It’s finally here! The mobile era has begun for Lonely Planet. The vast and comprehensive travel content we have in guide books and the Internet has been exposed to the wireless world. Whether you’re looking for a nice restaurant in central Bangkok or sight seeing around Vancouver, Lonely Planet m-site can help you with reviews, prices, directions, maps and other travel related information. Did you just arrive to a new destination and want to know where to eat, sleep, shop, play or what sights to see? Type in your location and we’ll tell you what’s around. Easily locate your places of interest and navigate on the integrated Google maps.

Or you can browse through all the destinations around the world to research and plan your next trip while waiting at an airport lounge or traveling on a train. Read all the short but detailed text about hotels, restaurants, nightlife, and weather in all these destinations as well as the helpful advises from fellow travelers in the Bluelist forum section.

With the majority of WAP 2 handsets supported, the m-site will be a great tool for travelers armed with a mobile device.

Visit m.lonelyplanet.com on your handset.

Facing an increasing problem of having too many markers to show on some maps, we have added “server-side dynamic clustering”, which allows us to display much more content on each map, using cluster markers that represent multiple things of interest.

The clustering is done on the LPmaps server before any information is sent to the map client, to speed up the user experience.

We’ve just released this as part of an upgrade to LPmaps for the launch of the new Lonely Planet Destinations site.

Here’s an example map which has organised itself into clusters representing over a thousand markers;

It’s also been rolled out to our other maps including lonelyplanet.tv, Lonely Planet Hotels & Hostels, and Facebook Trips.

We are keen to hear what you think of this feature, the good and the bad, and how it can be improved. Let us know.

The first SMS service from Lonely Planet labs goes live in the U.S. this week. Vegas Encounter is an information on demand service for travelers visiting Las Vegas.

Text the keyword ‘vegas’ followed by the activity you are interested in (e.g ‘quirky’, ‘free’, ‘high’, ‘vintage’) to PLANET (752638) and you will get a SMS telling you some exciting places to go or interesting things to do while in Las Vegas.

The service has been advertised in Vegas related publications distributed in the U.S.

Along with it goes up our SMS gateway update with features including bi-directional multiparts support, scheduled messaging, TPOA headers, Least Cost Routing, custom route configurations, 3rd party MT support, and SMS advertising.

Today I am very excited to announce the launch of Lonely Planet Trips, the first Lonely Planet application on Facebook.

We have pre-loaded a map with thousands of destinations to visit, videos to Watch, hotels to book, and places to eat, drink, shop and otherwise explore.

You can use the app simply as a research and planning tool for your travels.

Or you can add your own Trips, share Trips with your friends, and keep track of where your friends are travelling.

The map will also show you Been There places, Wannago places, Where is Everyone Today?, even Who’s going to be passing through Cuba at Xmas?

Thanks go out to Google for a great Maps API, to Facebook for f8, to Steve, Gordon, Suyin, Chris, Sohail, Troy, Nick, Carol, Alexey and all at Lonely Planet who have contributed, and to Tony Wheeler for letting us play with his GPS data. And special thanks to Wandering Ken Hoetmer, the better half of the app dev team, who actually got married at the weekend; try using the map to find where on earth Ken is honeymooning.

Add Lonely Planet Trips to my Facebook account »

Happy travels!

Last night we launched LPmaps onto Haystack, our online hotel and hostels booking service that features author-selected, reviewed and recommended properties.

You can now browse and explore and book hotels from a friendly Map View interface that shows you actual room prices and surrounding places of interest. Here’s London as an example.

We’ve released new versions of the LPmaps Widgets and Gadgets to add to your blog or webpages, including all the new features in LPmaps such as embedded videos, Hotel bookings and thousands of travel reviews.

	http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/lpmaps
	http://fusion.google.com/add?moduleurl=…
	http://eco.netvibes.com/subscribe.php?url=…

Or you can use our home-brew IFRAME builder.

You can still enjoy the previous versions of Lonely Planet TV widgets if you want just travel videos.

Over the weekend we released an upgrade to lonelyplanet.tv including Groups and the new version of LPmaps, our Digital Mapping technology powered by the Google Maps API.

The new maps have been redesigned to include a set of tabs on the left side that you can use to turn on / off and browse various other layers of Lonely Planet content, including thousands of Destinations, Hotels and Hostels (more on that soon), and Places to Eat, Drink, Shop and otherwise explore, plus an Airports layer showing the latest flight deals from Kayak.

Here’s one I embedded earlier. Try the Maximize button to Maximize you Map.

We’re looking for talented and innovative technology architects / engineers (combined, not separate!) who are passionate about travel and have some interesting digital and/or wireless pet projects to show.

If this sounds like you, please send your resume and details of pet projects to labs@lonelyplanet.com

To accompany the public launch of lonelyplanet.tv, we at LP Labs are also excited to announce that we’ve widgetized Lonely Planet TV’s maps. The result: with very little effort, you can put a map of lonelyplanet.tv videos on your website or startpage.

At the moment we support 4 different widget formats:

1. Widgetbox
2. Google Gadgets
3. Netvibes
4. Generic <iframe> code that you can copy and paste into your site.

While there are a few ways to get your own widge, by far the easiest is to go to lonelyplanet.tv, find a map you’d like to put on your site / start page, mouse over the blue [+] icon, and select either Widgetbox, Google, Netvibes, or Embed. You will immediately be taken to a page where you can do such things as change the map size, modify the contents, or tweak the Google Map settings.

If you prefer to setup your widget from scratch, you may head directly to either our own embed page, or visit our gallery entry in the widgetbox. Here’s an example in action, showing the most watched videos in Europe:

Today we dropped the beta logo, fixed the bugs, and broke out of stealth mode; lonelyplanet.tv has launched, how exciting!

My favourite video has got to be this crazy taxi driver in Istanbul.

We’ve added LPmaps to help everyone discover the best videos. LPmaps v0.8 packs some new features including an auto-complete search control, widget support and some mashup capability - Ken will tell you more about that stuff.