Ever since I saw the first cell phone with built-in GPS, I knew this would be a hot market for applications.

It is nice to have confirmation.

In their efforts to make Android/G-Phone an instant market hit, Google ran a contest awarding a quarter of a million dollars to people who wrote cool applications for their mobile platform. Ten teams earned $275,000 each for the software they developed … and each application used GPS in some way.

Rephrased: Google gave $2.8 million dollars only to people who developed GPS-aware apps.

I can’t comment on any of the winners having not seen their products first hand, but the market validation at play here is extraordinary. GPS combined with wireless data networks and cheep server hosting has created an entirely new and viable market. The ability to tie people on the move with anything that enhances their ability to be on the move is a natural fit. It eases life away from home (have a cab sent to wherever the hell I’m standing), makes life at the moment more spontaneous and thus enjoyable (I’m jonesing for some Thai food — were is the nearest restaurant) and can make socializing more effective (Google says there is a club with a lot of 20-30 year old women right around the corner).

Like the Internet before it and the mobile handset market today, the location-based market is wide open. The cost to develop and support such applications is cheaper than nearly any point in history, aside from the perpetual problem caused by supporting a huge variety of different handsets (a worry that Silicon Strategies Marketing client DeviceAnywhere handles quite nicely). It is a market primed for the next new reality.

I wish I had the gumption to launch another start-up. This is the market and now is the time.