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The company behind Ask.com, Citysearch, Evite.com, and more than 50 other high-powered websites has released Ask Mobile GPS, a GPS-enabled “lifestyle application” that combines local content with a instant location finder, a friend finder, personal events, and turn-by-turn navigation powered by the Global Positioning System and AT&T Natural Voices Text to Speech engine. You may remember that a version of Ask Mobile without the GPS feature won a Webby Award this year.

The Ask Mobile GPS service is being sold for US$9.99 a month, initially for seven Sprint Nextel phones, but the list of supported networks on the Ask Mobile GPS download page also includes AT&T / Cingular, Verizon, T-Mobile USA, Alltel, Amp’d, Boost, Helio, Metro PCS, U.S. Cellular, and Virgin Mobile USA. For certain other phones, you can subscribe to a $2.99 per month version that includes GPS but not Ask’s Navigation service.

As of March 2007, mobile statistics showed Google was still the most popular mobile domain in the US and the UK, with 1,894,143 and 348,873 visitors respectively. Ask.com wasn’t in the top ten. In the US, Yahoo had 1,315,801 visitors, though only 89,668 in the UK. Google Mobile and Yahoo! oneSearch are available on the Mobile Web menu of most US mobile phones.

However, at February’s 3GSM Congress in Barcelona, the largest mobile trade fest, some of Europe’s biggest wireless providers reportedly met in secret to plan a mobile search engine that could compete with Google and Yahoo. The companies included AT&T/Cingular from the US, as well as Vodafone, France Telecom, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom, Hutchison Whampoa, and Telecom Italia, but have said little about it since.

Besides the big names, other mobile GPS services include the free Mobile GMaps which works on any phone equipped with QUALCOMM’s gpsOne technology. WaveMarket, which powers Ask Mobile GPS, also introduced StreetHive, the first GPS-enabled friend finder service. Other friend finders: Mologogo and Loopt, which so far is only available on Boost Mobile.