Yen Lee, former General Manager of Yahoo! Travel has raised $10 million in Series B funding for his start-up.  His start-up is called UpTake.com and the funding was led by Trinity Ventures and Shasta Ventures.  The first round of funding was $4 million in December 2007.  UpTake.com is a travel search engine that grabs data from multiple sites at once.  This includes websites: TripAdvisor.com, Expedia.com, Fodors, goCityKids, Virtual Tourist, and Yahoo! Travel. 

With this round of funding, UpTake plans to expand into Lodging, Things To Do, Restaurants, and Beaches features.  UpTake will continue to invest in it’s own search engine technology.  UpTake works with BedandBreakfast.com, Restauranti.ca, OpenTable, La Quinta Inn & Suites, Away.com, and FriendCommunications for RV and campground reviews.

“We looked at dozens of investment opportunities in the online travel industry for several years before deciding to invest in UpTake,” stated Patricia Nakache, general partner of Trinity Ventures. “UpTake has a distinct approach that addresses a big search and discovery gap in the travel market and is run by a proven CEO and team.”

UpTake has aggregated and organized about 20 million traveler reviews, ratings, and articles.  UpTake is based in Palo Alto, Calif. and has engineering units in Beijing and Moscow. 

“It is actually interesting. Microsoft and Facebook, one thing that they have in common, is they both recruit using Jobster,”
-Jobster CEO, Jason Goldberg.

Jobster Inc., the Seattle, Wash. based company focused on the recruiter-candidate relationship has some high hopes for their partnership with Facebook and Microsoft.  Microsoft and Facebook both recruit candidates with Jobster. 

As a matter of fact, in February 2007, Jobster announced that they will have an official deal with Facebook [Source: GigaOM].  Since the partnership between Jobster and Facebook happened 5 months ago, I have not heard of any major milestones for Jobster. 

According to CrunchBase, Jobster has raised $8 million Series A from Ignition and Trinity, $19.5 million Series B from Ignition/Mayfield/Trinity, and $18 million Series C from Ignition/Mayfield/Trinity and Reed Elsevier.  This brings Jobster’s total investment at $45 million. 

Jobster’s Silicon Valley competitor, Simply Hired has about one-third in funding.  Simply Hired has about $16.5 million in funding.

Goldberg showed his optimism for Jobster on the FOX Business Network.  [Note: the video is down for now, if I get a fixed link, I'll update this post].

Recently, MySpace and Photobucket made a truce. The truce was that Photobucket would not violate MySpace’s terms of services again. The terms of service was that if Photobucket widgets and videos were to be embedded in MySpace profiles, there should not be advertisements contained. Especially because MySpace would not be benefitting from the revenue that Photobucket would be generating from the ads.

On April 24, the truce was made, but now MySpace wants to be more than just friends. It was confirmed today that MySpace has acquired Photobucket according to Mashable. The amount is reported to be $250 million. Photobucket was valued at $300 million by Lehman Brothers. Photobucket made $6.3 million in revenues last year according to ValleyWag. The company is reported to make $25 million+ in revenue this year.

Photobucket has 41 million users and received $10.5 million in funding last year from Trinity Ventures.

What does this mean for other widget ad networks? Andrew Chen, an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Mohr Davidow Ventures e-mailed me his perspective.

[Additional coverage: TechCrunch, TechMeMe]