This is huge to us from the nerd-tech end -- and for you, building on the game layer has never been easier (or more fun). Don't just play SCVNGR, build SCVNGR with us, right from your phone in less than 20 seconds.
  
  
• Add captions to the pics you snap! You've been taking creative pictures, funny pictures, group pictures and sometimes even bizarrely awkward pictures (sorry, but it's true :). And we know you want to give them a bit more context when you share with friends on Facebook and Twitter. Now you can! A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a couple extra never hurt.
  
  
• Find friends easier and faster! We've made finding friends easier than ever before with a friend suggestion feature that'll suggest friends for you on SCVNGR. It uses your Facebook and Twitter connections, but also people that you've done the social check-in with recently. Algorithms, baby. Try it out!
  
  
• Track your favorite places even better! SCVNGR now uses your past history (and history of your friends) to show you better place results. We're pretty stoked about this, because it decreases the fail rate on location selection from 40% to 22%. (We define fail rate as the amount of times people have to search for a place, rather than it being right at the top of the results). That's a huge improvement, and it's going to get even better!
  
  

"Just as Mill's theory of ethical Utilitarianism required individuals to perform at their most noble level for the greater good to benefit, so, too, does mobile-social Utilitarianism require individual optimization," said SCVNGR Chief Ninja Seth Priebatsch, who will be presenting his recent paper, On LBRTY, at this fall's Oxford Philosophy Graduate Conference. "So -- when everyone's geo-social experience is optimized (ahem, through using SCVNGR), logically everyone benefits."

That's nerd speak for: everything you want to do at a place (checking in and beyond) can and should be easy to share with the people in your life. This sharing leads to happiness, and happiness is a moral good.

So just grab the free app and start playing SCVNGR: Go places. Check in and do challenges. Earn points and rewards. Create your own challenges at the places you love. And share what you're up to with your friends.

About SCVNGR
SCVNGR is a game. Playing is simple: Go places. Do challenges. Earn points! You'll unlock real-world rewards and share where you are and what you're up to with your friends on SCVNGR, Facebook and Twitter. SCVNGR is played via a free iPhone & Android app. But playing SCVNGR is only half of it. Individuals, enterprises and small businesses build on SCVNGR by adding custom challenges and rewards at their locations. SCVNGR is funded by Google Ventures and Highland Capital Partners. Visit www.scvngr.com to learn more.

Image Available: http://www2.marketwire.com/mw/frame_mw?attachid=1331101
Image Available: http://www2.marketwire.com/mw/frame_mw?attachid=1331105
Image Available: http://www2.marketwire.com/mw/frame_mw?attachid=1331107