Lonely Planet decided to create a mobile travel startup separate from its mother company BBC Worldwide. Dubbed as Fourforty Inc., the new company is based in San Francisco and is geared towards the development of social mobile travel guides.

“We’ve set up a freestanding company in San Francisco and we’re going to use equity to attract a world-class team,” Lonely Planet CEO Matt Goldberg revealed.

“Lonely Planet is contributing key assets like brand, talent, technology and distribution. With the explosion of mobile and the scale of social, with a GPS in every smartphone, what does a guide look like?

Fourforty Inc. is currently looking for more partners while prepping for the launch of its first product in a few months. It’s an app called Wenzani (it means “Where are you going?” in Zulu).

One of Lonely Planet’s South African project prime executives was named the CEO for Fourforty Inc. The company, though owned by BBC Worldwide, bought most of its shares in 2007 and has bought another 25 percent during the summer, and is not involved with Fourforty at all. This comes in line with the company’s decision to separate innovation from legacy media.

“By doing this (Fourforty) as an independent company, we can invite those around the travel space to join us without feeling any compunction,” Goldberg added.

Lonely Planet was previously based in Australia but was transferred by BBC Worldwide in London to sit beside its mother company.  It has a mobile team in Oakland, California and a publishing business called Down Under. Lonely Planet also currently has over 220 mobile apps across 4 platforms, many of which integrated with augment reality functionality.

But Lonely Planet is branching out into a space that’s gaining traction, so competition is on the rise.  There are a lot of other startups trying to overthrow traditional travel companies from the top down. One of them is Triposo, a start-up founded by two ex-Googlers Hon Tirsen and Douwe Osinga. They intend to mimic what Google did with world information, and that’s to aggregate information and make things easily searchable through powerful algorithms. Gowalla also launched social travel guides for cities across the globe in place of check-ins.

While some are building on more services, others were acquired.  Travel startup Goby for example, was recently acquired by location services provider TeleNav.