MojoPages started as a Yelp-like directory of local businesses.  For the past year and a half, the San Diego-based company has focused on building a distribution network of 1,400 sites, mostly consisting of radio, TV and newspaper sites. Its revenue has come from search-related advertising.

The directory business, which competes against the likes of Local.com, CityVoter, Ellington and others, has been growing traffic at ten percent a month for some time, and positioned the company for venture capital. Its last round was for $5 million, and the company has now raised $7 million in all.

But now the site is adding  to the directory  “Mojo Awards,”  a new  games model  that CEO Jon Carder hopes will bring a little of the fun mentality around FourSquare into the SMB sector. A “best of the city” approach, MojoAwards is a year-long contest that lets consumers vote on favorite businesses – and for businesses to promote the content – and Mojo.

Every week, a different category will be highlighted, sometimes with topicality. This week, for instance, Tax Prep will be highlighted. Top companies will be highlighted.

Businesses that receive favorable rankings are ranked in terms of their popularity, which is aggregated and weighted into a single graph.  Carder believes the graph is much more illustrative than star systems, which are typically one dimensional.The site, which provides ratings and reviews from Yelp, Google, Yahoo, Citysearch and others, as well as its own,  is also developing Trust rankings for raters from certain-approved sites.

Carder says the highlighting of Mojo Awards brings to the SMB/Directory space some of the “check in” and “get involved” feeling of some of the hot social sites, which typically focus on  entertainment and dining. Ultimately, it should also boost partner revenues from advertising, as Mojo, which doesn’t charge for licensing, provides a promotional package for advertisers.

Revenues are shared with local media partners, which receive local exclusivity, and support. MojoPages hopes that the revenue share and promotion provides enough inventive for TV station personalities, for instance, to plug the contest and results on the nightly news and other programs throughout the day.

The French directory publishers PagesJaunes has made a significant move by acquiring 100 percent of the Austrian people search site 123People, which has a global audience of more than 40 million unique visitors in 11 countries, according to the PagesJaunes announcement. Terms were not disclosed.

Here is how Pages Jaunes CEO Jean-Pierre Remy describes the deal.

“We are delighted to have acquired 123people, which fits perfectly with our growth strategy and reinforces our leadership in people search on the Internet. 123people is a genuine Internet success story and will enable us to accelerate the growth of our audiences and offer advertisers additional visibility and traffic. With this acquisition, PagesJaunes Groupe will significantly increase its total audience, strengthen its expertise in natural listing and benefit from new synergies between 123people and the Group’s sites in France and Spain.”

123People acts like a personal reputation management tool. It aggregates all the places where an individual appears online. I did a search on myself and found various photos of me, as well as of others who share my name, links to blogs I’ve written, videos I’ve posted, pages online where my name appears and so on.  It’s a useful site to find and learn about other people, and to track the various ways in which you appear online.

This represents the beginning of a shift from inclusion-based results to relevancy results across SuperMedia’s properties.

SuperMedia’s Robyn Rose told us earlier this week that Switchboard and LocalSearch.com often act as test beds for the SuperPages IYP mothership, so we won’t see SuperMedia switch over to relevancy until any kinks are worked out on the secondary properties. Rose didn’t commit to a timetable for launching the new approach on SuperPages.

Here is how results used to look.

And here is how they appear now.

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.”

Leaders of the U.S. independent directory publishing industry were passionate in their defense of print media at this morning’s opening session of the Association of Directory Publishers meeting outside Houston, Texas. Jim Hail, the outgoing chair and head of Idaho-based Hagadone Directories, declared “Print is not dead!” He argued that the industry has become too apologetic about print and should take a much bolder posture in defending it in the media, where it continues to take a pretty vicious beating.

To bolster his point, Hail held up a recent Wall Street Journal article that details an effort by the magazine industry to embrace the “power of print.” Rather than accept its demise to digital, the magazine industry decided to run a campaign that basically says, at least where magazines are concerned, the print experience is superior. One tagline example, “The Internet is fleeting. Magazines are immersive.”

Hail was not impressed so much by the “esoteric” messaging but by the gumption the magazine industry has shown by saying, in effect, our old product is awesome, so deal with it. He wants the Yellow Pages industry to do the same thing.

“We need a consortium of publishers for an ad campaign … to tout the inherent strength of our medium,” Hail said.

Of course, Hail is aware that this call has been made many times before and never executed successfully. Joe Walsh, speaking after Hail, offered a somewhat different take. He said that while he has always favored a Yellow Pages version of the “Got Milk” campaign, he thinks it is “too late now” for any such effort to be effective.

He says the sense of print Yellow Pages as a passe medium has been fully baked into the public consciousness, “and we may not be able to reverse it.” Plus, he says there is no appetite among the major publishers to fund any such effort.

That said, Walsh sees some modest signs of improvement in the performance of Yellow Pages. He says his internal metrics show growing print usage, which he ascribes to an improving economy.

Just six months after it launched its SP411 Twitter integration, Superpages is at it again with an offer to Tweet any coupon that businesses upload to an online profile.

To do this it has created 72 city-specific Twitter accounts, which users in those cities can follow to get daily tweets for coupons and promotions happening around them. Businesses interested in taking part can register on Superpages and go through a process to create or upload coupons.

According to the press release, this includes:

• create up to three different coupons,
• set a start date and expiration date,
• add a disclaimer,
• apply coupons to multiple store locations,
• include a promotion code to track specific offers; and
• update coupons at any time.

Coupons are then automatically tweeted out by the geographically appropriate Twitter handle. Of course this is only as good as the number of followers of each of these city-specific accounts, but they should build followers quickly.

The growing interest for coupons on Twitter combined with Superpages ability to cross promote this, will make it happen. Meanwhile you can check out the aggregated feed of all of the 72 city promotions on Twitter (and link directly to your city’s account) at @superpages/superpages-cities.

Like SP411, this is a clever integration, utilizing only a standard Twitter account to communicate and create additional touch points with users looking for local business information. The coupon angle makes it that much more enticing.

As we said at the SP411 launch, media is fragmenting and Superpages is meeting users where they are going. This is an important paradigm that traditional media need to take to heart, as a once siloed world becomes more about presence across platforms and less about owning destinations.

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.

Lots of news coming from mobile local app provider WHERE today. Just a week after it opened up its WHERE Ads local ad network, it has launched a new Web site and officially changed its name from uLocate to WHERE.

The company not only provides the WHERE local app but is also an app production house, which my contacts in the publishing world tell me has solid technical chops. It will continue to build this side of its business but the name change reflects a friendlier consumer brand, in line with the familiarity of its flagship local app.

As for the Web site launch, this is similarly meant to solidify the brand and create a more integrated local experience between PC and mobile device. True to the cloud computing trends driving a great deal of online and mobile media, the site lets you log on (or register) to view and manage your local activity, such as the places you’ve checked in from mobile.

Other features, from the press release, include:

• Keep track of all the places they’ve been to in the past, those they want to go to in the future, and their reviews with Placebook
• Record their current location with Check-in
• Share their WHERE activity with their social network via Facebook and Twitter
• Search, discover and review local restaurants, businesses and services
• View nearby concerts, sports games and other events

In terms of creating continuity between the online and mobile experiences, Foursquare has a similar site but it’s not as functional (though we hear Web site updates are coming).

Lastly, some news from our Marketplaces 2010 conference next week. WHERE VP of Product David Chang is joining us onstage to discuss mobile monetization in a segment that caps off our mobile forum. He’ll join MoVoxx, LocalAdExchange and CallSpark in a discussion about the growing area of mobile local ad networks and monetization. We’re expecting a great session.

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.