Bay Area still center for search technology
Many in Silicon Valley are worried silly about the supposed exodus of high-tech jobs to India and China, but the stream of tech companies coming this way shouldn’t be ignored. The latest is search company YourAmigo, which tells VentureWire (sorry, sub required) that it’s moving its headquarters to Silicon Valley from Adelaide, Australia. Just two weeks ago, the Korean founders of MySimon unveiled Become.com, a company they formed locally after returning last year — saying the U.S. market is still the most lucrative, that Silicon Valley is the best place to hire, and, oh yes, raise moolah. Become.com’s CEO Michael Yang told us he’s looking to raise a VC round of about $12 million. Meanwhile, the five-year-old YourAmigo apparently has gotten $4 million from Silicon Valley’s BA Venture Partners and is looking for one more investor to close its $8 million first round of institutional funding, according to VentureWire.
According to CEO Rahmon Coupe:
The new centerpiece of YourAmigo’s technology converts the dynamic Web pages that the company used to search into a format that allows search engines like Yahoo and Google to read them.
“Given that we had the core technology to search the invisible Web, we thought we could help Web sites get crawled and provide a bridge between Web sites and Google,” said Coupe. “Search on the Internet is already important and attracting significant advertising dollars, but its going to be really, really important in the future.”
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
