VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

Yahoo may live to die another day — Legg Mason Capital Management, which controls 4.4 percent of Yahoo’s outstanding stock shares, is backing Yahoo chief executive Jerry Yang and the current board of directors at the company’s upcoming shareholder meeting. This is a big blow to Carl Icahn’s hostile takeover bid. Yang is so happy, he even made an internal “victory” video, Silicon Alley Insider has the transcript.

Motorola sues a former employee now with Apple over trade secrets — It should be no surprise that this is about the iPhone, which has all the buzz in the world right now while Motorola’s phones have well, none. Motorola claims this employee knew all about pricing, margins, strategy, etc… and fed it all to Apple. Bloomberg has more.

California is using more gas than China — California uses more gas and diesel than any country in the world, with the exception, of course, of the United States, according to Wired. But we have electric cars!

Corporate social networking STILL sucks — Or at least it’s a waste of money. ReadWriteWeb has more on the study.

ComScore finds Microsoft making gains in search — Could it be due to its comical attempt to pay users to use its search, or is it something else? Either way, Google is still utterly dominating and even Yahoo is still more than doubling Microsoft.

We’re still 15 years from fuel cell cars — 2 million electric vehicles powered by fuel cells would be in use by 2020 in the United States in the best-case scenario plan, a government-funded report finds.

Facebook wants you to talk about yourself? — A new feature in the new profile design soon to roll out apparently wants you to “write something about yourself,” according to Allfacebook.

Shopping site Become.com confirms new funding — We wrote about it a couple days ago.

EStyle sells assets for $6.4M — The baby and maternity products retailers which has raised almost $150 million in VC and private equity money is getting out for much less than than, according to VentureWire.

A new self-hosted life streaming site — SweetCron is a Tokyo-based new piece of blogging software that allows you host your own FriendFeed-style stream of social networking data. This will appeal to users who don’t want all of their information accumulating traffic for a third party site. StartupMeme has more.

DataPortability has its initial steering group members — These 12 people will make the decisions for the group that wants to make all of your social data on the web portable between different sites. CenterNetworks has the full list.

Updated

Become.com, an comparison shopping and research site, is raising $8 million in a fourth round of funding, VentureBeat has learned. The Mountain View, Calif. company confirmed the funding, but won’t provide any additional details until the formal announcement.

This news comes only three months after Become.com announced its $17.5 million third round. I’m hoping to talk to chief executive Michael Yang once the news is official, so I can find out what’s behind this. When we last spoke, Yang told me Become.com was in its second consecutive quarter of profitability, but he also said his goal is to have one of the top comparison shopping sites around, in the same league if not beating giant Shopping.com. So perhaps the company needs more money to fuel that growth. I’ve also been speaking to more and more startups who say they’re raising venture funding as a financial cushion if the economic doldrums continue or get worse, and Become.com may be in a similar situation.

Editor Matt Marshall first covered the site in 2005, when he used Become.com to shop for his (at the time) new house, and was particularly impressed by its search tool, which lets users find lots of relevant product reviews. It has a healthy amount of products for sale through comparison shopping, too — more than 25 million products sold through 5,000 stores — although that’s much less than shopping search site TheFind, which indexed 170 million products and 500,000 stores, the last time we checked.

This new round brings Become.com’s total funding to more than $37 million.

Update: Become.com has made its official announcement about the funding, identifying the European Founders Fund as the investor. As you might expect given the backer, the new money will go towards European expansion, particularly in the United Kingdom, Germany and France.

Become.com, a startup that wants to be the Google of comparison shopping, has raised $17.5 million in a third round of funding. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company seems to be fulfilling the promise we wrote about back in 2005.

At the time, we were impressed by Become.com’s “laser-like focus on (1) helping people comparison shop, while at the same time (2) using a clean search engine algorithm — free of paid placements, etc. — to help people research products.” In other words, it was one of the first sites that offered a truly comprehensive selection of products, reviews and purchasing options available online. (Top sites, like Shopping.com, were more limited because they required merchants to pay fees to be listed.) Chief executive Michael Yang tells me the company continues to emphasize its search technology, which has now indexed 5.6 billion web pages.

Since Become.com was founded in 2004, quite a few other sites have entered the field — TheFind, for example, is offering a similar clean search approach and seems to include more products (170 million, compared to Become.com’s 25 million), while Like has successfully brought visual search to comparison shopping. But Yang says his site continues to see rapid growth, with traffic increasing 260 percent between February 2007 and February 2008. Become.com isn’t yet in the same league as giants Shopping.com and NexTag, but at the current rate of growth, Yang says Become.com will be one of the top three comparison shopping sites in two or three years.

The company also plans to expand into other markets. Yang won’t offer any specific details, but says Become.com is looking at “other verticals that leverage our core search technology.”

Yang, along with co-founder Yeogirl Yun, has been in the comparison shopping market for a decade now, having co-founded MySimon in 1998. He says the field has matured quickly.

“Back in ‘98, our number one goal was just to get big fast,” Yang says. “Now it’s more like, ‘Get profitable fast.’”

Become.com seems to be doing something right on that front — it’s in its second consecutive quarter of profitability.

This venture round brings Become.com’s total funding to more than $29 million. The funding comes from TPG Growth.

Wize.com, a San Mateo start-up, has launched yet another search engine for consumer electronics and other goods.

Wize’s promise hangs on a single, skinny thread: Its “Wize Rank” concept. Wize Rank is a numeric ranking of products (from zero to 100). Each product is rated according to how well users and reviewers judge it, along with the buzz it’s getting. It is a cute play on Google’s concept of “Page Rank.” The exact “Wize Rank” formula is proprietary, and so not being published. This lack of transparency may cause some people to dismiss it, but then Google’s algorithm has remained secret too.

It is very late in the game to be launching new engines like this. Wize focuses on research, and joins a full field of players such as Become and Retrevo. We played a bit with Wize, and it doesn’t let you buy products directly, but directs you which vendors are selling them for the lowest price. Here, it also has competition in Shopping.com, Nextag, Thefind.com and Pricegrabber. (Update: ViewScore, of Tel Aviv, Israel, is doing the exact same thing as Wize, a reader points out below, making even less original than we thought. Meanwhile, other sites are doing something similar for specific niches, i.e., movies, games etc.).

And yet Wize has gotten $4 million in funding from Mayfield Fund and Bessemer Venture Partners, a sign that the search engine sector — dominated by Google, and to a lesser extent Yahoo — is so profitable that its worth gunning for a success even if the odds of doing so are very poor.

Here’s the basic Wize Rank equation:

Wize relies on 1,042,806 consumer product reviews of 17,668 products.

Its weakness is that it remains subjective like most other rating sources (why does “buzz” matter, for example?). Each user has different needs. Wize.com says we should consider its method similar to Wine Spectator’s scoring. But Wine Spectator’s tasting scores are quite subjective. WS’s scores became popular because it was one of the early players to rate wine. Perhaps Wize can win some respect for its numbering system, in which case it could become quite a success (there is less chance of this happening, now that we’ve seen Viewscore). Here is an example of a camera that has received a score of 100:

Wize CEO Tom Patterson was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Mayfield last year, the company said.