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With more than 200 deals since 2005, Y Combinator’s Paul Graham knows how to size up a young team of entrepreneurs. However, he didn’t get it right from day one.

On Friday, we got a chance to talk to Graham after his morning panel with SV Angel’s Ron Conway. He discussed how his strategy has evolved over the past five years and why the balance of power is shifting in Silicon Valley. See videos ahead.

Online monetization platform gWallet, which offers social gaming developers a variety of ways to monetize their apps and boost engagement, is looking to put its money where its mouth is: the company is launching a $20,000 cash guarantee to any social gaming publishers that don’t generate more revenue when they switch from their current monetization platform to gWallet.

To participate, publishers are being asked to implement a simultaneous, head-to-head test over the span of thirty days (you can sign up starting today, with the 30 day window beginning August 1). At the end of that time period, if your revenues from gWallet aren’t higher than they are on you original implementation, then the service will pay out the guarantee. But you’ll have to be a pretty sizable game to participate: to qualify, gWallet says that publishers need to be new to the platform, and need to have at least 250,000 daily active users. That said, it sounds like the the company is willing to discuss a guarantee to apps with a smaller user base if you email their partner@gwallet.com address.

gWallet launched late last year, positioning itself as a more trusted alternative to other ‘Offers’ companies in the wake of Scamville.  One of the company’s more popular products is the video offer, which can reward an app user virtual currency in return for watching a video ad (they also have more traditional offers).

This is a highly competitive and tough space; major Offers company OfferPal recently had to downsize in the wake of Facebook deciding that TrialPay would be its preferred Offers provider.  Still, there’s plenty of room to innovate (and give developers a bigger slice of the revenue) — if gWallet can prove that it earns devs more money than its competitors, it will likely do just fine regardless.

It’s no secret that loyalty programs — like those hole-punch cards that give you a free Slurpee every ten visits — are a great, cheap way to keep customers coming back to your business. Thing is, running these programs isn’t always as easy as it seems, especially if a business wants to do something more complex than the basic “buy ten get one free”. PlacePop is a new startup looking to make these loyalty programs accessible to any business: the startup has built a self-serve platform based around its new iPhone application which companies can use to distribute virtual, custom-branded loyalty cards.

Today, the company is launching at our Social Currency CrunchUp, and it’s also announcing that it has closed a $1.4 million round of funding.  Participants in the round include Affinity Labs Founder Chris Michel, Bebo Founder Michael Birch, and James Currier and Stan Chudnovsky, both of whom cofounded Ooga Labs.

At a high level, PlacePop is pretty simple for the end-user: you fire up the iPhone app, swipe until you find the appropriate virtual rewards card, and “check-in” at the venue you’re visiting. And the startup says that a business can get its loyalty program up and running in five minutes.

PlacePop isn’t the first startup to try to tackle rewards, and it faces the same chicken-and-egg issue that its competitors have: you need businesses to actually offer rewards to get users hooked, and businesses aren’t going to bother if the service doesn’t have any users to begin with. PlacePop is taking a few steps to deal with this (and help differentiate the startup): first, it offers a number of other social features, like sharing photos of the places you’re checking into so the app has some utility regardless of if a business is offering a deal or reward. And second, it’s letting you earning rewards points toward venue on Earth, even before a business joins PlacePop.

That may sound a little counter-intuitive, but PlacePop is hoping that it will lead to a sort of community-led guerrilla campaign where users urge their favorite businesses to join PlacePop. CEO Kent Lindstrom explains that users can start checking-in at their favorite restaurants and other venues, and when venue owners visit PlacePop and see that they already have traction on the service, they can “claim” their profile.  I’m not entirely convinced this will work (it’s going to get tough to convince users to check in based on the possibility that a venue may one day start offering rewards), but it’s an interesting tactic.

So why would a restaurant want to use PlacePop instead of a service that is already starting to get traction, like Foursquare? Linstrom gave a few reasons: first, PlacePop allows venues to customize and create their own branding for their virtual card. Second, the platform will allow venues to custom tailor how they want to reward program to work — for example, a business could opt to build their own Groupon-style program, where a special deal was activated if 50 people redeemed a coupon.

PlacePop obviously has its work cut out for it. Foursquare and other location-based services are looking to add deals and rewards as a layer on top of their applications, allowing for a more passive approach to earning rewards. Other startups in this space include We Reward, which lets you earn cash for your checkins.

Google has added weather data to its Google Earth application. As of now, the new feature only supports locations in North America and parts of Europe.