The local events provider Zvents, which is quickly becoming a strong competitor in local search (and has dozens of local media distribution partners), has raised $24 million in a new round of funding. The investors should get your attention: Nokia, AT&T (which owns Yellowpages.com) and Navteq (the GPS mapping company). As I’ve written before, the mobile implications of local search are tremendous. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of local searches (and local navigation) originated from location-aware mobile devices in the next five years.
The local advertising page on Zvents. What makes Zvents interesting is it empowers local businesses to publish timely content (“events” can also be sales) to the public. Then businesses can buy ads to highlight those events as well as their own Zvents pages.