Ask.com joins searching party with GPS offering

Ask.com announced it will offer a GPS-enabled mobile search application, a move that puts the company in direct competition with the likes of Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc.-and also further crowds the market for location-based services. IAC, parent company of Ask.com, is calling Ask Mobile GPS a “GPS-enabled lifestyle application” and says the service is “the first ever to combine local content, social networking and GPS navigation.”
The service allows users to browse listings from IAC’s Citysearch local search service, with GPS serving to pinpoint nearby locations and providing turn-by-turn directions. The application also allows users to view IAC’s Evite invitations and navigate to an event’s address, and turn their “address book into a social network,” as IAC puts it, by broadcasting their location to other people on their contact lists.
“We’ve adapted our brands specifically for mobile phones,” said Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask.com. “We’re not force-fitting content that should be read on a computer screen onto a cellphone.”
IAC built the application in partnership with WaveMarket Inc., which specializes in mobile apps and GPS. IAC intends to add more of its brands to the mobile service.
“This year we’ll add more IAC brands to the application, such as Match.com, Ticketmaster and RealEstate.com, and we plan to expand to a broad array of mobile phones and services to support as many of our 275 million worldwide users as possible,” said Doug Lebda, president and CEO of IAC.
The Ask Mobile GPS downloadable application is currently available for a handful of Sprint Nextel Corp. phones for $10 per month.
The offering is notable as it combines carriers’ GPS information with mapping and search services. Similar offerings from Google and Yahoo do not currently utilize carriers’ GPS information. Several carriers, however, offer their own branded mapping and search services that do include GPS-based locationing.