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WorldMate, the popular travel planning and organizational service, has expanded its mobile reach onto the iPhone. The two different versions of the app, which were released late Tuesday night (one free, and a premium version that costs a hefty $19.99), give travelers tools to create and track travel itineraries including flights, hotel reservations, rental cars, and any appointments along the way.

The two versions of the app offer identical functionality for core parts of WorldMate's service, like a flight search tool, world clock list, currency conversion, and a heads-up display on what's on your schedule. However, the paid "gold" version comes without any kind of advertising. Feature-wise, it also adds niceties like an automatic flight status checker that, with the soon-to-be-released iPhone OS 3.0, will send you an alert if there's a delay or cancellation of your flight. It also plugs into Google Maps to tack together a rich map with all the places you're visiting on your trip.

Until it gets the live notifications, users of both versions will simply have to use the one-click "check flight status" link. This checks information against WorldMate's delay and cancellation tracker. It also lets you know about any last-minute gate changes.

WorldMate can put your entire travel itinerary in one app, and give you a heads-up if there are any delays or cancellations. It even has mini apps built in, like this currency converter (pictured right)

(Credit: CNET)

The app is quite polished and ran smoothly on my phone. You can get more full-featured versions of the productivity tools that are included in the app by using other, standalone iPhone applications, however WorldMate's strength is that it puts all of those things in one package. This may seem like a trivial matter, but since the iPhone does a lousy job at multitasking, it's nice to have a Swiss army app equivalent.

WorldMate faces competition from TripIt, which has had its own iPhone app since mid-April. It does many of these things in a free package. However, it does not yet have its own notification service. Instead, it takes any delay notifications you get from your carrier and updates its own information. It's also tied into third-party services (via its API) that can alert you to potential changes to your travel plans.

RetailMeNot, an online destination for coupons and discounts, announced Tuesday that it has a new printable coupon offering, dubbed RetailMeNot Printable. According to the company, users will be able to print more than 90,000 coupons from thousands of companies.

RetailMeNot also announced that it has partnered with MoneyMailer, Redplum, and Valpak, to provide its users with more printable in-store coupons. The company didn't disclose the details, but it did say that it will continue to add partners to expand the volume of the coupons it offers. Its Printable service is live now.

Rhode Island's general treasurer, Frank T. Caprio, announced Tuesday that he will use Twitter to broadcast the state's cash flow on a daily basis. According to Caprio, each day's tweet will provide gross revenue and expenditure information of the General Fund. Caprio claims his office wanted to be open with the community and Twitter, he felt, was the best way to achieve that. To follow Caprio, click here.

Online travel itinerary service TripIt has unveiled an iPhone app that will keep the user's TripIt itineraries available whether on 3G, offline, or in airplane mode. According to the company, TripIt will provide links to airlines, hotels, restaurants, and more. It also has maps and directions at the ready. The app is available now for free in the Apple App Store.

Goom Radio, a newly-founded New York-based online radio company, raised $16 million in a round of funding that was led by Wellington Partners Venture Capital. The company plans to use the funding to launch its service, hire a dedicated sales team, and build out its infrastructure. Goom Radio plans to launch later this year.

Online travel itinerary and trip-planning service TripIt announced Monday that it has launched a new application programming interface for developers who want to integrate the company's travel itineraries into their respective service. The API will allow developers to share itinerary information between sites and travel agents. The first iteration of the TripIt API, which is available now, will only allow users to read, add, or delete trip plans.

ChaCha, a human-powered answers service, wants to raise $30 million in a Series C round of funding, reports PEHub. So far, the company has been able to raise approximately $11 million, but investor information has yet to be disclosed.

YouTube now allows users who leave comments to delete them. Those who wish to do so can click a new "delete" button that appears in the "Text Comments" section below a video. So far, YouTube will only allow users to delete their own comments.

ProPay, a service that competes with PayPal and provides the same basic service, announced Monday that it's now extending its offering to eBay Bronze PowerSellers. Prior to the announcement, ProPay was available only to eBay Silver, Gold, and Platinum PowerSellers. The ProPay eAuction service requires Bronze PowerSellers to pay 3.1 percent and 30 cents per transaction or lower for Silver, Gold, and Platinum PowerSellers.

The Internet has been voted the best source for investors to make financial decisions, claims a new study from Forbes. The study, which was conducted in November, found 65 percent of respondents believe the Web is the "most important source of investing information." In 2005, only 52 percent of respondents made the same claim. Newspapers, on the other hand, are losing importance. The study found that only 17 percent of all respondents say they use newspapers to make investing decisions.

Tripit, which I mentioned in an earlier post about Planjam, is a do-it-all travel service that helps people organize their travel plans (flight numbers, car rental info, accommodations, etc.) in one central location that can be updated and accessed on the go. Today they're launching a new feature called "closeness" alerts.

Much like Dopplr, which we peeked at last month, the whole idea behind the alerts is to let you know when your buddies (Tripit calls them "colleagues") will be in town or traveling in or around the same place at the same time. The only things existing Tripit users need to do to get in on the alerts are a) have at least five other people as friends and b) make and share their travel plans either publicly, or by inviting their friends as viewers.

So how do the new closeness alerts affect privacy? What if you don't want other people to see that you're going on a trip? The good news is that the closeness alerts are setup the same way as any other trip on Tripit, meaning that if your trip is marked as private, the only other Tripit members who will be able to see it are those you invite to participate.

There is certainly a lot of potential for these services, especially if you've got a large social graph and wouldn't mind unexpectedly seeing your friends while traveling. It certainly beats a flight out just to see them, and assuming everyone uses the service, you might have a reasonable rate of success.

If you've got people close by on other trips, Tripit will now let you know with its location-based travel alerts.

(Credit: TripIt, Inc. / CNET Networks)

If you've ever been put in charge of a guys night out, there's a new app for you. Personally I just go out and see what happens, but I know people who like to make itineraries, and they need tools. Planjam is such a tool.

The easiest way to describe it is like the Yellow Pages combined with Tripit's itinerary planner. All you have to do to create a plan is plug in your ZIP code, and pick from a selection of landmarks, restaurants, and local attractions that have been categorized by what scene you're into. Planjam will whittle down the potential results by activity, from romantic, all the way to family places and a night on the town for a group of guys or girls.

Once you've found something you like, you simply drag it over to your itinerary, and continue hunting down things to do. When finished, the entire day (or night) can be printed, complete with important things like maps with directions, and phone numbers and addresses. It'll even go so far as to guesstimate how much time you'll be spending at each location, and how much it will cost.

Planjam's planning tool is simple to use, just pick what kind of scene you're interested in, and drag over anything that piques your interest to your itinerary.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

What makes Planjam interesting is its plan building tool. While community services like Yelp and Yahoo Local offer great user reviews and categorization for a destination, they doesn't always offer a way to organize that information in a way that's exploratory. Yelp has lists and Yahoo Local has its weekend guides, but both are short on an actual planning tool.

My one major qualm with Planjam is that it's trying to reinvent the system by offering its own review pages instead of piggybacking on one of these pre-existing user review sites. While the tools are great, it's just the pits if you're blindly picking out places that might have a bad rep. To avoid this, the service is employing some its users as "scenesters" who get a free T-shirt and profit sharing for writing about some of their favorite local hotspots. For me, it's simply not enough to make up for the amount of places that don't have user reviews compared to those that do on competing local review services. If the Planjam folks are serious about building out their directory, I think the first step is integrating existing ratings from other services like Google and Yahoo have done on their directory pages.

Personal travel aggregation service TripIt has received a very important update this morning. It's now able to sync up travel plans that are sent its way to a handful of popular calendaring tools including Google Calendar, Apple iCal, Plaxo, Outlook, or any other service that can handle URL events. What this means for you as the traveler, is that if you're sent a change notice from whatever travel service you booked with, TripIt will spit that out to both your e-mail and your linked-up calendars, saving you the bother of having to manually go in and make changes.

While this may not seem groundbreaking to the casual traveler who travels once every few months, frequent travelers and those who have booked multiple services at once will benefit with the addition of automatic scheduling changes, and the option to rely on their existing scheduling tools.

Since we last covered TripIt in September, the company has launched its mobile service that lets you ping TripIt with an e-mail or text message containing various command codes to have it send information back to you. The most useful one is for the time, date, and confirmation code of your flight, although equally useful is another that lets you pull up your itinerary, or any other notes you've added. They've also got codes to get maps and directions based on the places listed in your itinerary.

I still have to side with Rafe's sentiments that this service would be best served in conjunction with other travel purchase sites. While it's not exactly tough to copy TripIt in with your confirmation e-mails, it would be much nicer to simply click a checkbox at the point of purchase. The move towards integrating it with existing communication mediums like phones and calendars is definitely a step in the right direction, though.

To automate getting calendar updates sent to you, just add one of TripIt's new calendar feeds to any service that supports URL events. Seen here is Google Calendar.

(Credit: TripIt Inc.)

TripIt aggregates all your travel info into one page. Useful!

(Credit: TripIt)

Here's a potentially very useful service for traveling geeks: TripIt. If you forward your electronic travel confirmations (from the airline, the car company, the hotel, etc) to it, it will intelligently collate them all into one place, parse the information, and add related information as well, such as maps, weather, events (from Eventful) and photos of where you're going (from Flickr). The goal being to replace all your pages of printed confirmations with a single online page that has all the relevant info, nicely organized for you.

The TripIt "Itinerator" has a social function: If you set up travel friends who are going on the same trip, it will collect all the data in one place, and will, from that point on, let you share your travel calendars if you like.

Now hinted at here at TechCrunch 40 -- but very important, I think -- would be mobile access to your personal trip pages. While the really reliable mobile output for TripIt is the printout from your smart itinerary, having a mobile-friendly Web page with useful links (local taxi companies, current weather, stuff like that) automatically created for you could be even more valuable.

It's unclear to me if TripIt is sustainable as a standalone, consumer-facing company. The service looks very useful, but I'd hope to see it embedded in booking sites like Travelocity and Orbitz.