Avvo, the free legal ratings and review site that has taken on the giant legal publishers that have long dominated the business, announced that it has raised $10 million in Series C funding. The new round adds to $13 million previously raised. The round was led by DAG Ventures, which joins existing investors Benchmark Capital and Ignition Partners.

The company’s business model relies on advertising and enhanced legal profiles. Avvo says it now covers 90 percent of U.S. lawyers. Legal is a $225 billion industry in the U.S. The industry spends about $4.5 billion annually on marketing.

CEO Mark Britton says that the company has grown rapidly, and now has 38 employees, including 18 sales people. The key to winning the new funding was the company’s success  in selling advertising to lawyers. Advertising  launched in early 2009, with a wide range of offerings “from $25 to thousands of dollars” a month .

Lawyers are always very busy, but can be sold if you understand their specific needs as a divorce specialist, or a real estate lawyer, says Britton. They also want to do more than by advertising, wanting to discuss ways to improve their profile on the site, etc.  “Lawyers need a lot of help.”

PaidContent reports that AOL Ventures is creating a $10 million venture capital fund for local start-ups. The fund expects to support the “increasing number of startups” in the market. AOL Ventures had previously announced that it is spending $50 million this year to launch Patch.com in “hundreds” of communities.

The company also announced it will relaunch its “City’s Best” entertainment guides in 25 cities, while adding geotargeted local content to AOL.com. In its announcement, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong says the local space online is “an untapped market for the most part and one of the largest commercial opportunities online that has yet to be won.”

AOL Ventures EVP Jon Brod is the opening keynote at Marketplaces 2010 next week in San Diego.

Online scheduling appears to be one of the break-out features in the marketplaces space this year. Nineteen percent of respondents to BIA/Kelsey’s most recent User View say they made a non-restaurant online appointment in the past six months.

Major appointment sites include BookFresh, Full Slate, ZocDoc, Agendize and MaxiPage. Each hopes to be the OpenTable of the services world. While they each have different focus points, they tend to provide an online scheduling platform, with additional services, such as enhanced profiles, pricing, etc.

The latest entrant we’ve become aware of is Atlanta-based AppointmentCity. The site launched last September with an effort initially aimed at dentists.

Founder Sherwin Krug, a former CPA, says he is targeting a market in which more than 7 million searches a month are performed for dentists. An online appointment is a more definitive source of leads since you know where and when consumers want to go. The enhanced profile that the site provides makes it more of a Yellow Pages-style considered purchase.

The original model had a monthly fee of $100 and a success fee of $50 per job. But Krug says the monthly fees were eliminated after three months and refunds were provided since the site really wants to build its volume. Looking forward, the site will expand to other media specialities, such as Lasik, Podiatrists, Chiropractors and Plastic Surgeons.

Other verticals are also being eyed by the site. Since they each have different pricing characteristics, AppointmentCity is likely to vary its fee structure for different verticals. Podiatrists, for instance, assign high lifetime values to each account, but individual job fees should be smaller since jobs tend to be lower value.

Groupon has a roaring head start in the deals of the day category for groups, with more than a million users. We’ll hear all about Groupon from CEO Andrew Mason at next week’s Marketplaces conference in San Diego, where he is keynoting. But there are now countless imitators adding their own deals.

New York-based 8Coupons.com, which aggregates coupons from content partners such as Valpak, Money Mailer and RedPlum’s SuperCoups, has now put them all together in one spot (great idea). 8Coupons launched the top 10 U.S. cities last month, and now has 55 different Group Buying “Deals of the Day” Web sites in 100 cities. Based on what we are hearing around the industry, many more sites are likely to enter the space soon.

CBS Local has launched an auto shopping guide on the Web site of WCCO-TV Minneapolis, using vertical content and services from High Gear Media, a Palo Alto, California-based auto specialist publisher launched two years ago by Daily Shopper founder Hesky Kutscher.

The CBS Local deal marks the first local effort for High Gear, which has 90 vertical auto-related car sites of its own. It also has distribution on site such as NASCAR.com, Yahoo Autos and Huffington Post. Its own vertical sites include TheCarConnection.com, MotorAuthority.com, GreenCarReports.com, AllCarsElectric.com and FamilyCarGuide.com.

VP of Product Management Jeff Birkeland tells us the CBS Local site will launch with 1.2 million pages of “very curated” content including content from a six-person full-time staff and freelance auto writers, as well as 200 community sources. He believes the level of specific, high-level auto writing is much higher from general content creators such as Associated Content and Demand Media.

Events are a vertical that cuts across many segments: travel, retail, sports, entertainment, education, dining, culture and others. Major players include specialists such as Zvents, Eventful, Americantowns.com and Center’d. City sites such as Citysearch and Yelp are active in the space as well.

A new one for us is Goby.com, a venture-backed firm that comes out of Mike Stonebraker’s relational database studies at MIT. The site, which launched in September 2009, has already had 250,000 visitors. It reviews 300 categories of things to do, from camping to opera. It can be embedded into other sites via Facebook Connect. An iPhone app is coming out “soon.”

The site breaks things up three ways: What would you like to do? Where? and When? It makes a special effort to go beyond “cities with airports next to them.” For instance, the most thorough listing of events in Carlsbad, CA 92009 that I’ve seen.

CEO Mark Watkins, a veteran of vertical search at Endeca, says the site is task- centric and created to be a “search engine for things to do in your free time. It does equally well for people planning a trip or sitting around the dinner table on Friday, wondering what they are going to do this weekend.”

It also approaches events in a way that Google may not. “Google gives answers for general purposes. But it understands keywords, not structured data. Plane tickets and other semantic information are not on Google,” he says. “We’re getting very focused results. We can sort Web data by price,” among other things.

The general model for search engines is to have a keyword and give back a URL, says Watkins. But Goby seeks to convert those Web pages to real world entities people can make decisions about. “We’ve cross-referenced photography from across the Web, and integrated more video types, and MP3 from concerts,” he says.

Another focus is to figure out how people decide to go to events. “We want to know: How did you decide to be at that restaurant?” says Watkins. It is the interaction of the search and gaming worlds, building off location-based sites like Foursquare and Gowalla.

Indeed, Watkins emphasizes that Goby.com is not just about events. “Events are really important. But they are one dimension of how we spend free time.” Travel is another aspect. “We’re coming at it like a search engine, as opposed to TripAdvisor,” he says. Travel is surprisingly local oriented and is more complementary to local than is generally realized, notes Watkins. More than half of queries — 55 percent — are typically near users.

As for revenues, the site expects to initially receive the lion’s share from affiliate and lead generation fees. It anticipates revenues from sites such as Priceline, and tour providers if it can recommend an Alcatraz tour in San Francisco, for instance. Or its personalization and recommendation engines can promote an Opera performance. When the site gets bigger, it will be more interesting to advertisers, says Watkins.

The site will also have a white label “pro” model for sites that might be licensed by media publishers, or travel suppliers.

The “Flash e-commerce” space got hotter today, as Washington, D.C.-based LivingSocial announced a new $30 million round led by U.S. Venture Partners. Grotech Ventures and Revolution (Steve Case’s company) are also participating.

The funding will be used to launch deal-a-day coupon sites in Chicago, Denver/Boulder, Raleigh-Durham and San Diego. These cities are actually live today, along with Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis-St. Paul, New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C.

LivingSocial got its start with Visual Bookshelf on Facebook, and has launched some additional applications since then (i.e., “Find a Happy Hour,” “Pick Your Five”). The company appears mostly focused, however, on the hot Deal a Day space, where it competes with Groupon, which has raised a total of $34.7 million, as well as a host of similarly themed providers (and many more on the way).

Last August, CEO and cofounder Tim O’Shaughnessy told us he sees the LivingSocial deals as “a huge opportunity” to market to customers based on their pronounced online preferences, and to take those preferences offline.

MerchantCircle’s Merchant Index tracks merchant confidence in the economy (low). But it also yields some unexpected “real world” insight into merchant awareness and use of their local online marketing options.

The Index is based on 11,000+ e-mail respondents, so there is likely to be an online bias in the results. Of its 1.1 million registered SMBs, MerchantCircle also has a strong base of rural and exurban members, but MerchantCircle officials don’t believe these businesses are disproportionally represented.

We’re most drawn to the low recognition accorded to many local mainstays that are “big deals” in our cyber capitals. The new LBS services, Foursquare and GoWalla, for instance, have recognition of just 7.5 percent and 5.7 percent each.

The principal city sites do better. Yelp has 39.4 percent while Citysearch has 66.5 percent. The disparity between them is not surprising given the latter’s longer track record and deeper national reach. Yelp’s awareness may be better pegged to its principal cities (i.e., San Francisco, where it is apparently the No. 1 resource).

The Index found that 26.1 percent of respondents are promoting on Citysearch, and 17.6 percent on Yelp. Google, Facebook and Twitter (among others) are used by more. Google is used by 59.5 percent; Facebook, by 52.8 percent; and Twitter, by 31.6 percent.

YouTube is a site that the respondents want to start using: 17.5 percent say they want to start using YouTube, while 14.2 percent say they want to start using Facebook.

MerchantCircle VP Darren Waddell is speaking on the New Directory Panel at Marketplaces 2010 in San Diego March 22-24 with Local Matters’ Mat Stover, SuperMedia’s Julie Miller and AT&Ti’s Greg Isaacs.

Local news cooperatives are now in development in San Diego, Chicago, Hawaii and San Francisco. The latter, known as The Bay Area News Project, is building up with a $5 million investment from philanthropist Warren Hellman, who apparently thought it would be a better idea to start fresh than buy The San Francisco Chronicle.

According to an article by James Rainey in the Los Angeles Times today, the 15-person BANP (a placeholder name) envisions potential revenues of $12 million a year with a four-pronged strategy developed by CEO Lisa Frazier, a former McKinsey consultant who is getting paid $400,000 a year.

Revenues are expected to come from multiple sources, including public radio style members and syndication payments from news outlets that use the project’s content. The New York Times, for instance, has lined up to run stories twice a week in its Bay Area edition (as it has in Chicago as well).

The site has snared New West founder and Industry Standard Editor Jon Weber as its editor. It will rely partly on paid interns from UC Berkeley, and is operating out of donated law office space. We’ll follow it — and the others — with interest. With enough of a bankroll, and much lower costs, there is no reason why these sites can’t compete against newspapers, win new types of users and advertising, and save the day for journalism.

Redbeacon, one of the new breed of social/local leads providers for SMBs, said it is now available throughout the entire Bay Area and teaming up with BigTent, a mega-moms network in the Bay Area with more than 100 local cells. BigTent will receive a revenue share carved from Redbeacon’s 10 percent commission.

The deal between BigTent and Redbeacon positions the company not only against Yellow Pages and other newbreed leads providers (i.e.m ServiceMagic, AlikeList, HelpHive, ThumbTack and Sears’ ServiceLive) but also against other sites that specifically tailor to moms (and women generally). These include sites such as Angie’s List and Center’d. It plays on the theory that some women are intimidated by home and trade professionals and may be more likely to seek out a social network for advice and recommendations.

For BigTent, the partnership marks the first time it has partnered with an organization to promote local businesses. It had previously worked deals with a number of national brands.

The BigTent news caps off a campaign to land associations and other organizations as partners. The results of the effort means that the site now boasts listings of 16,000 service pros with the badges of their organizations — a major trust factor. One of the key prizes has been the local branch of the Better Business Bureau, which previously hadn’t loaned out its list.

In other site developments, Redbeacon, which won the top prize as best new idea at TechCrunch 50 six months ago, is adding “Friendly Advice.” The feature lets friends comment on job bids (and the bidders). This complements the company’s matching engine, and reviews and ratings found on other parts of the site — including both positive and negative reviews.

“We’re crowd-sourcing recommendations and sharing,” says CEO Ethan Anderson. One added benefit is the viral element and the added exposure for Redbeacon: 500 views may become 2,500, he says.

Anderson notes that the company has been in a constant state of “iteration” since launching, and will only begin the process of raising money when it is satisfied with the end product. So far, the site has added several features, such as enabling private communications between consumers and providers in the middle of a bid and allowing providers to additional information upon request. “Consumers need lots of information to make a decision,” he says. The site has also syndicated reviews from Yelp, Google and Yahoo to complement its own.

One milestone reached by the site is that it can now successfully furnish a quote for every job that is bid. In fact, it had more than 1,000 service providers almost immediately after launch, and continues to rapidly grow its base. “We don’t have a chicken or egg problem,” says Anderson. “Signing up (service providers) has been easy.”

Redbeacon CEO Ethan Anderson will join AlikeList CEO Jim Delli Santi and Reply.com COO Sean Fox on the “SMB Marketplaces” panel at Marketplaces 2010. ServiceMagic CEO Craig Smith is a keynoter at the conference.