With location-based technology ruling the roost at this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Conference, startups Foursquare and Gowalla – the apparent rivals in the location-based mobile apps arena – ramped up their endeavors to entice customers.

Foursquare and Gowalla, both of which launched their respective location-based mobile apps at the SXSW conference last year, offer GPS-based apps and use a similar rewards system.

While Foursquare – which boasts over 500,00 users of its app - crowns the users who ‘check in’ the most as “mayors;” Gowalla – which claims to have 100,000 users - releases a list of the top 10 people who ‘check in’ at each location.

In their respective attempts to attract more people to use their location-based apps, Gowalla teamed up with SXSW to include an array of events on the application; while Foursquare came up with a “scavenger hunt” in which users win badges to the Spin magazine party to see Hole and Sharon Jones.

Despite their evident rivalry in the location-based apps market, both Foursquare and Gowalla are essentially popularizing the ‘checking in’ model, which apparently is more appealing for the users than the ‘constant tracking’ model, largely because it gives users the ‘option’ of whether or not to reveal their locations.

With the ‘checking in model gathering momentum, Gartner analyst Anne Lapkin opines that if the model goes mainstream, it would “allow for the sharpening of mobile advertising.”