IAC announced today that SeamlessWeb founder Jason Finger will take over as CEO of its CityGrid Media unit April 12. CityGrid Media includes the CityGrid ad network and Citysearch, Urbanspoon, Insider Pages and BuzzLabs.

Finger was a founder of SeamlessWeb in 1999. The company grew to 21 U.S. cities plus London during his tenure. SeamlessWeb, now known as Seamless, was acquired by food services giant Aramark in 2006, with Finger leading the business while serving on Aramark’s executive leadership council.

He’s served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Bessemer Venture Partners since 2010, focusing on SaaS, local businesses and e-commerce. Seamless currently competes for food delivery and restaurant online services with GrubHub and others.

CityGrid Media’s longtime CEO, Jay Herratti, told us he will be helping during the transition. During his eight-year tenure at the company, he proved to be a pivotal figure in the evolution of interactive local media. In addition to acquiring Urbanspoon, which should leverage Finger’s experience at Seamless, Herratti dealt head-on with building enough local user volume to attract merchants — a serious issue in the fragmented local world.

Next week, at ILM East in Boston, Herratti will provide insights into the evolution of local during his tenure at CityGrid. “Wrapping up my time at CityGrid Media with a BIA/Kelsey keynote seems like the perfect opportunity to reflect on the future of local,” he told us.

“During my session, I will share my thoughts on where local is heading,” added Herratti. “There is so much activity in our space right now; the next year should be just as interesting as the last.”

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BuzzLabs, a 16-month-old company that we first covered in February, has been charging $15 a month for the self-serve, PDF reports. The reports grade all mentions from blogs, review sites, Twitter and Foursquare Tips on a sentiment scale of one to five stars, and charts the aggregated sentiment analysis on a month-by-month basis.

In addition to the self-serve reports, BuzzLabs had been providing more customized reporting to large customers, such as restaurant chains. It is unclear whether it will continue supporting that business.

CityGrid Media CEO Jay Herratti says that the company appealed to CityGrid because it proved to be “very good at crawling both the mobile and social Web, aggregating information, and appending it to the right business. It shows how [the business] looks online.”

Herratti concedes there hasn’t been vocal demand for such information from customers — despite the initial excitement about reputation management 16 months ago or so — but he thinks it will prove to be very desirable and help CityGrid be seen as a one-stop shop. “Publishers can show this to their advertiser to prove results,” he says.

BuzzLabs, which is headed by Philip Lee, who had previously been with Microsoft Advertising, will keep its Seattle headquarters. Herratti says the company will likely add staff, and will also be integrated into CityGrid’s technology team. He anticipates it will take three to six months for CityGrid to fully integrate the company. Urbanspoon, another CityGrid property, is also based in Seattle.

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Citysearch officially rolled out its CityGrid publisher network this week. The network moves Citysearch away from an exclusive focus on its individual sites (“Citysearch.com,” “Insiderpages.com,” “Urbanspoon”). Instead, it works on a distributed basis with partners (i.e., “SuperPages”) to marry local content and advertising.

In the short term, CityGrid represents the new face of Citysearch and the next evolution in the local market. It allows the company to leverage its existing infrastructure and content, and reach down into the distribution channel with a more automated and cost-effective option versus a focused business development effort. For its publisher network, and its 500,000 local advertisers — projected to jump to 750,000 by year-end — it also represents a real alternative to Google.

Overall, our enthusiasm for the product is as high as it was when we were first walked through it some 14 months ago. Here’s why we like it. The local market fundamentally suffers from two broad problems. First, it’s hard to make money without a substantial investment in sales. Even then, success is not assured. Second, content is expensive to create. Yes, user reviews can be acquired, but there are still large swaths of categories that still lack deep engaging content.

In theory, CityGrid addresses both problems. It gives small and large developers local content and local monetization together in package. The power of this cannot really be underestimated since both of these are hard to come by, not to mention expensive. Urbanspoon used this to great success and eventually was acquired by IAC (Citysearch’s parent). Nearly every review and ad on Urbanspoon was from Citysearch.

We have seen some reports that this product is a reaction to other companies in the field entering the space. It’s not. If anything, it simply takes the winning strategy of opening up an API to developers and letting them build products on robust infrastructure. Think Google Maps, for example.

To our knowledge, there is no one else doing this model with the same scale and focus. Indeed, 100 developers signed up to work with the API within the first two days of its release. We expect, however, that more people will enter this market quickly. But not before Citysearch gets a major head start, if Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti gets his way.

“My vision is [that it will become] the leading content and ad network for local,” he told us, adding that it is no longer just about Citysearch.com as a destination site. “This is Citysearch,” he says. “It isn’t distributed in one place. It is part of many places, all around the Web.”

The result also provides an alternative to Google. “We look at what Google is doing with local as a major competitive threat,” says Herratti. “It controls access to the Internet.

“Last year, we were building and rebuilding,” Herratti notes. “This year, we are very, very focused on execution.” Still, the current product is relatively primitive and will be rapidly evolving. “Right now, we are talking about version 1.0” he says. “Twelve months from now, there will be new geotargeting solutions, new ways of creating content. We’re taking all of these pieces and putting them together. The next thing is to optimize, and optimize.”

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