Redbeacon, a new online competitor to YellowPages, Angie's List, and other online publishers, won the tech industry's version of the Palm D'or at TechCrunch 50 yesterday. You can chalk the win up to a compelling answer to the age old problem of matching local service providers and consumers who need work done locally, and some exceptional, seat-of-the-pants panache. In the end, it may have all come down to red velvet cupcakes.

Redbeacon.com's site allows consumers who need a service performed to find and interact with local businesses and professionals. Like other technology solutions, the company currently relies on businesses to enter the site and create a company profile that showcases recent work and conscribes their area of service -- then, of course on getting consumers to rely on Redbeacon to service their pressing local needs.

Assuming those two things are present, Redbeacon uses patent-pending machine learning and semantic technology to determine the best local service providers for the job. "If matched, service providers get notified by email and text message and are given the opportunity to submit a price quote. Consumers can then select and book appointments with their top choice service provider based on a comparison of business profiles, price quotes, and ratings and reviews from past Redbeacon consumers." 

Marc Andreessen, one of TechCrunch's luminary judges, asked Anderson about this "chicken and egg" problem -- how do you get consumers to patronize the service if there aren't service providers and vice versa. Anderson said the company, when it goes live in San Francisco in a couple of weeks, will rely on a team of "wizards," like the man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz, to take live Internet requests and perform human searches for providers that seem a likely fit. They'll then try to recruit those providers to use the service, thus hitting two birds with one stone.

It's a similar strategy to that employed by Booking Angel, except that Booking Angel hands the leads over to local publishers or service companies, letting them close the deal. RedBeacon's model is to use this method only to jumpstart the process, then make money from a percentage of the job that the successful vendor garners for its service.

If the company succeeds, you'll likely be able to attribute its success to a mix of a great semantic/natural language engine -- a user interface that is allegedly able to interpret what the user really needs from a variety of entry points -- and the real-time booking engine. (No more waiting around for 4 hours for a service provider to show up because the consumer specifies the time he or she wants the service provided, forcing prospective providers to have to comply if they want the job.)

All well and good, but this sounds like something already being supplied by a variety of other vendors. Here's Anderson's solution to a few of these:

* What about Yelp? Redbeacon has applied the Yelp API, and even pulls in Yelp reviews for contractors who sign up.

* What's the proof of concept? Believe it or not, this was performed pretty much live on stage, as Anderson used the engine to find a baker willing to make 500 cupcakes with the company logo on them and distribute them to everyone in the TechCrunch 50 audience before his presentation. He then went live to find someone willing to distribute the cupcakes to the audience. In seconds, he'd found his provider at the cost of $100 -- clearly an audience member willing to do the legwork for lunch money. Still, it wowed the crowd and the panel.

*But will it really work? For the next two weeks, service providers will be able to log their services into the system, then consumers can give it a whirl.The company intends to roll this out in San Francisco then, after a couple of months, evaluate expansion opportunities.

We emailed the company to see whether engaging local partners in its expansion was in the cards, but we hadn't heard back by presstime. But Anderson is no recent B-school grad tired of waiting for the cable guy. He was a product manager at Google, then responsible for launching and managing Google video outside the U.S. prior to the search engine's purchase of YouTube. He was also Google's first product manager in Southeast Asia, and a PM for Google Image Search. His retail background comes from Buy.com. 

You can watch Anderson's winning preso here; and for comparison's sake DM2PRO.com has loaded a profile of Angie's List which details the company's recent entry into the health care market. (The latter is for member's only, but you can kick the tires for just $19.95/month.)