Thumbtack, one of the new breed of service lead companies such as Alikelist, Redbeacon and HelpHive seeking to push aside leaders like ServiceMagic and Angie’s List (and the Yellow Pages), announced today it has raised $1.2 million, and now has raised a war chest of $1.7 million altogether. The new angel round includes 11 angels, …

ReachLocal went public today, raising $54.6 million on the Nasdaq from the sale of 4.167 million shares at $13 each. The share price had been sharply cut from earlier hopes of $17 to $19 given pessimistic market conditions. But the offering closed at $14.98 a share, up 15 percent in a sharply down day for …

ReachLocal says it is going ahead with its IPO. A new filing with the SEC noted that it will price 4.8 million shares between $17 and $19, allowing it to raise between $81.6 million and $91.2 million — below the $100 million it originally wanted to raise. If the IPO is successful, it may be …

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 …

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 …

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 …

EveryScape, a Massachusetts-based company that offers an immersive local search experience, has secured a new $6 million funding round. We see this as a sign of confidence that the model EveryScape is pursuing — creating a virtual local search experience where you can find a local business, walk in the door and virtually browse and …

The money is moving quickly into the third-party SMB reseller space. ReachLocal has applied for a $100 million IPO, which could go out this spring. In hopes of similar paydays, its rivals are raising hordes of cash. Yodle, for instance, has announced that it has added $10 million, boosting its total amount raised $38 million. …

Less than a month after its peer company Idearc Media emerged from bankruptcy with a new name (SuperMedia) and a new lease on life, R.H. Donnelley has done the same thing. Freshly out of bankruptcy and US$6 billion lighter on its balance sheet, RHD has shed its historic corporate name in favor of DexOne, which …

Bono and Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman
As widely reported last week, Yelp has confirmed that it will receive a $25 million investment from Elevation Partners, which is widely known for the involvement of U2 frontman Bono among its seven partners.  Elevation, which manages $1.9 billion, will also seek to increase its total investment to $100 million …

Venture capital king Frank Quattrone (the banker behind Amazon, Netscape and Cisco) has a message: IPOs have gotten too big, innovation is being stifled, exits are being delayed and firms need straight-forward advice, not Wall Street “casinos.”
“Wall Street no longer knows how to value,” he complained, during a breakfast talk before 500+  VCs and entrepreneurs …

The year-end money deals continue. Today, The San Jose Business Journal reports that Center’d has raised another $1.875 million on top of the $6.5 million it previously raised.  The two-year-old, mom-friendly local search and events planning site, initially launched as “FatDoor,” is led by former Yahoo Marketplaces head Jennifer Dulski and former Microsoft maps exec …

LiveDeal, under new management, has moved away from its roots in Yellow Pages and classifieds, and begun a strategic focus on high-end SMB services. As part of its strategy, the company has been selling off many of its directory-related accounts, which CEO Mike Edelhart calls high maintenance, high churn, low yielding and declining.
To date, 24,000 …

At The Kelsey Group, we’ve come to appreciate that our new owner, BIAfn head Tom Buono, is a major strategist. While Buono’s roots are in the finance of traditional TV, radio and newspapers, he’s mostly thinking about their next steps in the Internet era — and the next steps for local media in general.
In an …

Last fall, a report from Sequoia Capital was widely circulated, strongly suggesting that companies sit on their capital and wait out what was sure to be a very slow and painful period. Now it’s gotten worse.
For the past several weeks, other analyst reports have been circulating. They suggest that we’ve entered a period of “deleveraging,” …

OpenTable, the online restaurant reservation service, has filed an S1 with the SEC to raise $40 million. The company, founded in 1998 by former Citysearch President Thomas Layton, was launched as Easyseats.com. It currently has contracts with 10,000 restaurants in all 50 states, or approximately one-third of U.S. reservation restaurants. It seats roughly 2.8 million diners per month.
Among …

Placeblogger, a 2007 recipient of $220k from the Knight News Challenge, has recently been revamped by its founders to encourage more personal interaction. Why? Location-based blogging without the context of a person is just kind of stale, says founder Lisa Williams, a longtime blogger of hometown Watertown, Massachusetts, and previously an analyst at The Yankee …

Following Yodle’s $10 million C Round funding announcement yesterday, I had the chance to talk to founder Nathaniel Stevens. The funding, for one thing, is a good vote of confidence for Yodle and its market opportunity, despite the current economic environment.
It’s also supportive of the notion that many advertisers are demanding more measurability in their …

Pegasus News, the Dallas hyperlocal site, was seen as a great model for other markets when Fisher Communications, a leading broadcaster in Seattle and the Northwest, bought the site in July 2007.
But the roiled market in broadcasting apparently stifled Fisher’s ambitions. Ultimately, there were never serious efforts made to install a Pegasus platform on any …

We’re out with our predictions for 2009. But what’s the final word for 2008? Truly, it was a very stimulating and thoughtful year for our local media and commerce industry. But speaking for myself, it’s hard to say whether it was a good year, especially with fresh layoffs that we are hearing about every day. …