There’s been an overload of mobile location based applications over the past year. Fourquare, Gowalla are of course leading the advertising hype. And then there are Loopt, Yelp, Whrrl, Flook – a range of services – based on the location element. Some of these will be winners and some will fall by the wayside but the one firm which is a confirmed winner is: Skyhook Wireless.

For those not familiar with Skyhook Wireless, they have a software based hybrid positioning system, including GPS, Wi-Fi and cell tower triangulation. The company’s fortunes changed once they were picked to power location for the iPhone.

Today, they monitor most if not all the location applications on the iPhone app store, Android marketplace and even the Ovi Store and BB world. What that implies is that all the data being collected by these applications is also getting added to their platform. As a result, they have about 40 billion data points on their database today. And as we’ve seen time and time again, there may be hundreds of applications but the only way to get through the clutter is to put your money in the powering platform.

An afterthought – they have done all of this with approximately $16million in capital. That’s not a lot which makes it an even more appealing story; investors are Bain Capital, Intel Capital, RRE Ventures and some angels.

And where is the competition?

Navizon Inc is a software based wireless provisioning system (earlier Mexens Technology) which is building a dynamic database, using crowd sourcing to collect information on Wi-Fi access points, GPS locations and cellular towers. They have developed a reward based point system for information added to the database (this in comparison to Skyhook which started off by using students and retired personnel for Wi-Fi points data collection) and today have about 1 million users worldwide.

The positive element in the story – they have recently been selected by Microsoft to power their location capability (for Windows 7). This is in addition to Yahoo mobile which had selected them last year. Still between Skyhook and Google Latitude (which still has the highest number of hits on a daily basis) they will certainly find it a tougher proposition to establish themselves.

In summary, my only question for Skyhook is when do they go public and how do I get the opportunity to invest in the firm. Interestingly enough, there is no information on them in Second Market.

An afterthought - hopefully, they will not just become an eventual acquisition target for Apple, Microsoft, Nokia or perhaps even Google. And it certainly shouldn't be one of the operators which will only destroy their model. I'm quite sure I don't like what Vodafone did with Wayfinder.