What’s not to like about free directory assistance? Investors are pouring yet another $6.7 million into Jingle Networks, the company behind 1-800-FREE-411. The funding round was disclosed today in an SEC filing, and it brings the total amount raised by the company to almost $90 million.

The investors in this round were not disclosed in the filing, but previous investors include First Round Capital, Goldman Sachs, Hearst, and Liberty Associated Partners.

Jingle runs voice ads before giving out directory assistance numbers, and competes with GOOG-411. Last year, before the U.S. financial meltdown, it was looking to IPO, launched a broader voice ad network, and even hit profitability on a per-call basis.

The IPO talk stopped as soon as the advertising recession hit, and you’ve got to wonder how that voice ad network is doing now, and whether it is still profitable per call. I’d be surprised. If they were profitable, why would they have to raise $6.7 million now, on top of the $7.5 million they raised just last February. Maybe this one will get the company back over the hump and ready for an exit.

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Cc:Betty, a free service that helps organize group email threads, has rolled out an iPhone app to help declutter your email on your mobile device. Cc:Betty’s app is a group based email application that breaks email conversations into collated, threaded discussions.

An account can be created right from the app, and new group discussions can be created, using the iPhone address book to access your contacts. Photos can be easily attached as well and new contacts can be added to discussions via your address book. Any discussions, or other content such as attachments a person has in their Cc:Betty.com account are automatically synced to their iPhone. When one of your discussions is updated, you’ll get a push-notification to your iPhone so you can access important information on the go.

Founded in 2008 by Michael Cerda, Cc:Betty began as a web application that routes, parses, and organizes email conversations in a simple at-a-glance dashboard so you never have to scour your inbox to find the bits and pieces of a long thread. If you cc “betty@ccbetty.com” on any email, “she” will create a mailspace, which is a webpage, for your entire email thread and will divide important things such as dates, times, people, places, and files and will format them all in one place. Cc:Betty will track messages with up to 100 recipients and can organize emails with up to 20 MB in size, including attachments.

Cc:Betty recently integrated with Twitter, so that users of the service can tweet in and out of a of the collaboration platform, as well as see each other’s latest tweets. The startup also upgraded its service with several new features, including the ability to see maps, images and documents as large thumbnails in email threads, and a list of people in an email conversation. You can also filter content of the thread by participant. The startup’s founder Michael Cerda tells me that the company is also rolling out a stealth SMB centric offering in the near future called Threadbox.

The startup also just raised $500,000 in funding from Western Technology Investment. The startup previously raised $1.5 million in seed funding in June led by Venrock with investors Seraph Group and Hillsven participating. The company was incubated in Venrock’s offices and officially launched at DEMO in March.

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Startup RepairPal, an auto repair and maintenance information site, has raised $4 million in Series A funding led by Tugboat Ventures, with Rick Keister, David Strohm, Mark Goines, and Michael Torres participating. The startup previously raised $3 million in seed and angel funding.

The site, which we reviewed last year, is similar to a Google Health for cars. You get price estimates for different parts and repair jobs for your car. You enter your car year, model, and mileage, and it spits out price ranges for your zip code. There is also a directory of hundreds of thousands of local mechanics, with each shop placed onto a Google Map. Members can rate each mechanic and once a repair is completed, you can keep an online service record at RepairPal. It’s like a one-stop shop to maintain and record the health of your car.

RepairPal also launched a free, handy iPhone app which will help users find reasonable prices for car repairs and provided them with locations of reputable repair shops in their areas on the go. The app also includes Google Maps integration, user reviews for each shop and a list of towing and roadside assistance services based on your location.

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The recently released e-book reader from Barnes & Noble, the Nook, has been rooted by the community of enthusiasts at nookdevs.com. The complete instructions for hacking the device and obtaining root access are detailed on the site. The Nook went on sale in late November and aims to compete with the dominant Amazon Kindle, a device which has spurred its own community of hackers and modifiers.

The Nook retails for $259, and is an Android-powered device with built in AT&T 3G service and WiFi, along with an e-ink screen that is found in most other readers. The instructions for rooting the device require that the device is opened up and that the SD card which stores the operating system be removed. The process seems a little too simple, almost as if the device was designed to be hacked. The storage is on a removable card, which can then be loaded in another machine where the process of acquiring root access to the operating system is carried out.

This will likely lead to DRM controls being bypassed, and a slew of homebrew projects being created based on the hardware – which might ironically help Barnes & Noble in its bid to unseat both the Kindle and Sony e-Reader.

Full detailed instructions and photographs are available on the site here. The entire process is straight forward and only takes around 30-45 minutes. I might actually order a Nook now.

Tip via Nenad Nikolic (@shonzilla)

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