Become.com Raises $7.2M in Series B Funding; Company Announces Price Comparison Service to Launch This Summer.MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Become.com, a search engine that helps people find product reviews and relevant buying information, today announced the completion of its $7.2 million Series B round of funding. This round of investment is led by the Transcosmos corporate venture capital group with participation from Silicon Valley's Angel Investors An individual who invests his or her own money in a private company, which is typically a startup. An angel investor is not an employee or member of a bank, venture capital firm or other financial institution that normally makes such investments. Ron Conway and Bob Bozeman. With proceeds from the round, Become.com will unveil its price comparison shopping service this summer. Become.com will also expand and improve its shopping index which currently includes more than 3 billion pages of shopping related information. "We are very pleased with the additional investment from Transcosmos and the other investors, all of whom have great confidence in Become.com as the next generation search engine for shopping," said Michael Yang Michael Yang (Korean: 양민정, Hanja: 梁民正, born August 31 1961) is a Korean-American Entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, California. , Founder and CEO (1) (Chief Executive Officer) The highest individual in command of an organization. Typically the president of the company, the CEO reports to the Chairman of the Board. of Become.com. "The feedback we have received from current users has been overwhelmingly positive and we look forward to delivering our price comparison shopping site this summer. Unlike comparison shopping sites that focus on price, Become.com combines professional reviews, buying advice, and articles as well as the best price comparison service on the internet." "We are very excited to be part of Become.com's success through our investment. Become.com has tremendous opportunities in the growing shopping search engine market with its unique AIR (Affinity Index Ranking) technology," said Shin Nagakura, Executive Vice President, Transcosmos Investments, Inc. "Become.com is the first search engine technology focused on delivering the most relevant product and shopping information to help people make smart buying decisions. I am very excited to be making additional investment in this round," said Ron Conway. Since its beta launch on February 23, Become has gained significant momentum: --More than 100% growth in traffic from March to April --Unveiled Affinity Index Ranking (AIR), the first new search algorithm In computer science, a search algorithm, broadly speaking, is an algorithm that takes a problem as input and returns a solution to the problem, usually after evaluating a number of possible solutions. since Google introduced PageRank in the late 1990's --Introduced a shopping-focused spell checker A separate program or word processing function that tests for correctly spelled words. It can test the spelling of a marked block, an entire document or group of documents. Advanced systems check for spelling as the user types and can correct common typos and misspellings on the fly. --Expanded its shopping index to include more than 3 billion pages of shopping related information --Announced the appointment of two search veterans Jon Glick, Senior Director of Product Search and Comparison Shopping (formerly with Yahoo) and Greg Haslam, Director of Business Development (formerly with NexTag) Michael Yang, Founder, President and CEO will be presenting at a series of upcoming conferences: --IBD Network's Under the Radar This article is about the magazine. For other uses, see Under the Radar (disambiguation). Under the Radar is an American magazine that bills itself as "The solution to music pollution." It features interviews with accompanying photo-shoots. Conference -- May 31, Mountain View, CA --Consumer Report's WebWatch Conference: Trust or Consequence -- June 9, Berkeley, CA --SDForum Vertical Search Engine A Web-based search engine that indexes content specialized by location (local venues and activities), by topic, typically for consumers, or by industry, geared to businesses (B2B). Conference: Shopping Search -- June 28, Santa Clara Santa Clara, city, Cuba Santa Clara (sän`tä klä`rä), city (1994 est. pop. 217,000), capital of Villa Clara prov., central Cuba. , CA --Dow Jones Venture Wire Conference -- November 8 & 9, Redwood City Redwood City, city (1990 pop. 66,072), seat of San Mateo co., W Calif., on San Francisco Bay; inc. 1868. Manufactures include commmunications, electrical, electronic, and medical equipment. , CA Yeogirl Yun, Founder, Chairman and CTO (Chief Technical Officer) The executive responsible for the technical direction of an organization. See CIO and salary survey. will be presenting at: --MIT Technology Review's Emerging Technologies Conference, September 28 & 29, Cambridge, MA About Become.com Become.com is a search engine for shopping that helps people find product reviews and buying information on millions of products across the web. Founded by Michael Yang and Yeogirl Yun, founders of pioneering online comparison shopping site mySimon, Become.com indexes over 3 billion pages of shopping related information and uses proprietary ranking technology AIR (Affinity Index Ranking) to deliver targeted and relevant information for shopping searches. |
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