There are already many use cases for location aware mobile. The technology grew out of a decade of E911 initiatives, which sought to pinpoint the origin of mobile calls to police or firefighters. Today, mobile subscribers (and mobile app developers) are well-aware of the power of local intelligence and can bake location awareness into 511 calls for traffic conditions or spoken versions of services that “find-the-nearest” ATM, gas station, restaurant or restroom. There are also obvious uses for businesses managing mobile workers or service fleets.

In this announcement, Voxeo notes that it will serve as a single source of location information from a number of carriers. It also notes that it is taking an approach that complies with Best Practices and Guidelines for Location-Based Services provided by the Cellular Telephone and Internet Association (CTIA). That means that end-users must opt-in or “subscribe” to the service. Among Voxeo’s service delivery options are “single or double opt-in” as well as SMS based confirmations.

More detailed information and support, including a description of the API is available here, including a phone number that demonstrates how the call-flow will work for subscription to LBS and retrieval of weather information. Developers will be pleased to find access to an API that is “fully compliant with industry standards as an extension of the Location RESTful API from GSMA’s OneAPI.” It is documented http://help.voxeo.com/helpserver/go/evolution/LBS.

To encourage use by developers, Voxeo offers 1,000 free geolocation look-ups through the API as well as access to its developer support resources.

NavteQ has been holding these competitions since 2003. The mission is to foster new, creative uses dynamic positioning technology and (oh yeah) NAVTEQ® maps.