LightPole - another Web app to Mobile App Solution

LightPole is another company offering a solution to do the work of taking your Web app and making it available with geo-context, on a cell phone. It’s akin on first look to uLocate’s WHERE platform in my mind, but the Industry Standard says it competes with: “Where, ULocate, Google Maps and Yahoo Local, which is also one of the partners. In the future, services such as Yahoo’s Fire Eagle and Google’s Android phones are to compete in the same space.” I don’t think Fire Eagle or Android are competitors, as far as I understand them.

How does it work? From the Industry Standard:

The software is a kind of translation service. LightPole’s customers put a Java-based widget on a web site. Users click on the widget, which looks like a mobile phone, so that they can load a mobile version of that site’s services onto a cell phone. Users type in their phone numbers, enter confirmation codes, download the application.

LightPole is announcing a bunch of partners today, including Yelp, Hotspotr, Mappy Hour, Yahoo Local, Zvents, The Bathroom Diaries, Gables and Fables, and Platial Mobile Map.

More good news for LightPole: $1.7 million first round of capital from Alloy Ventures and Stanford University was announced today.