Watch out Dun & Bradstreet. Radius Intelligence is coming.

Radius, a five year old, San Francisco-based firm formerly known as FWIX, is gunning for D&B’s SMB data business by scraping the Web for insights into how users find and engage SMBs, and then providing leads for them. Today, Radius announced that it has raised $13 Million in new financing. The new amount comes on top of $15.2 Million raised in prior rounds.

The new round is led by Formation8 Partners, which has been joined in this round by prior investor Blue Run Ventures and CEO Darian Shirazi. American Express, Western Technology Investment, Stanford University and Comcast Ventures participated in earlier rounds.

Speaking at BIA/Kelsey’s Interactive Local Media event in December, Shirazi said the company is committed to “empowering people to make good decisions around big data.” Radius scrapes the Web and uses additional sources to provide a rich picture of SMB engagement with customers and comparing that data with their competitors. Social media, news, listings, neighborhood information and other sources are all indexed.

Radius says it accurately categorizes firms based on such usage, and provides leads based on the types of customers it sees by looking at SMBs and their competitors. Leads programs begin at $99 a month, and the company is already pulling in “millions of dollars in annual recurring revenue,” according to figures cited by The Wall Street Journal’s Venture Capital blog. The blog quoted Shirazi as saying that Radius’ goal is to reach $10 million in annual recurring revenue this year.

At our ILM conference, Shirazi argued that his firm’s cloud-based approach has become much more relevant than the “antiquated,” “spreadsheet” approach taken by traditional data leaders, such as D&B and others. Historically, a good chunk of their business intelligence comes from SMB suppliers, said Shirazi. But SMBs have “moved from checks to credit,” making it more difficult to get an accurate snapshot about a business from its purchase data (i.e. how many cups have been ordered by a restaurant, etc.)

Radius Intelligence CEO Darian Shirazi

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Facebook Head of Groups Justin Shaffer told attendees at Where 2.0 that one of Facebook’s goals is to develop the largest database of “interesting” places. The collection of places has “really been the focus” of his division for the past four to six months, he said. At the same time, the database of places is probably something of a commodity for Facebook, and other services. “The coordinates are approaching a commodity. But (we’re) pushing up the stack with services, etc.”

Shaffer, former CEO of Hot Potato, a group software site acquired last year by Facebook, said that a “social network” involves storytelling, memories and serendipity. The latter is “where friends check in and find you.” He added that a social network itself can be broken down into three basic elements: “Open,” “Geo” and “Temporal.”

Open would mean your social network acquaintances, Geo would be a friend’s photo of the Eiffel Tower, and Temporal would show the four people who are “here” right now. The importance of check-ins is “not really where you are, [it is about] who you are with,” he said.

Content-wise, it all splits into the “Open Graph,” “Data” and “businesses.” Data would include places and events, and businesses would include check-in deals and pages. While it would be ultimately helpful to develop standards, Shaffer warned that “everyone isn’t going to agree on meta data or categories.”

Speaking on a panel with Shaffer at Where, Fwix CEO Darian Shirazi, who has just raised a new $4.2 million round from Comcast Interactive Capital, agreed that the basic information is probably approaching commodity status. The challenge is to build a package that it unbeatable, said Shirazi. A listing of “The Top 10 Bars in San Francisco” would be an example.

Content, and geotagging of content, “is where this will realistically go,” added Shirazi. Fwix, a 22-person company that started two years ago as a news aggregator, is now expanding into vertical content areas such as real estate and video transcriptions. If Fwix could use places data to win even 1 percent of Google search results, it would be “huge,” he said.

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I take great delight in the Carlsbad Patch updates on my smartphone every morning. And the Fwix local app on my iPad. But why do I feel they are my “guilty pleasures”? Because there is a rap out there that hyperlocal doesn’t scale and these are toys.

Is it still the case?

Patch now has a local presence in 600 communities, with editorial and sales “pods” of 12 each. Some are being run by longtime newspaper industry leaders (such as former SignOn San Diego leader Chris Jennewein and ex-NAA New Media Federation staffer Beth Lawton).

Last Sunday, LA Times media columnist James Rainey wrote that Patch is revitalizing local journalism and asserted that may have become THE place for journalists to go (aside from wages of $35k-$50k, or half the salary that big city journalists might have gotten from the big metro, if they were hiring).

That’s fine by Patch President Warren Webster. At ILM:10, Webster didn’t dispute my characterization of Patch as an experiment that wants to quickly get a national footprint to attract national, regional and local advertisers; create a business directory that goes beyond the Yellow Pages; and scale editorial and sales resources.

On a macro level, local ad revenues typically split 50/50 between targeted national and local. For Webster (and cohorts Jon Brod of AOL Ventures, and AOL Chief Tim Armstrong), the bet is that Patch is poised to do both. They’ve publicly said they were spending $50 million to ramp it up in 2010.

Sites such as Main Street Connect and Hello Metro are going down much the same path — although they likely aren’t as focused on winning national dollars as yet. Main Street Connect in the NY metro area has raised $4 million for its effort, and recently signed up Carl Lavin from The Philadelphia Inquirer (and more recently, Forbes) to run its own editorial pods. Many single city efforts have also launched, such as Allbritton’s TBD.com in the Washington metro area.

Sales aren’t guaranteed for any of these. It remains tough to get through to SMBs — note the partial retreat of The New York Times, which offloaded The Local, its hyperlocal effort.

But for the sites that green-light hyperlocal, the hypothesis is they’ll get to local advertisers with local sales forces, and advertisers will follow an audience — especially the affluent, suburban audience targeted in many of these sites. Which brings us to the biggest question for 2011. It isn’t about sales quotas. That’s premature. It’s the audience question.

The audience question is a big “if.” Some of the sites hope to differentiate themselves with audiences via higher quality, more targeted local content or better mapping. But they face super-fragmentation, with at least five or six sources of “good enough” local info, as well as possibly declining user interest in local news in an age of urban sprawl. It is an issue made even more complex by aggregators, where they all feature each other’s content.

Sites that are focused more on geographic aggregation for media partners, such as Topix, Outside.in. Fwix, DataSphere and Everyblock. Local event and news site such as AmericanTowns.com, Center’d and DiscoverOurTown are also part of the mix.

Some of the aggregators are also supported by unique user-generated content and pro/amateur content farms, such as Examiner.com, Associated Content, Demand Media, Helium, MerchantCircle Studios and others.

Examiner.com, by itself, may actually have many times the traffic of a Patch, as CEO Rick Blair notes. Yahoo’s $100 million acquisition of Associated Content this year may have similar implications.

So as we end 2010, and think about 2011, do we think that hyperlocal is going to begin to cut it? One assumes there will inevitably be a shakeout and shutdowns in the coming year. And there will also be smarter ways to economize via user-generated content and aggregation. The all-purpose use of the “hyperlocal” term will also fall by the wayside.

But if more of us find our guilty pleasures from checking out the hyperlocal news on our smartphones and our iPads, and sneaking peeks on our PCs during the day — there is simply no reason to think it will generally fail.

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The Sacramento area is fast becoming Ground Zero for local blog networks. McClatchy’s Sacramento Connect, a project carved from The Sacramento Bee, is a content connector for 70+ area blogs and Web sites. It started incubating last summer and was fully in place by March.

Connect, which is subtitled “best of the local Web,” can be personalized for personal tastes a la Fwix. It primarily offers blogs more visibility and traffic, but there is no payment plan. Connect is also doing some cross-publishing based on the aggregated content, starting with a recently published Happy Hour Guide.

The Sacramento Press-related Sacramento Local Online Ad Network (SLOAN), on the other hand, is a network of 31 local blogs and sites powered by Cox’s Adify, a vertical ad network publisher. It is geared toward providing a cable TV-like regional interconnect among local bloggers to build up a base of advertisers. It gets more than 540,000 unique visitors and 7 million impressions, and pulls in a CPM listed at $18.

Many of the Sacramento area blogs apparently take part in both networks (and many still have not joined either — the Connect team has ID’d 400 Sacramento area blogs). “I think it is an important step for The Bee to take a leadership position in building a healthy local media ecosystem in Sacramento,” says Ben Ilfeld, cofounder of Sacramento Press and SLOAN. “It proves they are serious about collaboration rather than strictly competition.”

Ilfeld adds that his team is currently expanding the concept to the Bay Area, where the Bay Area Publishers Partnership (BAPP) is being developed. “The Bay doesn’t have the same level of clear leadership,” he says. “There is no ‘Sacramento Connect’ option for those publishers. I would like to bring the same technology [it is a meebo widget] to our publishers there on top of our ad network.”

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The local and community news “aggregator” space is poised to become increasingly important. Local news staffs, obviously, are being whittled away with the declining economics of local news. But there is more local content than ever, via blogs, pro/amateur content, reviews and other sources.

Already, the aggregator space is well populated by sites such as Topix.net, Outside.in and EveryBlock. Other companies challenge from the periphery, including the so-called “content creator” companies (Examiner.com, Demand Media, Associated Content, AOL’s Seed.com). The portals and news services have also been traditional aggregators of content.

San Francisco-based Fwix is another up-and-comer. The 16-month- old company hopes to differentiate itself by a highly refined set of algorithms based on “user behavior” and “linguistic quality.”

We met last week in San Francisco with Darian Shirazi, Fwix’s 23-year-old founder. Shirazi, who previously was a software engineer at Facebook, notes the company has raised $2.7 million from BlueRun Ventures, and now consists of 12 people — 11 engineers, including two mobile specialists, plus Steve Comfort, a business development vet.

The site attracts 14 million unique users in the U.S., as well as Canada, U.K., Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. It is looking closely at Brazil as a possibility. The site is centered on 200 cities, which will increase to 300 markets by September 2010.

Revenues for the site come largely from paid search and customized news packages. Fwix is also testing different types of proximity advertising. Eventually, it expects to see a revenue split that consists of 30 percent from ad networks, 20 percent from partners and half from its own sources.

But Shirazi says Fwix is less focused on short-term, nascent forms of monetization. Instead, it focuses on building up its traffic and on its local news search engine, which Shirazi believes is the most advanced local engine to look exclusively at “user behavior” and “linguistic quality.”

Mostly, Fwix is determined to avoid overemphasizing search engine optimization rankings. It believes an SEO focus ultimately waters down the quality of local search results. “We are about quality journalism,” says Shirazi, noting that the site’s content comes from a wide range of local media sources. (I found Carlsbadistan.com on Fwix, a site dedicated to my little beach community that I hadn’t seen before). While long-term goals are for the site to get most of its traffic from its own URL, the vast majority of site traffic today comes from partnerships, including, most notably, The New York Times Co. and Weather Underground.

The Times Co. is already using Fwix content to supplement its local news coverage for The Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, which is part of its NY Times Regional Group. The Times Co. will also be using it to supplement coverage for The Local, The New York Times’ hyperlocal sites in the New York area. Shirazi doesn’t confirm that the NYT Co. relationship will go deeper — it could — but says many more partnerships are in the works.

Mobile also plays a significant role in the company’s development. As mentioned above, two of its engineers are specifically focused on mobile features and products, and the company was among the first to launch a dedicated iPad app. It eventually expects mobile to account for both content contributions, and up to half of its site usage. But Shirazi says that mobile currently only accounts for 5 percent of its overall traffic.

While Shirazi expresses confidence that Fwix can carve out a large chunk of the local aggregation market – and even expand it – he acknowledges there is an 800-pound gorilla that he is watching carefully. “The one company we are afraid of is Google,” he says. “Their engineering is intent to do what we do.”

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