[Image via Techshout]

The $35 million investment comes from Battery Ventures, which will also take a minority stake in the company with the deal.

Angie’s List has over 600,000 members across 124 cities in the United States. This new investment will be used to expand into new markets in the U.S. as well as into new rating/review categories — such as the recently launched medical reviews.

Another priority will be expanding into select international markets. There is competition overseas, but by utilizing its 10-plus years of experience in the business, Angie’s List is confident it will work very effectively in other countries as well, Battery Ventures’ general partner Roger Lee tells us.

$35 million is a lot of money but the company believes its model is built to scale larger both in this country and aboard. Access to providers, quality and reliability are all important factors which Angie’s List currently has working in its favor.

One competitor in this country is Bestcontractors.com, which also allows users to find trust-worthy professionals by way of customer reviews, but that services currently operates in far fewer markets. Yelp, also offers customer reviews, but is broadly focused making it more difficult to find pertinent service recommendations (our coverage).

A newer entry in the arena is GenieTown, which has a special focus on the Bay Area (our coverage).

As we noted yesterday, Google and Yahoo have indeed gone ahead with a trial of Google ads on Yahoo’s search results pages — and as expected this drew a testy response from Microsoft, which is courting Yahoo with a big acquisition offer.

However, really sending things over the edge for Microsoft was word that Yahoo was flirting with yet another suitor, AOL. Those two were reportedly closing in on a deal (which they had previously discussed).

Shortly thereafter came word that Microsoft was working on a counter-attack to this Yahoo/Google/AOL alliance — and who was Microsoft recruiting on its side? None other than former potential Yahoo suitor, News Corp. These alliances sound like the balance of power tactics of the European theater in early 1900s, with Yahoo being France. TechCrunch has already compared News Corp. to the Italians in this World War II scenario.

So this is shaping up to be an epic battle to liberate or takeover Yahoo.

If these alignments hold we might see a small lull in action for the next couple days while the two sides work out their respective battle plans. Then expect a PR blitz as both sides try to sway the public, the Yahoo shareholders and potentially the U.S. government as to why each arrangement is the better one.

[photo: flickr/striatic]

In our most recent meeting, Pell laid out Powerset’s new unofficial motto: “We’re not a search engine.” That’s not a surprising assertion, considering that all of the semantic startups have been trying to dodge the hyped-up “Google Killer” label since their inception. But it’s worth explaining exactly how Powerset, a company that wants to be used to search for information on the Internet, is not a search engine.

Say you’re searching on Google to learn about naval history. Here’s your problem: When Google returns its thousands of results, you actually have to go to web pages individually to see if they’re what you want. If they are, you then have to search through those pages for the information you want. If you want to know about a particular naval battle but can’t remember its name, the search could quickly become frustrating. A search for naval battles during the Civil War will be helpful, but it requires some effort to hunt through the results (try it yourself).

Powerset’s technology, however, can provide sets of results based either on entire web pages — as Google does — or on specific sections of those pages, which is helpful if they’re long, like Wikipedia entries. But where the company is headed is toward reading through pages for you and arranging or condensing the information it finds to just tell you an answer.

That means I could potentially ask Powerset, “What were the major naval battles of the Civil War?”, and immediately find in a list of results what I was looking for, the bizarre fight between the Monitor and the Merrimac. If I had to go to a page to search through the information, Powerset might have some tricks to aid in the search, pointing out sentences that seemed to be likely matches.

Figuring out the exact form those tricks will take is Powerset’s immediate challenge. I got to see a handful of tools and features, but only after swearing secrecy — in part because there’s no certainty as to what will be included with the company’s public release. Powerset faces the same challenge that Twine does or Hakia does, in that respect. Because it’s trying to create new ways of navigating the Internet, there’s no tried-and-true model to copy.

Before launching, Powerset will have to settle on a way to return data it thinks is of the most use in a search. And of course, there’s the challenge of processing millions of these requests at a time; whatever it does has to scale up for public use. Overcoming those challenges could drag out the launch date. (Some of Powerset’s team have vowed not to shave their moustaches until their public release, a project they’re calling Powerstache.)

In the meantime, Powerset will keep stressing that it’s no Google — simply because the team doesn’t want to invite derision by making grandiose claims. Yet that creates the question of whether the company could ever approach Google’s value. After all, it hasn’t yet shown that it can expand beyond Wikipedia. And what’s the point of getting excited about a company that’s basically a glorified research tool?

The answer is all in possibilities. Google is still the best way to hunt through vast numbers of silos (web pages) containing information when you’re looking for a specific fact. No new technology will seriously challenge that ability for a year or two, at least. But a technology like Powerset could short-circuit Google’s process by just giving you the damn fact, already instead of listing relevant websites.

We like Google for its speed and efficiency. We’ll like Powerset, or something similar, even more. A decade from now, we’ll look back and wonder how we survived with just Google; it’s a whole new ball game, one that will give us a whole new suite of tools indispensable for navigating the Internet. It remains to be seen how well Powerset will play into that future.

Coral Capital Management led the round, with participation from British Telecom, Google, Allen & Co., founder Martin Varsavsky’s Jazzya and Joi Ito’s Digital Garage. Varsavsky says he’ll use the new funding to launch Fon in Russia, and to release a new version of the company’s Fonera router.

We covered the company last October, when British Telecom joined Google as a Fon investor. It’s a cool idea: After installing a Fon wireless router, you can open up your network to other Fon users in exchange for free access to other routers when you’re traveling, or you can charge for access and receive 50 percent of the proceeds. But it’s still not clear whether the company is making much money, since it appears to be giving the routers away for free, and the most interesting part of Fon’s model also involves free wireless. (A startup called Meraki is also trying to create a free wireless network, in this case one that envelops San Francisco.)

It’s worth noting that British Telecom and Google may not see Fon as a moneymaker, but as a way to promote their own offerings. Sequoia Capital, a previous Fon investor that’s usually more interested in profit, didn’t participate in the current round.

Grayboxx

However, local search is a very competitive area. On the one end, Google, Yahoo and other large companies offer decent local search features, most prominently on their mobile applications such as on the Google Maps application. A range of content sites also offer ways for you to drill down to find things in your area. There’s local review site Yelp, local online classifieds site Craigslist, as well as Facebook’s own regional networks, that include events and other local information. These are all just some of the more obvious competitors — there are many other startups in this area, too.

Bay Advisor is a sort of search service where Bay Area businesses can find relevant information. It will use Grayboxx’s IP to build out vertical searches.

There was some upside for investors, including Sierra Ventures, as well as its management team, depending in part on how things go for Bay Advisor, Chandra says.

With MediaForge’s technology, banner ads become a lot more interactive — when users roll their cursors over the banners, an interactive widget appears that can showcase special deals, purchasing options or various media.

For example, when you mouse over an ad from MediaForge customer Overstock.com, a window appears that lets you browse through the day’s top sellers and specials (see screenshot at left). According to MediaForge, Overstock’s test campaign with the platform led to a 12 percent increase in return on investment.

Interactive advertising through widgets is definitely taking off, but I’m not sure the banner-widget hybrid does much that a widget can’t do on its own. On the other hand, not only can MediaForge help companies create hybrid ads, it can also “socialize” (i.e., add widgets to) existing banners. Companies wanting to expand existing banner ad campaigns, rather than starting from scratch, seem to be the startup’s target audience.

The company raised $1.5 million in 2006. It’s based in Salt Lake City.

When we covered Jingle back in 2006, the startup had just raised $30 million to build out its network — reaching a “critical mass” of between 10 million and 20 million monthly callers was key to attracting advertisers, chief executive George Garrick said. It looks like Jingle’s efforts were successful; it’s gone from around 13.5 million monthly calls (450,000 daily) to 20 million.

Investors include Goldman Sachs & Co., Hearst Corp., IDG Ventures, Liberty Associated Partners and Comcast Interactive Capital, and Jingle’s total funding to date is $70 million.

This is a crowded market, with lots of competitors offering similar free services, and Jingle competing against big players like Google, Microsoft and At&T. (We also hear that V-Enable has a big announcement coming tomorrow.) Google, for example, is better placed to deliver targeted ads, which is key to making ad-supported services pay off. If Jingle wants to take on companies of that scale, it will have to be innovative.

On the other hand, the startup must be doing something right already, because it reached profitability last month. I’m trying to reach Jingle’s investors to find out more about why the company has done so well, and how it will stay competitive in the future.

A few weeks ago, we reported that Mountain View, Calif.-based Meebo was aiming to raise $20 million to $30 million at a valuation somewhere between $200 million and $250 million, with the assistance of investment bank Montgomery & Co.

Meebo’s site lets you chat with friends across competing IM services like AIM and Yahoo Messenger. It more recently launched a chat room feature, where you can embed a group chat widget on other sites around the web. The site has nearly 30 million monthly users, between its various services.

We’d heard that Facebook and MySpace had both looked at buying Meebo, and passed. Techcrunch adds that eBay and AOL also thought about buying it, although MySpace owner Fox and AOL may be participating in this round as strategic investors.

The explanation for Meebo’s low revenue is that it has been focused on rolling out new products that have allowed it to keep growing.

ReadWriteWeb has an interesting interview with the company that examines how it plans to start making money. Next month, it will begin introducing ads into its services that are essentially invites to sponsored media — videos, polls, quizzes, etc. — targeted according to a user’s demographic information and behavior. There will even be a leaderboard displaying the most popular ads. The company says that in tests, it is experiencing engagement rates of up to four percent, which is much higher than what an un-targeted banner ad might see.

Enter Brokaw, a long-time ad exec at CNET, and more recently Warner. Meebo is hoping to go as far as offering consulting services to top ad agencies. Brokaw, who will be based in New York, will be leading Meebo’s charge into Madison Avenue — he has the opportunity to prove that IM can be a big business.