Street Fight Daily: Cars.com on the Block, Lyft Raises $150M

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology

c4a5ca76-d9ea-4e88-829b-3318be22532aNewspaper Consortium Seeks to Sell Cars.com for $3 Billion (Wall Street Journal)
A group of newspaper publishers has put the cars.com online marketplace up for sale for as much as $3 billion, hoping to cash in on booming values for e-commerce sites, people familiar with the plans said. Gannett, for instance, which owns around 27% of Classified Ventures, has signaled that it could raise or sell its stake, depending on the price.

6 Ways to Use Analytics to Fine-Tune Mobile Campaigns (Street Fight)
Mobile marketing is transforming the path to purchase, as consumers rely more heavily on their smartphones when making all types of purchasing decisions. The question for marketers now isn’t whether they should launch mobile campaigns, but how they can improve the effectiveness of those campaigns going forward. Here are six strategies that marketers can use when fine-tuning their mobile campaigns

Lyft Funding Official: Documents Filed for New $150 Million Round (Recode)
Lyft, the ride-sharing app that is locked in an expensive competition with rival Uber, is at least part of the way to its next round of funding. The company filed a document associated with a Series D round worth $150 million in Delaware this week, which is embedded below. Reports of the fundraising had surfaced recently, but this public filing makes it official.

TripAdvisor Plans Mobile Travel Guide Features in the Face of Competition From Rivals like Foursquare and Google Now (TheNextWeb)
Now 14 years old and hosting 150 million reviews and opinions, TripAdvisor has established itself as a go-to destination on the Web for reviews of hotels and attractions around the world. The market is hardly standing still though and the company now faces competition from the data-powered approaches of Foursquare and Google Now, offering a more contextually relevant experience.

MasterCard, Visa Form Group to Push for Better Card Security (Reuters)
Visa and MasterCard said they had launched a cross-industry group to improve security for card transactions and press U.S. retailers and banks to meet a 2015 deadline to adopt technology that would make it safer to pay with plastic. The new group – which includes banks, credit unions, retailers and industry trade associations – will initially focus on the adoption of ‘EMV’ chip technology.

Tech That Tracks Your Every Move Can Be Convenient, Not Creepy (Wired)
A stadium that knows our food and drink preferences is technically possible now, and Citi Field, where the New York Mets play, is already taking steps in this direction. Spaces like this could become common all over the world as the usual suspects of ubiquitous and invisible computing — sensors, low-energy communications technology, embedded technology — continue to evolve.

How Yelp Encourages Users to Write More Thoughtful Reviews (Even on Mobile) (Fast Company)
Customer reviews are the heart of Yelp’s popularity and success, and yet you couldn’t write a review from mobile until August 2013. Consumer and Mobile Products Vice President Eric Singley tells us how they figured out how to get users to write out high-quality reviews–through gentle nudges, clever filtering, and a little bit of social priming.

Manhattan Community Papers Revamped Under New Editor (New York Times)
Kyle Pope once shared in a Pulitzer Prize at The Wall Street Journal and served as the top editor of The New York Observer. So when he recently took a job running five small community newspapers in Manhattan, it raised eyebrows in New York’s gossipy and insular media world.

iBeacon Comes to SXSW (Mashable)
The official SXSW mobile app is powered by iBeacon — Apple’s name for the innovative Bluetooth LE technology that allows two-way communication to take place between devices. We’ve seen iBeacon implementations in retail environments and at stadiums, but this is one of the first times we’ve seen iBeacon technology utilized at an event like SXSW.

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