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.