Former MySpace Exec Starting Facebook Competitor

A social network with more privacy controls, Mark Zuckerberg's latest passion, a new ranking of top VC firms, and the rest of the day's entrepreneur news.

Each day, Inc.'s reporters scour the Web for the most important and interesting news to entrepreneurs. Here's what we found today.

Former MySpace exec to launch Facebook competitor. Dmitry Shapiro, former CTO of MySpace Music, is working on a Facebook-like site that will have one main point of differentiation: more ability for users to control their information, data, and overall privacy. So far, reports, The Wall Street Journal's AllThingsD.com, Shapiro has raised $1 million in funding from the likes of Draper Fisher Jurvetson and MySpace founder Tom Anderson. The name of the site? Altly.

Mark Zuckerberg's new obsession: killing the meat he eats. Facebook mastermind Mark Zuckerberg raised some eyebrows yesterday when Fortune reported the young CEO admitted he only eats meat from animals he has, er, killed himself. Why? 'A bunch of people told me that even though they loved eating pork, they really didn't want to think about the fact that the pig used to be alive. That just seemed irresponsible to me. I don't have an issue with anything people choose to eat, but I do think they should take responsibility and be thankful for what they eat rather than trying to ignore where it came from,' Zuckerberg wrote in an email to the mag. So far, he has reportedly only killed a lobster, chicken, pig and goat.

The best VC firms ranked. Venture capitalist Chris Farmer debuted a new method to rank the best VC firms called "InvestorRank." Arguing that an investor's past performance is not indicative of future returns, InvestorRank ranks firms on how connected and trusted they are, as well as when they invested in a highly successful company. To demonstrate his system, Farmer revealed the top ten VC firms according to InvestorRank. The results were somewhat surprising: Andreesen Horowitz, a relatively new firm, took the top spot, while Kleiner Perkins, one of the most widely-renowned VC firms of all, came in toward the bottom.

Google announces first virtual wallet. Yesterday Google unveiled Google Wallet, a mobile app that allows consumers to use their phone to make payments. According to the New York Times, the virtual wallet will be available this summer on the Nexus S 4G phone on Sprint. Cardholders can simply wave their cellphones at a retailer's terminal--eliminating the need for plastic cards or the wallets they lived in. In conjunction, Google also plans to incorporate "Google Offers" advertising deals that are sent through a mobile phone. At first Google Wallet will be available with Citi MasterCard cards at hundreds of thousands of merchants worldwide.

China gaining steam in scientific research. "No country in the entire world publishes more scientific research in reputable journals than the United States of America," notes Forbes. For now, at least. According to SciVal Analytics, a division of the giant scientific publisher Elsevier, China published more papers in information technology than the U.S. did in 2009, and could surpass total American scientific research in the next several years.

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Allison Fass is the general manager of Inc.com. A longtime business journalist at Forbes and The New York Times, Fass has also held roles in venture capital and innovation at Hearst Interactive Media and digital strategy at a start-up consultancy. A graduate of Duke, Fass earned an MBA from Columbia where she was also a Knight-Bagehot fellow. @alliefass