GigaOM

Google (GOOG) is acquiring certain assets and technology of Zingku, a mobile social network startup that helps users organize their social life via the web and text messaging. Zingku wrote about the deal on its site, and a Google spokesperson confirmed the plans. Zingku, a Boston-based startup was co-founded by Sami Shalabi. The service has been in private beta and new user accounts are currently frozen.

What is Google’s motivation to acquire this little known company? One explanation would be to get talented engineers, but we suspect it would be to bolster their Orkut social network. Zingku is an SMS-turbocharger of sort. While Google lost out to the king and queen of social networking in the U.S. (that’d be MySpace and Facebook), their Orkut is extremely popular in Brazil and India.

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Project Playlist calls itself a “social music experiment.” In other words, it’s just one of the many options available when it comes to adding an embeddable music player to MySpace or Facebook profiles. Its simple player lets users aggregate free MP3 files available on the Net and put them together in a widget that can be posted just about anywhere. This week the company even announced a version of Project Playlist for Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone.

The Beverly Hills, Calif.-based startup has raised $3 million in funding, according to PE Hub. We tried to contact the company to find out more about their Series A round, but to no avail.

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Update: This morning, we found out some more information about 360Desktop. While when we chatted with CEO Evan Jones last night, we were under the impression that the company plans to support itself through partnering with advertisers in the creation of branded desktops, Jones sent us an email this morning noting that the company expects that ”advertiser-branded 360’s would make up less than 0.5 percent of all the 360 content available.”

What about the other 99.5 percent of content? Jones said that these user-made mash-up desktops are available to use for free, just like any free-to-download wallpaper, and that they will “never have any ad content delivered into them, ever.” Additionally, Evans wrote, “In the same way that line or button-sized ads are delivered into apps like Messenger, we may also deliver ads into one small spot in the drop-down navigation utility, but that is not our primary focus.”

360Desktop, an Australian startup, wants to unclutter your desktop and turn it into an unending panorama, and oh by the way also a giant billboard.

The company makes software that turns an ordinary desktop into a long, scrollable horizontal rectangle adorned with customizable wallpaper. Users can leave widgets, Internet windows (that automatically refresh), and applications open on the desktop without clogging up their entire screen.

The self-described “panoramic desktop platform company” based in Melbourne launched at DEMOfall this week. Backed by $1 million in angel funding, the company will make its products publicly available on Nov. 5. Their plan to make money revolves around what else: advertising.

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If you’re like me — tired of old-school personal finance software à la Quicken, you’re in for a treat. Mint, one of the best online personal finance startups I’ve seen, launched yesterday at the TechCrunch40 event. (It was the winner of TechCrunch40’s $50,000 award.)

I’ve been using the beta version for a few weeks now, and I am impressed with what the site has to offer. While competitors Geezeo and Wesabe are reasonably adequate for money management, Mint gets online personal finance right.

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Do we really need another online travel startup? Gregg Brockway, one of the co-founders of online travel site Hotwire.com (EXPE), thinks so. His latest venture, TripIt, launched today. Aimed at the growing number of travelers who are buying flights, hotel rooms and car rentals directly from supplier sites, TripIt allows them to organize all of these individually booked arrangements in one place.

The company enters a crowded space. TripHub.com, for example, similarly allows users to collate their travel plans. But TripIt’s unique twist is that it lets users forward the confirmation e-mails from their bookings to TripIt, which then takes the pertinent information, such as flight number, date and time, and automatically inputs it the user’s travel profile. Also, the site uses the provided travel information to offer related info that could be helpful for the trip, such as weather and local maps.

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