With more GPS-enabled handsets on the way–iPhone 3G, I’m looking at you–there are few Web 2.0 niches that are more hyped-up than location-based services.

The latest evidence: Nokia announced Monday that it plans to acquire Plazes, a start-up still in private beta.

Financial terms of the deal, which is expected to close in the third quarter of 2008, were not disclosed. Plazes, which is based in Zurich, Switzerland, but works primarily out of Berlin, will become part of Nokia’s Software and Services division. Plazes’ technology will likely be worked into future mobile apps.

It’s good news for Plazes, which has 13 employees. The track-your-friends-on-a-map application was in a tight market that kept growing tighter, with no clear winner emerging.

“When we started in 2005 the potential of that space might have been obvious, but it was an uphill battle nevertheless, with so many concepts gone sour before,” a posting Monday on the Plazes blog explained.

Indeed, the first breakout start-up in the space, Dodgeball, was quickly acquired by Google. And instead of gaining mass-market success, it faded away.

Since then, start-ups like Loopt (which had some prominent stage time at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference this month), Whrrl, and Brightkite–many of which do more or less exactly the same thing–have popped up and gained minor to moderate buzz. By getting acquired, Plazes has pulled itself out of the fray and, in effect, has ensured that it won’t go under like some of its location-aware start-up brethren surely will.

“If all goes well, in the near future Plazes will be made available to millions of Nokia customers both online and on millions of mobile devices,” the Plazes blog post read. It will still be available as a standalone service, and its iPhone application is still on track.

More: continued here

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting Web 2.0 Portals!

A look at Google's Android mobile operating system.

(Credit: Google)

Last we heard, we’d be seeing phones powered by Google’s Android open-source software in the second half of 2008. A report Monday from The Wall Street Journal has narrowed that down somewhat: Those handsets will start appearing in the fourth quarter of this year, a later time frame than expected.

And according to the Journal, some handset manufacturers are “struggling” to get Android on track even for a fourth-quarter launch. Sprint Nextel and China Mobile, the world’s largest cell carrier, reportedly won’t be able to put out Android-powered phones until next year. Other carriers, like T-Mobile, claim their Android phones are still on track.

Some developers of mobile applications, on the other hand, have been sidetracked by the announcement of the iPhone 3G, the second-generation version of Apple’s ubiquitous handsets. With a lower price point, a developer kit already released, and a concrete launch date of July 11, not to mention faster Web access and a built-in GPS chip, the appeal of the new iPhone may have pushed Android to the back burner for some companies.

More: continued here

ScrnShots is a community for hosting screenshots. It’s a companion to a desktop application that will grab and automatically upload in a similar fashion to Plasq’s Skitch. Both sites have a social element, with commenting and tracking popular shots. The big difference is that ScrnShots is cross platform and will work on both Macs and PCs. You can also simply use it as an image host if you’re using another screenshot utility like TechSmith’s SnagIt, or OS X’s Grab.

The service launched in private beta back in April, and has since opened up to everyone. I’ve been exploring it this morning and have come across quite a few gems just from its discovery pages, which like Flickr will highlight some of the more interesting shots based on community involvement either in page views or comments. If you find something you like, or would like to share one you’ve taken, there’s a simple embed option to stick it on a blog or social-networking page. One thing to note is that these embeds are for specific sizes only, either close to full-size or a small thumbnail, like I’ve embedded below.

For power users, the integrated desktop applications offer the convenience of uploading without having to visit the site. You can also do things like add URLs and related tags–the latter of which is made far easier on the Mac version, as it will pull up tags you’ve used in the past and auto-complete them for you as you begin to type. Both sit in your system bar and can be called upon no matter what application you’re using.

While regular users will bask in this simplicity, ScrnShots isn’t the perfect solution for bloggers, what I consider to be ScrnShots’ target audience. It’s missing a way to annotate and edit your shots. Skitch and SnagIt offer this, and I find it a hugely helpful feature–especially for some of the shots I take and use for my posts on here. Also missing is a way to set up captions and credit on shots that are embedded elsewhere, meaning site owners will have to set up custom CSS and coding into the embedded item if they want to do either of those two things. Until it gets these features I wouldn’t ditch SnagIt or Skitch just yet.

Related: Iterasi goes live with personal Web-archiving tool

More: continued here

Watchdog groups accuse a startup ad company of intercepting browsers and hijacking Web sites….

More: continued here

Update: After this story went live, PlanetEye spokespeople contacted me to say that the version of the site reviewed here is not the site they’ll be pushing out to the public. That site, scheduled to go live on July 10, will have the new, smarter Travel Pack feature that was pitched to me in a meeting. As I say at the end of the review, I recommend you hold off on trying the site until that new version is online.

With the cost of travel and fuel continuing to rise, I don’t understand why anyone would launch or even pitch a travel site right now, unless it was designed to help people make the most of in-town bus vacations (note to self…). But that opinion hasn’t slowed the steady stream of pitches I’ve been hearing for vacation-planning sites. The latest: PlanetEye, a service relying on some technology spun out of Microsoft.

PlanetEye is a great site for viewing travel photos of the location you’re thinking of going to. It is also supposed to help you find the cool things to do once you’ve got a location for your trip narrowed down. Then you can save your finds into a “Travel Pack” that you can easily retrieve when it’s ready to embark on your voyage. You can also share your plans with the other people on your trip, so they can contribute to building your hit-list of things to do as well.

PlanetEye is good for scouting photos of a vacation destination, but less good at finding restaurants and attractions.

The site uses Microsoft Maps, and does a nice job of displaying trip photos from other users. But I found it frustrating to use the map to look up attractions and restaurants. Each item (or collection of closely grouped items) on the map is represented by a dot, but there’s no way to know what the dots stand for without clicking on them, and even when you do, the information you want displays in a navigation bar, not on the map as you’d expect. It’s hard to correlate the navigation bar text with the map. This design sucks the fun out of exploring a destination, and, to me, defeats a primary purpose of the site.

If you want a more typical travel guide experience, though, PlanetEye does offer that. There are City Guides for popular destinations, with the usual lists of most popular tourist attractions. Many major cities also have Local Expert pages, which feature more personal guides. Items you find in either of these guides can be added to your Travel Packs.

Coming up soon will be integration with more data sources, such as OpenTable, StubHub, WaySpa, and Wine Spectator. And the Travel Packs may get smarter, and start to suggest items to you based on what you have already added to them and what you say about yourself in your profile. I’d wait until these new features are added, in mid-July, to rely on this product for planning trips.

Related stories:
TravelMuse tells you where to go (on vacation)
Offbeat Guides: Build your own travel books
TripIt aggregates your travel info

See also: Dopplr, TripAdvisor, Tripbase, TravelMuse.

The site has useful, but typical, city guides.

More: continued here

Have two Gmail accounts that you want to keep open at the same time in the same browser? Check out CookiePie, a simple browser extension that will fool your browser’s cookie manager into thinking you’ve got one account open. Once installed, you can have several instances of Gmail, Google Docs, or any other service that doesn’t let you have two windows or tabs open with different accounts.

What makes the extension nice is that you can toggle it on and off with a simple right-click on any tab. My test with Gmail got me to the point of login on a secondary account, but actually trying to open and create messages gave me a dreaded Gmail error message. The same went for Google Docs and Spreadsheets, so there’s some work to be done–at least with Firefox 3, that is. Your mileage may vary on earlier versions, and will probably be fixed in the coming days. Still, this looks to be a handy tool for folks looking to save time by having multiple accounts open without having to resort to the browser shuffle.

Embedded below is a video of it in action. You can grab the extension here.

[via Delicious and Lifehacker]

More: continued here

Citigroup analyst predicts that, with YouTube, Google will be able to bring in more than $1 billion in ads during 2009….

More: continued here