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 purchase inventory — is a significant and immediate opportunity.

The lead investor in this round (EveryScape has raised $16 million to date) is SK Telecom Co., South Korea’s primary carrier and a major Web portal. The venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson also participated.

EveryScape operates in a space that is increasingly on the radar of local search and directory players. In Europe, publishers that include PagesJaunes, European Directories and Seat all offer various flavors of immersive search, often using internally developed solutions.

EveryScape has deployed its solution with a number of partners to date, including such local search or tourist destination sites as Philly.com, HarvardSquare.com and others.

Yell.com has decided to forgo partnering on maps with Google, Microsoft or other potential competitors in favor of building its own propriety map product. The U.K.’s largest directory publisher unveiled a beta version of the Yell Maps product this week.

Yell is positioning its map product as designed for the specific purpose of finding local businesses. Here is a video that offers some color on the new product. Yell contends its new product is faster and easier to use than the previous incarnation, thanks in part to more up-to-date content and improved geocoding.

Yell used the French firm Tridoo to build the Yell Maps product. Tridoo already provides the maps on Yell’s mobile search products. The company is also using Navteq to provide quarterly updates to ensure that business location and directions are kept up to date. Yell describes Tridoo as a “small specialist company that has spent the last 10 years at the forefront of mapping and geospatial development.”

Yell “map master” Djamila Fernana-Ritchie says, “This is the first of a number of planned releases designed to make Yell Maps the premier mapping solution for local business search in the U.K.”

It seems clear that Yell, which had taken a more cooperative view toward Google in recent months, has decided that maps is a strategic piece of its future business, and owning its platform makes more sense that outsourcing it to a key competitor. The challenge for Yell will be making its maps compelling enough to divert usage from Google.

Mapping has become less about radius of where you are and more about what people define as local, how far people are willing to travel and the importance of certain events or locations in their community. While the advertising paradigm has focused on ZIP codes/postal codes, consumers identify more with neighborhoods or specific areas of cities, which sets up a major disconnect.

The clear trend is the linking of social and mapping to drive action and to link people with their network of friends or favorite bands or events. According to Julia Scott, CEO of Bargain Babe, “linking social and mapping allows people to surface activities and deals that you may not be aware of.”

The goal, according to Darrin Clement, CEO of Maponics, is “to add more context to maps to help drive actions on a localized basis and to understand what is most valuable to the consumer to see on a map.”

A unique view of mapping came from Jason Bosek, president of Parking Data Ventures, who said that “parking is a point of necessity to allow people to utilize and take advantage of destinations particularly in urban areas.” Parking Data Ventures is an example of how mapping is becoming more specific to the needs of consumers beyond what is nearby to how to enable getting and staying in a particular location.

One of the main challenges of mapping pointed out by Clement was that “people’s ideas of local are more personalized to their neighborhoods and cities requiring sites to redefine what they consider local and offering layers of mapping choices to better match needs.” With this more personal view of what is local people are seeking ways to find friends, their favorite bands, sports and recreation activities on what they determine is a reasonable distance to travel or walk.

All this will force marketers and site owners to think more like their consumers and offer the mapping choices they need based on the type of search they are conducting and how they plan to travel to the location they have designated.

Selling advertising on customized Google Maps is becoming increasingly common, with agencies such as LAT49 showing the way. Ads have been sold on maps for hiking, jogging trails, local transit and other categories.

Now Wedding Mapper is taking the same concept to weddings, where it allows couples to map out a wedding trail of airports, receptions, hotels and rehearsal dinners. The free maps can be emailed, downloaded to mobile phones, printed out or posted on websites. Wedding Mapper, which grew out of Community Walk.com, a non-specific map builder, was launched in January 2007. It has already produced 100,000 maps, and is likely to climb further as it gets a bigger piece of the wedding market, which sees 2.2 million couples married every year, per The Wedding Report.

Founder Jared Cosulich tells us that the maps are configured on a hyper-local basis for 10,000 communities in the U.S. and abroad, and advertisers can target any of those communities, with the average spend roughly $20. About a thousand advertisers have tried the service out. He adds that the micro-targeting figures to be especially compelling for exurban and rural communities that are normally left out of wedding-related media (but I might question that: small town folk tend to know who vendors that they want to use).

Cosulich notes that one of the most compelling things about the service is that maps have quite a long tail. Here’s why: The five person, San Francisco-based crew have created a User Generated directory of 140,000 wedding vendors that can be used to pre-populate map locations. The directory is given extra context by adding user reviews from businesses that have been mapped. More than 50,000 reviews have been entered so far.

I built a couple of maps for fun, one for my current town (Carlsbad, CA) and one for my college town (Bronxville, NY). I found that they’re easy-to-launch, wisely password protected, and the categories are intuitive and well thought out. But the map experience is far from perfect. While the maps will surely get your guests around town, the User Generated directory is far from comprehensive. Users that rely on it would find reception locations, churches and bars and airports many towns and miles (and scrolls) away from optimum locations.

Trust me, when you’re getting married at The Crossings in Carlsbad, you probably don’t want to stay in Dana Point, 30 miles up I-5. There are dozens of hotels and resorts in between. But I bet that will get better when the site relaunches this Sunday.

MapQuest launched a feature that lets those celebrating Easter find the closest Easter egg hunts. These include formal hunts for the general public (search technology hasn’t reached the point of indexing private backyard events).

It’s an interesting integration of local event based data and online mapping. Lots of other possible holiday-based integrations come to mind. Check it out — especially if you’re looking for some good egg hunting on Sunday.

Local SEO guru Andrew Shotland just alerted me to the fact that Google is now serving the local “10 pack” in searches that don’t include geographic modifiers (original discovery by Google Maps expert Mike Blumenthal).

For those unfamiliar, the 10 pack is the block of 10 local results that occupies the top results in searches where Google has a high degree of confidence in local intent. Until today, that confidence was based on explicit geographic modifiers (i.e., Pizza, San Francisco). It has now been broadened to include search terms that have more implied local intent.

I imagine Google is algorithmically deriving levels of confidence based on different categories or terms where there is higher likelihood of local conversions (i.e., plumber, pizza, flat screen television). Under the previous method, the 10 pack was limited to the amount of searches that included geographic modifiers (less than 10 percent of overall searches). Now its impact will be felt much wider.

This has rather large implications for anyone in the local search space that depends on traffic from Google, including vertical search plays, city guides, IYPs, etc. When the 10 pack first came out about a year ago, many such entities felt the pinch because they were essentially pushed down (or off) the first page of listings. That effect will be greater going forward.

This is something we’ve seen coming, but we haven’t been quite sure what form it would take. The premise was that the 10 pack would get served with greater frequency as:

1. Users get more sophisticated by knowing to include geographic modifiers with local queries. This will happen through positive reinforcement of search behavior and increasing volumes of local content online.

2. Google gets better at recognizing local intent in the many places it occurs outside the limited use of geographic modifiers.

Today’s development falls into the second bucket. But what this really shows is Google’s affirmation of what we’ve been saying for years: Lots of searches have varying degrees of local intent, though they may be at various stages of the typical purchase funnel. Locally relevant content should be much more saturated than it currently is if it’s to truly match user intent.

This is a big development, the real impact of which will be shown in the coming weeks. I’ll continue to examine what it means and huddle with my SEO friendlies (Shotland et al). More to come.

MapQuest announced a series of tools today that let advertisers place themselves along the routes that are generated when users plot driving directions.

These are new features to MapQuest’s existing Business Locator, which let users choose different types of businesses that are visible along their routes. This will include coffee shops, grocery stores, gas stations and hotels — all of which can be toggled on and off by selecting icons on the side of the map.

Large and small businesses are conversely given the option to advertise on the map (mapvertising), on the page surrounding the map, or on the printouts that many MapQuest users take with them on their journeys.

Advertising is geotargeted to the locations on the map, which could resonate with store chains with localized branches that more or less cater to travelers (gas stations, hotels, etc.).

Though it has gotten lots of competition over the past few years from Google Maps, MapQuest remains the market share leader for online mapping and for driving directions.

MapQuest today announced a new feature for its MapQuest 4 Mobile application, which will let users save and share personalized maps and routes. Known as MyPlaces, the feature will be part of the free MapQuest 4 mobile download on select BlackBerry models (more devices coming soon).

The main point is to drive usage by extending the MapQuest experience from desktop to the mobile device. Along these lines, users will be able to create and save personalized maps online that are accessible from mobile.

Though MapQuest has gotten a relatively small share of the spotlight during the recent excitement surrounding mobile, it was an early mover with products such as MapQuest Navigator and earlier versions of MapQuest 4 Mobile. Today’s move follows the October launch of an iPhone optimized site. Next up is likely an iPhone native app.

For all these efforts, the name of the game will be to compete with Google for mind share and positioning among mobile users. This will be important at this relatively early stage when user behavior hasn’t formed any well-defined standards.

But as the mobile Web becomes more and more like the online Web (given penetration of smartphones with full Web browsers), lots of user behavior will transfer over from online. Generally, this will be good for Google and its 63 percent search market share. For MapQuest, it’s good and bad: It has longstanding brand strength in online mapping, but that has seen considerable competition and attrition from Google (see chart below).

Google also has the inside track when it comes to the iPhone, with its Maps native application that’s pre-loaded on the device. But more and more users are going “off deck” to search for native and Web applications that suit their needs — the usability and Web browsing capability of iPhones and some smartphones has driven this.

As a result, MapQuest will need to solidify its brand and its usability on mobile devices. Personalization, new features and tie-ins to online accounts will be a good start (an iPhone app also won’t hurt).

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You can find out more and download the application here.

The Los Angeles Times today debuted “Mapping L.A.,” an online effort to map 87 distinctive neighborhoods in the sprawling Southland. For the paper, the designation of neighborhoods goes beyond civic duties. Not only does it intend to base news stories around them, but also hyperlocal marketing, advertising and blogging effortsl.

The initial cut of Mapping L.A.’s neighborhoods was based on census tracts but has been adjusted for the “geographical, historic and socioeconomic associations that define communities,” per release. One of the mapping site’s features is that it can be edited by readers on a WIKI basis — something many Angelenos will probably do as they assess the real estate impact of having their house listed in “Franklin Hills” or “Los Feliz”; and “Beverly Hills” or “Century City.”

“Dorothy Parker famously said Los Angeles was ‘72 suburbs in search of a city,’ so it’s not surprising that residents take their neighborhood names so seriously,” notes reporter Bob Pool in an article about the new mapping feature in today’s Times. “Those designations are part tradition and history but also part economic and political.”

One of the homespun stories of interactive local media is the rise of HelloMetro, a city guide company that started in 1999 as an entrepreneurial effort in Louisville, Kentucky, and has since grown to include 15 staffers, including five direct salespeople.

The company, which has hundreds of Hello(City name) city guides, made $7.5 million in 2008. It is on track to make $9 million or more in 2009, says CEO and Founder Clark Scott.

A key to the company’s success has been its use of Google AdWords for “pretty much anything that mentions the name of a city,” says Scott. The company started with a $100 budget for Google, and now spends $350,000 per month. Scott says he tries to add “a little more” to the Google budget every month.

Content-wise, each of the HelloMetro sites features all the rudiments of a standard city guide, including Yellow Pages listings, events, weather, dining and movies. Lately, it has been bulking up more on original content — a strategy that other geodomain-oriented sites have also focused on.

The content efforts include mapping out neighborhood info on a Google map and hiring 15 journalists to cover their local markets. The journalists are mostly out-of-work newspaper reporters, who are not hard to come by. The reporters typically get paid for 20 to 25 hours a week. Scott says he plans to keep hiring more.

“We picked out our largest cities to give us the biggest bang for a buck,” says Clark, noting they add a human-but-professional touch to the site that can’t be equaled by remote reporters or most bloggers. Focus areas for articles include what Scott calls “the four corridors of content”: local attractions, restaurants, events and nightclubs (a little).

Nightclub and social information will never be the focus of the site, however, says Scott. HelloMetro’s audience is somewhat more mature than other sites, he notes. “We don’t want to be MetroMix.” Indeed, users are typically in their 30s and 40s, with perhaps 60 percent coming from in-market, and 40 percent coming in as tourists or business travelers. (The ratio of national traffic is higher, however, in tourist meccas such as San Diego and Orlando.)

The company has also branched out into mobile sites, which all use a Hello(Cityname).mobi address. On an aggregated basis, the mobile sites are receiving 250,000 unique visitors per month. While the site has some Google Mobile ads, it hasn’t begun selling its own yet.