VentureBeat

Here’s the latest:

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Sabio Labs raises second round — Sabio is a secretive Palo Alto, Calif. start-up building a new design process for analog chips. It’s likely up to something significant, because Andy Bechtolsheim, the brilliant engineer and co-founder of Sun Microsystems has led a round of investment into the company. Investors in the earlier, first round include individuals like Art Reidel (CEO Scintera – on the board ), Bill Unger (of Mayfield), Barr Dolan (of Charter Ventures), Rajeev Madhawan (CEO Magma), Carl Showalter (of Lightspeed Ventures), Marc Friend (USVP and Summit Partners), Bobby Yazdani (CEO SABA), Amidzad (Palo Alto investors) and Harry Cheung. We plan to follow up with the company’s chief executive, Mar Hershenson.

The blog search engine Technorati has bought PersonalBee — PersonalBee (see our coverage) lets experts and others create their own news page for others to follow along. See Technorati’s statement here. Meanwhile, Technorati continues its search for a chief executive, something we’ve heard started several months ago. Technorati could have moved into providing blog and stat features, but the nimble MyBlogLog moved more quickly (our coverage). After more than $14 million in venture capital, Technorati appears still to be searching for a business model.

Is Photobucket in negotiations with Fox Interactive Media, owner of MySpace? — That’s what we’ve heard from a source, who says the two are working through Lehman Brothers in talks. Even if true, it’s another thing to speculate whether the recent scuffle between MySpace and Photobucket is related to deal jockeying. Apparently, Diller’s IAC is also interested in Photobucket. (See our update here)

Competitious has raised an angel round — Competitious is a start-up company that gives users tools to compare themselves against competing companies, using a number of variables, such as Web traffic, feature lists and news articles. Paul Colton, the founder and CEO of Aptana, which recently took over the RadRails project, is one investor. The company is still early, and has yet to release its main product. (See our earlier coverage).

Traits of successful entrepreneurs — Venture capitalist Ryan Floyd reports on the qualities of the best entrepreneurs he has funded.

Aggregate Knowledge raises cash, but ChoiceStream raises more — Following our report yesterday about Aggregate Knowledge, a behavioral search company raising $20 million, we learned competitor ChoiceStream, of Cambridge, Mass. has raised more, $25.79 million. The company hasn’t responded to requests for comment. Dan Primack has more details and speculates the company’s valuation exceeds $250 million. Rumor we’ve heard is ChoiceStream rejected a $150 million or so buyout offer, so Dan’s reasoning is sound, though SEC filings can also be misleading. Investors are General Catalyst, Sutter Hill Ventures and a family trust affiliated with ChoiceStream CEO Stephen Johnson. The company has more than 100 employees, and so is burning $1 million a month.

Do you ever get overwhelmed by all the Internet Web sites out there, and want to track their features and how popular they are?

Competitio.us has designed a way to do that, if you are an Internet company, and want to track the competition. It started with web 2.0 companies, and is building out from there. It gives you a dashboard so that you can see a company’s profile. It also lets you see their Alexa traffic, and read news and blog posts about them.

It also lets you fill in a list of features that a company has, so you can keep track of its weaknesses and strengths. Finally, it produces a matrix that lets you see on a single page your universe of competitors, letting you contrast their features side-by-side

The Palo Alto start-up of two people is still in its early, testing stages of letting you do all this. Co-founder Andrew Holt, a former product manager at Yahoo said he evaluating ways to develop the service, make its interface more intuitive and build out more offerings — including collaboration on knowledge within a team.

Currently, you have to do most of the work from scratch, building up the feature set of each company you want to track. You can also add your own company, and its features.

Right now, the market lacks appropriate offerings, Holt says. There are various tools, such as news aggregators, and traffic measuring services that track competitors, but nothing that brings these aspects together. Also, corporate strategy officers at big companies often horde such information. Competitio.us is a way to give all employees an explicit tracking device on the competition.

One good way to improve the service may be to offer more data on where a competitors’ traffic increases are coming from, and to provide other data, such as a competitor’s ranking on Google.

The company has no VC funding yet. Below is a partial screenshot of a profile page you could build for Microsoft Live.