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Kosmix, the Silicon Valley search engine company that focuses on specific topics, such as health, has raised $10 million more in backing.

Kosmix is run by co-founders (including Venky Harinarayan, pictured left) who came close to buying Google in 1999 when they represented Amazon. Google was still a small company, but Google co-founder Sergey Brin responded to their offer saying he’d settle nothing short of single-digit billions; they passed. See our coverage of that history, here.

Needless to say, in retrospect that was a mistake. The Kosmix guys are filled with ambition in order redeem themselves, and they continue to plug away at Kosmix despite terrific odds. Scores of competing companies have launched to focus on every specialty topic under the sun.

Could their hard work be paying off? Kosmix’ health consumer site, www.righthealth.com, is now the sixth most visited health site, according on Hitwise. It draws more than 3.9 million unique visitors a month, according to Quantcast, or a 56 percent increase since its official launch in fall. (See our coverage.) That comes despite a significant number of competitors in the health site and health search domain.

DAG Ventures led the investment. Previous investors Accel and Lightspeed also participated. Kosmix recently released a consumer auto site, www.rightautos.com, which attracts more than two million unique visitors a month, it said. It plans to release more topical search sites, including RightTrips.com, which is next.

The company previously raised $25 million.

In case you haven’t noticed, one of the frothiest areas in start-up world lately is behavioral targeting.

With hordes of advertising money moving online, entrepreneurs can make a killing by analyzing user behavior, and hooking that user up with the right ads and products.

MyBuys, which tracks user behavior to help online retailers make better recommendations, has raised $10 million.

The Redwood Shores, Calif., company is one of many trying to improve online shopping. We covered StyleFeeder last week, which raised $1 million for its community recommendation site. Mybuys’ behavioral targeting technology also competes against Wunderloop (our coverage), Baynote (our coverage), Matchmine (which also recently raised $10 million), and Aggregate Knowledge (our coverage).

These services are used by online retailers to show you potentially interesting merchandise, by tracking what you have already been looking at or buying. If you do a lot of online shopping for designer jeans, a service like MyBuys may recommend especially popular or discounted designer jeans to you.

MyBuys claims to deliver the highest converting recommendations, with 300% more revenue per interaction between a user and a retail site.

The company makes money by receiving a cut of revenue from the retailer when users purchase suggested products.

The demand among online retailers for better behavioral tracking is so high right now that MyBuys and its startup competitors are all able to gather this “low hanging fruit” — for the time being — Lightspeed Venture Partner’s Peter Nieh tells us.

The market shakeout in behavioral targeting will resemble search engines startup in the 1990’s, Nieh thinks: Many companies were able to search the web, but Google ended up doing it way better than the others, and captured the largest portion of the market.

Mybuys is already being used in retail sites such as camera site Ritz Interactive, urban style site Karmaloop, and fabric site Hancock Fabrics.

Lightspeed is all over e-commerce. We are only seeing the “tip of the iceberg” in e-commerce, the firm’s top blogger Jeremy Liew wrote in June — he thinks there will be “many more” e-commerce companies that grow to make more than $500 million in revenue by using behavioral targeting and other methods of matching purchasers with products they’re most likely to buy.

Lightspeed participated in this latest round, which was led by Palomar Ventures.

LS9, a Silicon Valley startup that hopes its technology may one day help replace petroleum, has taken $15 million more in funding.

The San Carlos, Calif. company uses synthetic biology to modify microorganisms in order to produce high-energy fuels, including to power cars (see our previous coverage).

According to the company’s own projections, it is two to three years from commercializing and selling a synthetic fuel. LS9 recently recruited president Robert Walsh, who brings several decades of supply-line experience from Royal Dutch Shell.

Despite the huge potential returns from producing synthetic fuels, the number of startups in the field is limited by the small pool of knowledgeable experts in synthetic biology. One pioneer is Craig Venter, who recently added to his own human genome project fame by announcing he is capable of creating life. His own company, Synthetic Genomics, is a competitor to LS9.

Other companies competing in the area include Amyris Biotechnologies and Codexis. Each startup is betting on its own proprietary methods to replace petroleum-based fuels.

LS9’s most recent $15 million in funding was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Flagship Ventures and Khosla Ventures, the company’s original backer, also participated. The company has so far taken a total of about $20 million.

Here’s a summary of the latest action. See below for more:
1) In-Q-Tel invests in Forterra Systems, a private virtual world creator
2) Appfuel, another Facebook ad network, but with better ad targeting
3) AOL to spin out advertising arm?
4) Project Playlist, for sharing music playlists on other sites, raises $3 million
5) Four Interactive, a local business review site, gets $10 million from Valley VC’s

In-Q-Tel invests in Forterra Systems, a private virtual world creator – San Mateo-based Forterra’s software platform lets developers quickly create private, online virtual-world scenarios for organizations that can be used to simulate potential real world events, such as a government’s secret spy missions.

After running a scenario, the software lets its users get integrated reports that analyze participants’ actions to figure out what when right and what went wrong.

Besides government agencies, Forterra serves organizations in healthcare, education and other industries.

The amount of funding was undisclosed. The company said a “technology advancement agreement” was part of the deal, which sounds like customization for the needs of the US government. In-Q-Tel invests in technology companies that in some way further the interests of the US intelligence community.

Appfuel, another Facebook ad network, but with better ad targeting – RockYou, VideoEgg, Social Media and other Facebook ad networks have already been active for months. Today, San Francisco-based Appfuel is launching with the claim that it can more quickly and accurately serve targeted advertising within Facebook applications

In one example, if you state you’re a fan of the band the FooFighters on your Facebook profile page, then you might see an ad that shows you information about the band’s latest shows or where you can buy band t-shirts. GigaOm has more.

The company has raised an undisclosed amount of angel funding.

In other Facebook news, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has been spotted in Seattle, on his way to talk to Microsoft — possibly about selling them some Facebook shares (our previous coverage).

AOL to spin out advertising arm? – New Techrunch editor Erick Schonfeld has the potential scoop.

Project Playlist, for sharing music playlists on other sites, raises $3 million – Another social music site with a widget, the Beverly Hills company lets you create, embed and listen to playlists on MySpace, Facebook and other social networks; PEHub reported the funding, although no investors were named.

Four Interactive, a local business review site, gets $10 million from Valley VC’s — The Bangalore-based company owns AskLaila.com, a Yelp-like site in India where you can read others’ reviews about local businesses and add your own. It includes proximity search, SMS notifications and other services. More here.

Investors include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Silicon Valley Bank and returning investor Matrix Partners.

TheFind is a comparison shopping search engine that is unusually clean — it doesn’t ask merchants to pay for their products to show up in results. TheFind’s traffic is growing.

This purity is one reason it has just won $15 million in fresh backing from big-name investors Bain Capital, Redpoint Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

The investment, to be announced tomorrow (Thursday) makes TheFind one of the best-funded of the new shopping search engines. It wants to do to shopping what Google did to general search seven years ago — turn it upside-down by making results as relevant as possible to the user. Search for “Victoria Secret” for example, and TheFind will return plenty of results listing clothing made by that company. If you do that at Shopping.com, you’ll get nothing, because Victoria Secret refuses to pay it.

Shopping.com and a wave of other early players have matured and seen financial success — and yet all of them demand payment from retailers in return for showing their wares. With so many players, you’d think the game would be over: Nextag, Pricegrabber and Shopzilla.com — all are huge. Most recently, Nextag recently received a major investment that valued it at $1.2 billion. A slew of other start-ups, from Retrevo to Become.com, have launched too — but none of the smaller players have gotten major traction. None have received major amounts of funding.

Thefind seeks to crawl as much of the Web as possible to search for hard goods (electronics, cameras, etc) as well as soft goods (furniture, clothing, etc).

We should note that after our initial favorable review of TheFind back in March, we made several qualifications a week later when we came to realize that TheFind was not as pure as were initially led to believe. These were largely temporary issues. At the time, TheFind’s sponsored ads at the top of returned results were not clearly marked as such. TheFind has since marked its sponsored results clearly as “sponsored”. In addition, TheFind was paying for ads at search engines to attract traffic to its site, in an effort to market itself. So while it boasted a million unique users, we discovered that half of those users were directed there by an ad (suggesting its growth wasn’t as self-fueled as we’d believed). However, TheFind has since reduced its payments for such traffic. This month, 80 percent of its two million unique monthly users this month are be people going directly to the site, said chief executive Siva Kumar.

TheFind.com says it indexes 170 million products and 500,000 stores.

Stion is one of the now dozens of companies saying it is developing a more efficient solar power technology.

The Silicon Valley company (Menlo Park, Calif.) has raised $15 million in a second round of financing, saying its new material (the company won’t disclose which material it is) for manufacturing cells and modules will have a lower installation cost than all its competitors. Significantly, the company says it will be able to market its product without public subsidies, which so far have been required to prop up the solar industry.

While its material will be as cheap to make as the new materials being used by other companies, such as CIGS and Telluride, it will be more efficient than those others at converting sun to power, it said. (See our past coverage on the problems plaguing existing start-ups). It uses a so-called “thin-film” technology that several other companies also use. Chet Farris, the company’s chief executive, said its efficiency will be 25 to 30 percent, which is notable because it is much higher than the efficiency of silicon solar cell technologies produced by existing public companies like SunPower. Stion will produce both the cells and the modules (panels).

We previously wrote about Stion here, when it went by former name NStructures.

Farris said his goal is to provide electricity at a ten to twenty cents per kilowatt hour, or at an installed cost of $3/watt — which would be competitive with today’s utility electricity rates. Half of the $3 cost would come from installation costs, and the other half from the actual cost of the module technology.

There’s a big catch: The company will only finish development in 2009, and build a factory by 2010.

The financing was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, and included General Catalyst Partners and existing backers Khosla Ventures, Braemar Energy Ventures and Moser Baer Photovoltaic.

Brad Greenspan, the jilted MySpace executive, makes play at WSJ — Greenspan, who filed a suit against MySpace’s parent company for ripping off shareholders in its sale to News Corp. (the suit was rejected), is now seeking to buy the WSJ’s parent company Dow Jones. Of course, this continues the rivalry between Greenspan and News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch, another bidder for Dow Jones.

Heads rolls at VC lobby in London, now attention moves to Washington: The CEO of the British Venture Capital Association, Peter Linthwaite was forced to resign after a dismal performance in front of Parliament defending a loophole that allows carried interest to be taxed as capital gains at 10 percent rather than income at 40 percent (more details here in NYT). This comes as the issue heats up on this side of the Atlantic, with Congress taking a deeper look at whether private equity professionals — including possibly Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists — should be paying more tax.

WeFi offers a useful way to find free WiFi hotspots — Several sites let you find WiFi spots, including Jwire.com. However, for the most part, they’ve lacked a social component, and WeFi fills that void. Started 18 months ago by Arnon Kohavi (chief exec), Yossi Vardi and Shimon Scherzer, the company offers a download that lets you discover and connect to nearby free WiFi spots. A map displays the location of other WeFi users (users add the location themselves) and this info is updated every 15 minutes for all users. The Mountain View company has an R&D center in Tel Aviv, and is funded with $7.35 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Pitango and Gemini. Kohavi tells VentureBeat the service has gotten a lot of initial downloads since launching a press blitz earlier this week. This is useful for those people spontaneously on the go.

However, we see a long slog ahead for this company. There are so many free WiFi spots already, and even paid ones that offer value (we have a Starbucks account, for example) that it will be difficult to convince existing providers to opt into its platform. Only then can it start serve advertising to make money — and this, arguably for some, degrades the free WiFi experience. Kohavi says he may be able to convince WiFi providers to switch, if he can show them how to make more money. It’s also a tough slog because other services, such as Whisher, hope to let people connect for free, and to serve advertising as well. Kohavi says he’s now considering using the service for hooking up people seeking dates, or gaming partners.

Google approaches 3rd anniversary — And that means more exodus of talent is likely. Employees still holding pre-IPO shares will be completely vested on August 19, meaning they no longer have to stay in order to be able to cash in their stock.

Truphone, a UK-based start-up offering a VoIP download for mobile phones, gets kicked around by T-Mobile UK — Truphone makes it easy to make cheap calls over dual-mode (VoIP/cellular) phones. T-Mobile is refusing to connect calls from the company.

Imeem launches first ad-supported online music service — We wrote about Imeem’s plans several months ago. It has now launched, and compensates artists when their music is streamed on Imeem. It launches with 5,000 record labels with 3 million tracks. This is the company sued recently by Warner.

Odd turns in the story of Tom Perkins, the founder of Kleiner Perkins — Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is, along with Sequoia, one of the two most storied and successful venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. Founder Tom Perkins’s monster yacht, it turns out, cost $130 million to build (see Newsweek story by David Kaplan), the most expensive sailing craft ever. That’s up from the $100M we reported last year. More bizarre, however, are the events from 11 years ago, only now showing up in his published memoir. He was racing his yacht off the French coast when he capsized a smaller craft, killing a doctor on board. “I was arrested and tried in a foreign court in a language you don’t understand, by judges indifferent - or worse - to justice, represented by an inappropriate lawyer with the negative outcome preordained,” Perkins, 74, wrote, according to PageSix. Author Danielle Steel sat in court with him.

Another great post from Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen — This one is about what it’s really like to start a company He has good line about the euphoric up days and the catastrophic downer days that seem to plague a founder’s early days.

YouTube released in nine languages — This is about time. Home grown competitors in France and Germany, such as DailyMotion, are gaining footholds.

YouTube Mobile released — The carrier-agnostic version is finally here. But YouTube is still selecting the types of videos it shows, and so will frustrate some. FAQ here. Moreover, YouTube will begin encoding videos in a higher-quality format for the iPhone. Some 10,000 videos will be prepared in the H.264 format for the iPhone.

YouTube launches online video editing tools — They are basic, but basic is what most creators of YouTube’s grainy two-minute videos really need.

LongJump offers ways for non-programmers way to create applications — There are plenty of competitors, however, so this isn’t particularly new. (More details here).

Simple Spark offers a catalog of Web 2.0 products — It makes them easy to find for mainstream users who aren’t versed in the new ways. Searches for Flicker will turn up flickr, delicious will turn up del.icio.us, etc. It offers a concise description of each application. Despite an orderly interface, however, the options remain overwhelming. See this catalog of photo companies, for instance

Do we really need more dating sites?

Venture capitalists and other investors think so — even though the field is already stuffed with competitors.

Icebreaker, of Bellevue, Wash., has raised an undisclosed amount of cash from Lightspeed Venture Partners and individual investors, to launch a mobile dating service — called Crush or Flush. You can meet people with similar interests in your area. More details about the service here. It is similar to HotorNot.com’s mobile version.

Meanwhile, OkCupid, a New York dating site, has raised a whopping $6 million of cash from individual “angel” investors (first reported by GigaOm), the latest sign that some entrepreneurs are shunning venture capital firms.

OkCupid aims to be a serious dating site, while offering its service for free. Serious dating sites — these include Harmony.com, Match.com and Yahoo Personals — all charge, chief executive Sam Yagan tells VentureBeat. Meanwhile, free sites, such as HotorNot.com, or Friendster, are places where some people, for example many women in their 30s, feel uncomfortable, or at least don’t take the dating process seriously, says Yagan. However, Vancouver, Canada’s PlentyofFish has a similar model as OkCupid, and has at least as many users.

OkCupid has about 500,000 people have logged in at the site over the past 90 days, Yagan says. PlentyofFish says it has about 250,000 users logged in daily. Match.com has 1.3 million users, he says.

If you try OkCupid, you will see that it is easy to browse for dates, and that it finds matches for you based questions it asks you. OkCupid’s site isn’t the most intuitive at first. Once you log in, you’re supposed to go to the “matches” tab and answer questions, something that Yagan says will be made clearer with a site redesign within several weeks. On average, people answer 200 questions, on everything from smoking, politics, sex to sports, Yagan says. The resulting calculations, which show how compatible you are with a potential date, is what sets OkCupid apart from Plenty of Fish, says Yagan.

Yagan said he raised the cash from individuals — two New York hedge fund professional, a “rich alum” from Stanford and two entrepreneurs — because venture capital firms had demanded tougher terms. Several firms made offers, but they insisted on clauses forcing Yagan to get their permission first in the event of a sale (VCs might choose to reject a sale, to try instead to get a bigger sale price down the line). One VC told Yagan that a sale of $200 million or less would be considered a failure, he said. (Some VCs are upfront about the mismatch).

Yagan plans to make money from advertising. He is seasoned: Earlier, he formed SparkNotes, an online Cliffs Notes competitor acquired by Barnes & Noble, and eDonkey, a peer-to-peer file-sharing application.

OkCupid has eight employees.

Updated

The advertising revolution continues, in both the Internet and wireless worlds.

Spot Runner, the internet start-up that gives advertisers an easier, cheaper way to insert their ads into local TV programming, has raised $40 million more in backing.

And Rhythm NewMedia, meanwhile, has soaked up $18 million more in venture capital, to claim a stake in the other sexy ad area right now: inserting ads in wireless video clips.

This is a lot of money for both players. For SpotRunner, it is significant because backers include major buyers and sellers of advertising: WPP, CBS Corporation and the Interpublic Group. WPP says it manages about $50 billion in advertising budgets and Interpublic Group says its ad agencies serve 4,000 clients. Existing shareholder Allen & Co. led the third round of financing.

It suggests Spot Runner is getting traction. Its model is compelling: The complexities and cost of producing a video and buying air time are daunting for most small business owners. Spot Runner, which we first wrote about here, has developed a self-serve, web-based ad-buying system for TV.

The service works like this: The local business owner goes to the Spot Runner site, picks a business category and then chooses from among thousands of generic, pre-taped video ads. Each ad comes with pre-written voice-over text that can be customized. Once the business has picked an ad, it tells Spot Runner how much it wants to spend on air time and which media markets it wants the ad to run in.

Also among the latest investors are Tudor Investment and Capital Research and Management, and existing investors Battery and Index Ventures.

Meanwhile, Rhythm NewMedia’s technology, which is still in development, will use its new funding to work with carriers to insert relevant ads in video streamed to their users’ cellphones, the company told VentureBeat Friday. Carlyle Venture Partners led the investment, while existing investors also participated. These include Rembrandt Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Morgenthaler Ventures.

Separately, the company told VentureWire (sub required) it is about to launch with two carriers — one in the U.S. and one on the U.K — with one of those as early as this quarter, the second during the first quarter of next year.