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LightPole, a mobile location service platform company, is announcing today that it has integrated its software with Yahoo’s Fire Eagle service, the repository for location-based information.

LightPole has also introduced more features that let users of LightPole-based applications post directly from their phones and create their own custom channels.

The upshot is that LightPole can make it easier to come up with new mobile applications that are based on existing web sites. LightPole supplies the backend know-how to take web site data services, such as a site for finding Wi-Fi hot spots, and turns them into an application that works on any mobile phone. The company is currently in beta testing.

Doug Klein, CEO of LightPole, says that customizing sites so you can use them on the phone gives users the power of “geo-context,” or finding information when they need it. As we noted before, LightPole can take Yelp restaurant listings and make them viewable on a cell phone map. It also lets users comment on restaurants and share those comment with friends on a specific mobile channel.

You also check the location of bar happy hour events using the Mappy Hour program. That’s because the web site has a widget from LightPole that lets the site send its bar data down to the user’s phone. With Yahoo Fire Eagle, you can use the cell phone’s cell site location data to fix your location, even if your phone doesn’t have a paid global positioning system (GPS) capability.

“We can get a lot of content on the phone for free,” Klein said. “And we can extend the reach of web developers without requiring them to do a lot of work.”

Klein showed me how he could use Yahoo Fire Eagle to set his location in certain neighborhoods in New York and then use the location to discover the closest amenities through various LightPole applications. You can thus use the phone to plan a trip. You can check to see if your friends recommend anything — by posting their own personal points of interest — in that neighborhood. You can store your location, and trusted applications can access that data so they can direct the proper services in your direction.

Mappy Hour is one service that will let mobile users post their own additional bar-hopping tips, enhancing the data that is available on the web site. More prolific users can create their own mobile channels that others can subscribe to and receive alerts from.

Founded in January 2007, LightPole is headquartered in San Francisco and has a development center in China. It has 14 employees. It has raised $1.7 million from Alloy Ventures and Stanford University. Its competitors include Where, ULocate, Google Maps, and Yahoo Local (which is also one of its partners). Hundreds of phones are already compatible with LightPole; at some point, the Apple iPhone will be as well.

Putting “geo-context” into information is a hot topic these days on the mobile web.

The phrase means making data more useful by putting geographic context behind it, like listing all of the wireless Internet hot spots nearest you on a map on the phone. Adding geo-context to the mobile web is what LightPole, a start-up that launches today, is banking its business on.  LightPole says it can take just about any web site and turn it into a mobile service with geo-context.

For instance, it can make Yelp’s restaurant listings viewable on the map view of a cell phone. But it goes a step further than mobile map or search services because it lets someone comment on results, share it with a bunch of friends and have it viewable on a wide variety of phones.

On the consumer side, it lets phone users discover what’s around them, said Doug Klein, CEO of LightPole in San Francisco.

“A GPS navigator gets you to a certain point, but we let you discover what’s around you when you reach that point,” he said.

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) to load a mobile version of that site’s services onto a cell phone. Users type in their phone numbers and enter confirmation codes to 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. Yelp identifies nearby restaurants. You can use the application to view restaurant details, make a reservation, share it with friends and then exchange text messages about a meeting time — all by looking at your phone. Hotspotr locates nearby Wi-Fi wireless Internet access points.

LightPole also announced today that it’s raised its $1.7 million first round of capital from Alloy Ventures and Stanford University.

Competitors include basic search services such as 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 likely to compete in the same space.

At some point, Klein said, LightPole will create a third-party application for the iPhone, using Apple’s newly released software development kit.