With today's announcement of Gowalla's $8.4 million Series B investment, I think you can qualify "local" as the new "black" in the tech field. 

Clearly the opportunities are significant — the newspaper business is being modernized, old business models are failing and being replaced by new ones, advertising is becoming increasingly mobile and social, and the long tail of local services has not yet been modernized & put online to the point that it will in coming years. 

Mobile GPS is spawning location-based services that will likely be a critical part of the portfolio of products and services for the tech giants moving forward.

So the trend continues — who knows what is next?  All I know is that it is an interesting place to be, and it's where the action is at the end of 2009.  We're having a great time with it at Notice Technologies, and we'll have some very interesting things to announce at the start of 2010!