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"Company Name:\nLightPole\n20-Word Description:\nLightPole's mission is to make it easy for content owners to participate in the mobile economy by helping them distribute location-specific information to mobile devices.\nCEO's Pitch:\nLightPole aims to lead the charge into the location-based technology frontier by using familiar tools that help content owners bring the Web to mobile devices in a way that is as easy as blogging and offers a truly individualized, dynamic and location-relevant experience. By applying the core technology from its Content Distribution Fabric, LightPole will pool the collective services of its partners to create a content network, and ultimately marketplace, that is leveragable by the entire mobile marketing ecosystem.\nMashable's Take:\nThere are many mobile services which supply location-based information retrieval today, particularly when on-demand GPS navigation is applicable on handheld, Web-enabled devices. LightPole presents itself as one more attendee to the party, albeit with an option for a growing coterie of publishers to reach users of the company\u2019s software rather easily. Instead of presenting unique applications all their own, LightPole acts as a window through which users gain access to an ever larger number of services custom tailored to small screens - so long as independent publishers opt to distribute their content through LightPole\u2019s Publishing Services component.\nThe company lists services like Trulia and Six Apart as partners using its platform, just to name a couple. (Trulia is a bit of an anomaly in that it is a solitary actor with a dedicated application.)\nIn order to register an account with LightPole and download the mobile software (supported by \u201Chundreds of models of mobile phones, including BlackBerry, Motorola, Nokia\u201D) you\u2019ll need to establish a short profile. Also, if you happen to have an interest in connecting LightPole to a Yahoo Fire Eagle account, which allows you to broadcast your location while making sense of your surroundings, you can do so following the sign-up process. Once you\u2019ve completed these steps, you\u2019re given a selection of utilities to operate. They provide relatively common functions, like restaurant and bar discovery, business reviews (via Yelp), a Wi-Fi finder by the name of HotSpotr, and several others.\nLightPole is free to use, and you have options both to consume data as much as share and make contributions for other users to gain by. Think your review can help the LightPole crowd decide where to go and, in select circumstances, what to order? Submit your thoughts. Yet, if you just want a single platform that gives you the potential to have a greater and greater number of sources from which to gather content, and gather it in ways that best tap those sources, LightPole is able to serve that role.\nEditor's Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.\nSponsored By: Sun Startup Essentials"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/09/23/lightpole/>