Reply.com this week announced plans to raise $60 million in an IPO. ReachLocal had earlier announced similar plans to go public. The success of one or both companies’ efforts will have a major impact on other local-themed companies’ efforts to raise funds and/or go public.

Looking at Reply.com’s SV-1, we see that the company has 127 full-time employees, including 103 in sales and marketing, 14 in technology and 10 in general and administrative. It has raised $27.5 million since its inception, and last year grossed $34.3 million in revenues from more than 5,000 advertisers. It also delivered 700,000 leads.

The brainchild of AutoWeb Cofounder Payam Zamani, Reply.com was founded in 2001 primarily as a lead generation service for autos, with real estate added in 2003. In 2005, the company acquired Connecting Neighbors, which builds sponsored neighborhood Web sites for real estate professionals.

In 2006, Reply.com’s strategy made a sharp turn. It announced plans to sell Connecting Neighbors, which recently only contributed 5 percent of its revenues; and added “enhanced clicks” generated from auctioning inventory for a variety of local categories from the search engines and ad networks. The company reasoned that the search engines and ad networks had a massive amount of left-over local inventory that needed to be specially targeted.

The online auction marketplace was introduced in 4Q 2008 with auto and real estate components. Since then, it has added home improvement and has just added insurance.

In the SVI, Reply.com noted that 65 percent of its income comes from locally targeted national accounts, aggregators and channel partners. But an emerging sales focus is on channel partners offering white-labeled versions of its system. Traditional media companies with a large installed base of advertisers are being specifically targeted.

Reply.com COO Sean Fox is a featured speaker at Marketplaces 2010, taking place in San Diego March 22-24.

In all the excitement around geolocation, Google’s latest move to discern local intent is a search tool that enables “nearby” filtering. This is useful during the times when a geographic modifier, like a ZIP code, is not used in a search query.

The underlying technology has been there for a while to serve local results when geo isn’t specified. Google has made a few moves in this direction over the past year. This included local results served in cases of “implied” local intent (think categories where intent is likely to be local).

This new option simply meets users halfway by giving them a button make their intent more explicit and “localize” a set of results that didn’t fit the bill. Like the aforementioned automatic local results, this will most often pull a user’s IP address (or you can enter a city or ZIP manually).

In cases where users have opted in for Google’s MyLocation feature, the results could be much more accurate, as this feature utilizes Wi-Fi signal triangulation to pinpoint PC users’ locations. This much is clear, but there is more to the nuts and bolts that will require investigation. More to come.

Foursquare is blowing up in the tech mediasphere. It’s also standard issue for the mobile elite in cities like New York and San Francisco, and I admit addiction. But there is a certain amount of tech media distortion going on — also known as the Silicon Valley effect.

This refers to the coverage bias to focus on things we in the analyst corps and media tend to use ourselves. The mobile social service gets way more ink than its 500,000 users deserve, and it’s something that my parents, for example (and tens of millions of Americans), have never heard of.

To be fair it’s growing rapidly, now up to a million check-ins per month. But more so, the quickly growing list of traditional media deals it’s signing could begin to launch it into the mobile mainstream.

Most notable is last night’s 20-second ad that aired on Bravo — part of the partnership the two companies recently formed. Many will see it and shrug, but the reach we’re talking about in a major cable TV spot could pique mass curiosity. Bravo’s audience of young urban foodies is also on target.

The Bravo partnership itself creates a Foursquare presence with recommendations pushed to any Foursquare user who connects to it. This includes a series of special badges to unlock. These badges — plus competition to become “mayor” of local establishments — are central to the gaming element that drives Foursquare’s appeal.

Driving users to local bars & restaurants is ultimately the result, and the real value the company sits on. It’s already worked with this (no money exchanged) in its “nearby specials” feature. After first seeing this, specials are popping up more and more when I check in to local places on Foursquare.

The uncertain part is how Foursquare will directly monetize the foot traffic its driving. It’s seeing some money come through the door, but we’ll see more revenue models develop soon.

Local/social leaders from Facebook, Yelp and Twitter took the stage at IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting in Carlsbad, California, this week to discuss what IAB President Randall Rothenberg called “the mobile/social local real-time medium that does not have a name.”

Facebook’s Tim Kendall, director of monetization, said Facebook has essentially introduced “marketing on the social graph” by tracking its unique information, such as “pages,” “events,” “like,” “share” and “connect.”  “We’re getting pretty good at showing you ‘who matters to me’ on news feed and topics,” he said.

Advertising on the site is now in full play. “We have created a social marketing experience that we think it the most interesting social advertising on the Web,” he said. And Facebook’s advertising success is demonstrably strong. “Our click to conversion rate is two to three times other sites. Social wins every time.”

Kendall added that Facebook’s effective CPM ends up being “a couple of dollars,” but that advertisers also come in via the service’s self-serve advertising, which is priced on a flat rate basis.

Jed Nachman from Yelp estimated that the site’s effective CPM was $200. One example, Little Star Pizza in San Francisco, for instance, had 1,500 looks (and presumably pays $300 for the ad). Nachman also noted that on average, Yelp users look at 2-4 reviews before making any decisions.

Meanwhile, Twitter is preparing to launch its first ad product next month, according to Anamitra Banerji, who is “Product Management, Monetization.” Banerji said his prior experience at Overture told him to “innovate really, really quickly before anyone else comes up with it.”

Banerji added that people should “be focused on what you are doing and not worry about what people are doing around you.” He also noted that Twitter is a distributed product. “We don’t see ourselves as a Web site,” he said.

Weighing in on social during a separate session at IAB was MySpace Co-President Jason Hirschhorn. Hirschhorn noted that MySpace is refocused on entertainment and music. “We’re not jettisoning our roots as a social network. But our fans want to be entertained. Not everyone is a publisher.”

Hirschhorn spoke admiringly of Facebook, which has basically deposed MySpace as a leader in social media with almost four times the traffic — 128 million uniques versus 400 million uniques. “The media community itself has its social graph on Facebook,” he said. “But there is a completely different behavior and mind-set you are tapping into when you are a brand marketer.” He noted that MySpace still has information on 13 million bands, and a “16-34 type audience.”

Mobile and online “questions” company ChaCha today has partnered with local search and listings provider Localeze. This primarily involves ChaCha’s Web site (as opposed to mobile), and will insert deeper local business information around questions asked on the site.

Specifically,15 million local listings will be provided through a search bar. Results will come with the standard set of maps, contact info and other stuff Localeze has assembled. A unique site experience could develop if previously indexed questions and answers “map” to these businesses or their categories.

Additionally, if the site can recommend local businesses that relate to new questions asked, it could have something interesting on its hands as an SMB lead source. It’s unclear how this will come together exactly, but it has some unique implications.

“The trend in the local search space is moving towards using business listings as the anchor for local specific content,” Localeze head of Bus Dev Gib Olander told me this morning. “ChaCha does a great job of answering questions and a consistent set of business listings helps hold all of that together.”

Other possibilities include integrating business listings into ChaCha’s coupons site (ChaChacoupons.com). Listings could also potentially integrate with ChaCha’s primary mobile answers service, but this is more of  a stretch, given the SMS format and the way users currently engage the service.

It would seem that this requires training users to see the mobile service as a place to seek local business information in addition to general knowledge. But if it can do this, it will get more mileage out of the Localeze content in potentially monetizable ways. The company is likely thinking in these terms.

Keep Moving

Overall, this represents the latest evolutionary step for ChaCha, which has gone through many since its 2007 launch. It started in the small batch of “human powered” search engines that loosely contain others like Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo.

This entailed humans who sat around and did Google searches for incoming queries. The idea is that human intervention enables natural language searches. The company soon migrated to mobile as a primary access point, using low-cost part-time labor (i.e., housewives and college students) to conduct Google searches from incoming SMS queries.

Human guides got expensive and were a source of flak for the company. But a larger index of previous questions and answers (about 500 million, it claims) has allowed it to begin to automate much of this process. It’s now up to about a million questions a day, through mobile, online and Facebook app.

Other milestones include passing Google as the top SMS search service, according to Nielsen Mobile. It’s also been a darling to the venture community, raising round after round of funding over the past couple of years — now totaling $70 million.

Local content could be a natural extension of a Q&A format, and tie in with the local intent of many online searchers (and even more so in mobile). We’ll see how it comes together and will report back after a briefing with ChaCha.

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Related: See previous ChaCha coverage in our interview with former CEO Brad Bostic.

Mobile M&A activity continues … except this time it’s a mobile ad network on the buy side. Following Google’s $750M AdMob acquisition, and Apple’s $275M Quattro acquisition, the largest remaining independent ad network, Millennial Media, will acquire mobile analytics firm TapMetrics for an undisclosed amount.

TapMetrics will allow Millennial to offer developers more comprehensive revenue management dashboards. This will be chock-full of application analytics such as feature and version adoption, device access types, user feedback, and crash reports.

Overall, this can be viewed as a very developer-centric move. As ad networks increasingly compete to build networks of app developers, this will help Millennial to provide better incentives. The carrot for developers here is a tool to better optimize and monetize their apps.

Speaking of analytics, this is a good chance to mention Millennial’s latest in its line of monthly SMART reports. It takes a year-end look at some of the biggest trends and lists of ’09. See the collage of data below and download the report here.

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SuperMedia has announced a new program that extends its SuperGuarantee idea into the autos vertical. The SuperGuarantee Autos program gives anyone who buys a car on SuperMedia’s EveryCarListed.com automotive vertical a free limited powertrain warranty good for up to $3,000.

SuperMedia acquired EveryCarListed last February and has since made its comprehensive video inventory a key point of difference from other car sites.

SuperMedia seems to be making a huge bet that it can clearly differentiate its brands by making its SuperGuarantee concept central to everything it does. The SuperGuarantee was introduced last year originally as a program that stands behind the work of contractors sourced through the SuperMedia (previously Idearc) Yellow Pages. The idea behind the guarantee is to instill consumer confidence in the SuperPages brand.

In an interview with BIA/Kelsey at the end of 2009, SuperMedia CEO Scott Klein made it very clear that the guarantee will be at the heart of SuperMedia efforts to revive itself in 2010. The company went into bankruptcy in March 2009 as Idearc Media, and exited court protection on New Year’s Eve with $7 billion in debt gone from its balance sheet.

In that conversation, Klein said the SuperGuarantee provides SuperMedia with a much needed point of differentiation.That insight appears to be guiding SuperMedia’s initiatives in 2010.

This Thursday, Feb. 25, at 2 p.m. EST, we’ll hold a free webinar to outline the key discussion points that underly the upcoming Marketplaces 2010 program.

This will include a unique look at some of the presenting companies, as well as commentary and data around the opportunity drivers in local verticals across all media. Highlights will include social media, online trends and lots of mobile. We’ll also take questions.

As a bonus, we’ll provide a promotional code to all who register, good for $200 off the current registration rate. We hope to see (hear) you there.

You can register here.

Juniper Research has released a report that projects the global mobile location based services (MLBS) to reach $12.7 billion by 2014.

This is different in scope from BIA/Kelsey’s forecast released yesterday — or at least the mobile component of that forecast that projects U.S. mobile local ad revenues to reach $2.2 billion by 2014. Juniper is looking at the global market for location based mobile services.

Usage will be highest in Asia the report projects, but the most revenues will come from Western Europe. This includes both subscription and advertising revenues. But interestingly, the firm projects the advertising portion — where our forecast focuses — to grow at a faster rate (via TechCrunch):

“Location-based applications are extremely interesting for brands and retailers in that they allow those companies to direct consumers to outlets in their vicinity while simultaneously providing information about the products on offer. When these are allied to measures such as mobile coupons and vouchers, you have the combination of information and financial incentive which can be compelling for consumers.”

Growth drivers include hardware evolution, application marketplace proliferation, higher capacity network deployments, and the consumer adoption that hinges on all of the above. These factors are currently pushing the growth of services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Gowalla, Loopt, et al. We’ll see advertiser interest follow.