Serial entrepreneur and investor Jason Calacanis appears to be gearing up for the launch of his next venture, which may also signify one more pivot for his information site Mahalo. And that next step also looks like a new chapter for an internet domain that itself has seen a couple of pivots.
On a tip from a reader, we visited inside.com and found this: → Read More
It’s been a rough year for Mahalo. The startup, which was founded by Jason Calacanis in 2007, began its life as a human powered search engine that offered curated links in what was intended to be a mix between the traditional search layout and Wikipedia. Over time, Mahalo became a knowledge directory, launched a Q&A service a la Yahoo! Answers, and began producing educational and games-related… → Read More
You’ve heard the term “betting the company,” but have you ever known anyone who has actually done that? I mean literally. As in, they’re playing poker with shares of the company on the line. Because that’s exactly what Yammer founder David Sacks and Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis are doing at The World Series of Poker in Las Vegas.
When Calacanis first tweeted about it, I thought it was a joke. → Read More
With regard to his recent spat with Facebook we don’t exactly see eye-to-eye with Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis. But this morning, we did when an incident showed just how hard it is to delete your Facebook profile. But after reading that post, someone brought up a very good point. You know where else it’s hard to delete your account? Mahalo.
Seriously, try to figure it out. You won’t be able to… → Read More
There are two sides to every story, but this email exchange between Mahalo founder and CEO Jason Calacanis and one of his (now former) employees is a lesson in how not to handle a resignation.
Jason says this was a private exchange and that he was just being honest with Evan. Evan says Jason can’t control his emotions.
If you’re going to trash your employee, do it verbally so that there isn’t a… → Read More
Remember Squidoo? Founded by current CEO and famous marketing guru Seth Godin, the service allows Internet users to generate rich, topical web pages (dubbed ‘lenses’) to serve as a hub for information, videos, links etc. centered around any given subject. The concept is similar to what companies like HubPages, Mahalo and Helium are all about.
Now Squidoo is looking to monetize the web service… → Read More
One of the most active sub-genres of search right now in terms of startup and new product activity is question and answer sites. Some searches are subjective and best answered by another human being. The success of Yahoo Answers proved this and spurred a raft of competitors to try their own hand at making Q&A better. These include Answerbag, Wiki Answers, Mahalo Answers, Aardvark, and … → Read More
About 45 minutes ago I tried logging into Mahalo to stake a few claims for myself in the site’s revamped directory, which pays users for creating and maintaining their entries. This has proven far more difficult than it should be. In fact, it seems like Mahalo’s account system is totally broken.
First, I attempted to create a new user name for myself. I decided to go with MrCody, which is the… → Read More
Jason Calacanis wants to inject what he calls the “Skeeball economy” into Mahalo, his highly tuned site for creating and searching topic pages. (Disclosure: Calacanis is our partner in putting on the TechCrunch50 conference). Since launching Mahalo two years ago, his staff and free workers on the Web (AKA, the Mahalo community) have built about 100,000 topic pages that tend to rank highly in… → Read More
Actor Kevin Pollak (A Few Good Men, Usual Suspects, etc.) met Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis at a poker game and learned all about Twitter – a few weeks later and he has over 160,000 followers (although he jokes “I just don’t know what that means”). Calacanis also talked him into hosting a video show as well, which is two weeks old and already has 1,000 or so people watching live every Sunday afternoon. → Read More
ChaCha, the human-powered answers service we’ve written about quite a bit here on TechCrunch, is raising a Series C round of $30 million, of which close to $11 million has already been secured according to a regulatory filing, reports peHUB. The filing doesn’t list any new shareholders.
Update: we exchanged e-mails with a company representative, who informed us that this is actually “old news”… → Read More
Mahalo Answers, the just-launched Q&A service that is part Yahoo Answers, part Google Answers has just proven that people will actually pay for valuable information. At least, they will when strippers are involved.
This morning a representative for the The Stripper Method – a video series that invites viewers to watch “two former strippers, now housewives, business owners and mothers, as… → Read More
Mahalo is now answering your questions. The human-curated search engine/ condensed wiki guide is adding a Q&A service called Mahalo Answers to its mix. It is a combination of Yahoo Answers and the long-defunct Google Answers, with some cute avatars and virtual currency thrown in. (Disclosure: Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis is our partner in the TechCrunch50 conference).
Like Yahoo Answers… → Read More
This has been a brutal month or so for tech layoffs. According to our Layoff Tracker, there have been 19,683 job eliminations at tech companies announced since mid-September, and we’re not even counting the 24,600 people at Hewlett-Packard who are being eliminated as a result of its merger with EDS.
But only five big companies make up more than 90 percent of the layoffs: Xerox (3,000), Dell… → Read More
In his latest email newsletter, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis discusses “How To Handle Layoffs.” It is a topic he knows too well, having had to go through a layoff of 10 percent of his staff earlier today. After repeating the text of his blog post announcing the layoffs, he offers some advice for other entrepreneurs on how to do it right. The email newsletter is reprinted below in its… → Read More
In a post on his blog, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis has announced that his human powered search engine has laid off 10% of its staff. Along with the layoffs Calacanis writes that the company will be doing some “smart things” to help cut costs, including outsourcing much of its editorial department to freelancers instead of in-house staff. Calacanis pegs the number of full-time staff cut at… → Read More
When Mahalo launched about 16 months ago, we called it a human-powered search engine and began thinking of it as a Google competitor. But it’s so-called “guide pages” for topics as diverse as the Boston Marathon and Patriotic Drunk Rednecks provide not only links but quick facts, making Mahalo an editor-driven, Wikipedia competitor as well. And with a new site-wide design launching today, Mahalo… → Read More
Check out Mahalo Daily’s “CinemaCrunch” review of last night’s Batman screening in Los Angeles. Jason Calacanis calls it “definitely the best superhero movie ever made…hands down.” The key, everyone says, is to see it in IMAX. Thanks to the 600 people who attended, particularly the handful of people who dressed up as the Joker. Some people camped out for… → Read More
People-powered search engine Mahalo will soon have some competition from a stealth startup called YouBundle. If you go to YouBundle’s site now, there is nothing other than a landing page. But we got our hands on a couple screen shots from the private beta (click above for a larger image and see topic page below) and the guidelines sent to beta testers (reproduced after the break). Like… → Read More
Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo has borrowed from the Simon Fuller Idol franchise in its search for the new host for Mahalo Daily by announcing Mahalo Idol. Potential hosts are asked to respond to the above video on YouTube showing their best side, or turn up to a casting call in Los Angeles April 19. Idol style host wannabes will be purged until there are five finalists, who return one week later… → Read More
Geek chick celebrity Veronic Belmont has signed to co-host Revision3′s Tekzilla show. Belmont resigned from the Mahalo Daily podcast last week after only 5 months, with a relatively cool send off from Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis. Prior to working for Calacanis, Belmont worked for CNET.com, where she produced and co-hosted shows including Buzz Out Loud, MP3 Insider and Crave. She also… → Read More
A long weekend usually means less news, but for those looking for a new and quite often attractive take on news, the ongoing battle for geek chick supremacy offers a bountiful choice. Webb Alert http://p.castfire.com/cHNHf/video/9013/webbalert_2008-03-21-023917.flv Michael discribed Morgan Webb’s daily tech show as “a winner” and even stays up till 2am to catch new episodes. → Read More
Mahalo founder and serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis has some interesting tips up today about how to squeeze every single last thing from your startup employees. Helpful advice includes (our interpretation): If you do meetings, have them over lunch, because you shouldn’t let your employees eat alone Don’t provide people with phones, they can always use their own cellphones, and this… → Read More
Weblogs, Inc. co-founder and CTO Brian Alvey is preparing to launch his new startup – a content management and hosting system called Crowd Fusion. From what we hear (I haven’t been able to speak to Alvey yet), the company will provide a hosted all-in-one platform for blogging, wikis, podcasting, standard web pages, forums, etc., and will also allow management of a variety of properties… → Read More
Jason Calacanis has announced an expansion to the Mahalo social platfrom that allows users to access most major social networking sites within Mahalo itself. The idea of social networking site aggregation or single landing page isn’t new, we’ve covered startups aiming to provide a similar service, such as MyLifeBrand, ProfileLinker and Loopster, but none have really captured the… → Read More
The organizers of the DLD conference in Munich put on a great show today. One of the more lively sessions was called “Humans Disrupting Algorithms” and featured Wikipedia/Wikia Search’s Jimmy Wales and Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis, moderated by Fortune’s David Kirkpatrick. Jimmy and Jason each gave a brief overview of their human powered search engines. Jason railed on… → Read More
Too lazy to watch the entire Stevenote video stream on CrunchGear, or read Duncan’s real time notes from the event? No worries. Mahalo’s Veronica Belmont distills all the important stuff down into just sixty seconds. See all of our coverage from Macworld here and at CrunchGear. → Read More
Rich Skrenta, who created the first computer virus (Elk Cloner), co-founded the Open Directory Project, and co-founded online news site Topix, may have bitten off the biggest challenge of his career – taking on Google. In search. Skrenta left Topix last June. He started his new company, Blekko, almost immediately, along with five others from the Topix core team. They raised $2 million in… → Read More
We’ve waited more than a year for Wikia to launch their human powered search engine. The project was first announced in December last year by Wikipedia/Wikia founder Jimmy Wales. The promise was to return better results than Google and other search engines, using humans to make quality decisions: “Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but… → Read More
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