Roundup: Yahoo gains key shareholder in proxy fight, Motorola sues former employee for giving secrets to Apple and more

Venture Beat — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 20:58:33 -0700

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.