The company also announced it will relaunch its “City’s Best” entertainment guides in 25 cities, while adding geo-targeted local content to AOL.com. In its announcement, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong says that 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.

Major appointment sites include BookFresh, Full Slate, ZocDoc 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 seven 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.

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” websites in 100 cities. Based on what we are hearing around the industry, many more sites are likely to enter the space soon.

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

VP of Product Management Jeff Birkeland tells us that the CBS Local site will launch with 1.2 million pages of “very curated” content including content from a six person full time staff, free lance auto writers and more than 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.

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 which 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 revenue, 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 fund 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, Mineeaspolis-St. Paul, New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington D.C.

Living Social 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 co-founder Tim O’Shaughnessy told us that he sees the Living Social Deals as “a huge opportunity” to market to customers based on their pronounced online preferences,” and to take those preferences offline.

The Index is based on 11,000+ email 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 #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.

Revenue is 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.

The deal between BigTent and Red Beacon positions the company not only against Yellow Pages and other newbreed leads providers (i.e. 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, Red Beacon, 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 Red Beacon: 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 over 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.”

Red Beacon 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.

Now, Analog Analytics, a San Diego based vendor, is pushing a clever mobile solution that allows online local publishers to feature display ads that have SMS promotion codes built in. Consumers show the coupon on their phones to retailers for conversion.

Use of the mobile coupon provides complete analytics (impressions, click-thru rates, texts, email and conversions). Among the 850 publishers currently working with the solution are Media News Group, Village Voice Media, Local.com, Wick Communications, Freedom Interactive and The San Diego Reader. More than 25,000 ads are being supported, and the company has just expanded beyond the U.S. with a new Australian operation. Chinese operations are currently being eyed.

Company founder Ken Kalb, a longtime search vet, says the mobile coupon solution is the natural successor to low click display campaigns. The engagement of a local promotion typically boosts click-thru rates by two-to-10 percent – 10 times higher than national online ads. Revenues might see a 20-30 percent boost within six weeks of launching.

Kalb notes that the coupons are sold via local sales forces, or alternatively, via a self serve platform. Affiliate marketing programs from other online coupon companies just aren’t a good alternative, he says. They typically pay just three cents per click. They also don’t offer much support for local advertisers in terms of analytics or upsells.

In fact, Analog’s self-serve platform also offers an upsell gift certificate program, which brings in immediate revenue for advertiser and publisher alike; as well as the “Bigger, Better Deal,” a daily promotion special. It also encourages frequent updating of ad copy and promotions. The platform also enables the development of opt-in marketing lists.

Is it too soon for mobile coupons on a mass media basis? It might be. As a backup, Analog Analytics does support print-out options. But this solution is an interesting one that might bring a source of renewed interest for local media companies. They continue to bring in more eyeballs than other media on their websites, but often have a hard time proving their value.

Analog Analytics CEO Ken Kalb is a featured speaker at Marketplaces 2010. He’s on the “Back to Square One: Refocus on Revenues” panel with Adicio CRO Tony Lee and Matchbin CEO Reed Brown.