The local market has seen a seemingly endless flood of startups come online over the past few years, with many building the next iteration of last year’s feature. But as the market matures, and later-stage startups look to expand their addressable markets, the industry is starting to coalesce. According to data presented at the Interactive Local Media conference in San Francisco Tuesday, the number of M&A deals jumped by 65% this year thanks to strong performance online, but explosive growth in mobile...

MomentFeed announced this morning that it has closed a $5.5 million Series A funding round led by Signia Venture Partners. Robert Blatt, who was quietly installed at MomentFeed's new CEO earlier this year, told Street Fight that the new funding would go toward further scaling MomentFeed's platform...

Every two weeks, Search Influence’s Kelly Benish — who knows practically everyone in hyperlocal — covers some of the latest job changes taking place in this dynamic industry. In this week's edition, new hires and jobs at Street Fight, MOGL, VendaAsta, Leaf, and AOL.

A roundup of today's big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.... Foursquare 7.0 Brings Passive Location Technology To All (GigaOm)... Homejoy Raises $38M As It Looks To Expand Beyond Home Cleaning (TechCrunch)... EBay, PayPal Pinpoint Stores For Mobile Shopping (USA Today)...

The 903 small business owners surveyed in a new study from Borrell Associates said they expected to spend only 12% of their digital advertising budgets in 2013 on banner advertising, sponsorships, and classifieds. Meanwhile they expected to spend more than half of their marketing budgets on owned channels, investing heavily in managing their website (35%), running email marketing campaigns (13%), and social media (14)%.

Eight months after raising a massive Series A round, Booker is making its push into a new, and potentially massive, market: CRM. Today, the New York-based company, which began selling booking and business management software to service businesses, rolled out Promote, a Demandforce-like product that allows businesses to tie email messaging and social media campaigns to the goings-on of their business...

Smartphones generate billions of bits of location data every day, creating an unprecedented opportunity for marketers to understand and engage with local consumers at scale. In a Street Fight webinar Wednesday sponsored by YP, Patrick Dolan of the IAB joined David Petersen of Sense Networks and YP’s Luke Edson to discuss the trends that make location data a must for mobile marketing, and outline a handful of ways advertisers can use big data to unlock local relevance in their campaigns...

A roundup of today's big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.... Amazon’s Drones for Deliveries (Wall Street Journal)... Online and Offline Stores Duke It Out This Week (New York Times)... Cyber Mundane: Why Online Shopping Is Overhyped, And What Brands Should Focus On Instead (TheNextWeb)...

Independent hyperlocal publisher Scott Brodbeck has launched a third digital news publication in the suburbs of metro Washington, D.C. His new RestonNow serves a thriving, nationally recognized planned community that was built from scratch on farmland in Northern Virginia's Fairfax County...

A new study from Kenshoo finds that advertising on Facebook may bolster the performance of existing paid search marketing campaigns. The research, funded partly by Facebook, found that users who saw an ad on Facebook and then made a purchase via a paid search link spent nearly a quarter more than those who were not exposed to the same ad...