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.