A roundup of today's big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology... Newspaper Consortium Seeks to Sell Cars.com for $3 Billion (Wall Street Journal)... Lyft Funding Official: Documents Filed for New $150 Million Round (Recode)... TripAdvisor Plans Mbile Travel Guide Features in the Face of Competition From Rivals like Foursquare and Google Now (TheNextWeb)...

More and more, marketers are turning to deep data analytics to measure the impact relative to a local marketing campaign. But call measurement provider Telmetrics says that value can still be delivered by paying attention to a more basic form of interaction: phone calls...

A roundup of today's big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology... With Square Capital, Square Begins Offering Controversial Merchant Cash Advances (Recode)... It’s Now Obvious Why Microsoft Invested Millions In Foursquare (Business Insider)... Uber Says it Doesn’t Discriminate by Neighborhood in Chicago (GigaOm)...

Borrell Associates predicts that political spending on marketing is set to balloon in the next four years, growing from 120 billion in 2012 to well over 950 billion in 2016. The overwhelming majority of that money will still be spent traditional media — namely, television —with only a fraction spent online...

Grubhub has officially thrown its hat into the I.P.O. ring, with the public filing of its prospectus Friday morning. The online ordering firm, which merged with competitor Seamless in August, filed the prospectus confidentially with the SEC last week under a new provision introduced by the JOBS act aimed at making the IPO process less expensive for smaller companies...

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, jobs at AOL, Yahoo, Google, VendAsta and Street Fight.

Small business owners are underestimating the importance of online reviews — negatively influencing their communication with customers as a result, according to a new survey conducted by local marketing provider Yodle. Only 13 percent of small business owners said they actively pursued online reviews from their customers...

Groupon reported stronger-than-expected earnings for the holiday quarter, but shares of the daily deal giant tanked in after hours trading due in part to poor first quarter guidance and concerns over declining margins. The company grew revenue by 18% from a year earlier, but it also saw double digit declines in margins decreased by as its less profitable ecommerce business continued to account for a larger portion of the wider revenue mix...

Two years after acquiring the Portland-based startup Geoloqi, Esri is putting the startup’s technology to use. The forty-five year-old mapping firm released a new geo-trigger service and a redesigned developer site this morning in an effort to build a wider developer tool kit that might serve as an alternative to the native location tools provided by Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android...

Small businesses face increasing marketing complexity driven by more fragmented media outlets and more online channels, and a vast array of marketing technology that is supposed to “help” them simplify this dynamic. SMBs are being forced to rethink where they advertise and how to stay in touch with existing loyal customers....