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 regularly appears on programs on DL.TV, MSNBC, CNBC, the G4 Network, PC Gamer, and This Week in Tech. Belmont featured in our list of geek chicks to watch March 21. image credit: Veronica Belmont CrunchBase Information Revision3 Mahalo Veronica Belmont Information provided by CrunchBase → 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. Occasional mens mag model Morgan Webb delivers tech related news from across the world. Our August 2007 review here. → 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 saves money Buy a decent espresso machine and provide food in the office, because you don’t want your staff to ever stop working, this way you keep them in the office every minute of every day Buy people who work hard a computer for home, so they can work after hours, on weekends and public holidays Urinary catheters are cheap, hook each employee up to one so they don’t waste minutes going to the restroom OK, so I made the last point up. Here’s my favorite one though (direct quote): “Fire people who are not workaholics…. come on folks, this is startup life, it’s not a game. go work at the post office or stabucks if you want balance in your life. For realz.” Apparently having a life isn’t “for realz” in Calacanis’ playbook so a note to possible Mahalo employees: expect to check your family at the door if you want to go work for JCal. Up to 18 hours a day for $30-35,000 (what I’ve heard is the going rate for base Mahalo employees) , you’re never allowed to go outside during this time or have a proper break…. sounds like a great place to work. Update: via Stilgherrian, 37 Signals responds to Jason’s post by suggesting you should fire the workaholics. Update 2: Allen Stern at Centernetworks makes some strong points about the need for personal space and breathing time here. CrunchBase Information Mahalo Information provided by CrunchBase → 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 under a single dashboard. It will compete directly with blogging platforms like WordPress.com and Typepad, as well as more industrial strength CMS systems that large publishers use. If anyone can build it, Alvey and co-founder Craig Wood (also of Weblogs, Inc.) can. Alvey has been building content management systems since at least the mid nineties, including systems for Business Week and TV Guide. He was also the architect of Weblogs, Inc. and their associated CMS, Blogsmith. AOL acquired Weblogs, Inc. in October 2005. Crowd Fusions seems to be the next generation of Blogsmith, since it includes lots of content types other than blogs. The company, which is based in New York, hasn’t launched yet, but we hear they’re busy raising a first round of capital. Alvey co-founded Weblogs, Inc. with Jason Calacanis. Calacanis launched his new startup, Mahalo, in May 2007. → 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 imagination of the broader internet. Mahalo is trying to better these services by becoming the front page destination for those looking to access sites such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube and others. Setup is easy enough. You simply add your user name or user ID into the boxes provided, and it then pulls your profiles from each service. It’s not perfect yet, for example you have to provide your full URL for Facebook (which they noted) and LinkedIn (which they didn’t note). From there you can visit each page via tabs on Mahalo itself. I found that maybe half of the pages I opened remembered my ID and I had immediate access to use the sites, others didn’t at first, but after logging in work fine. I wont fully revisit the whole is Mahalo a great service debate here other than to say that someone once described Mahalo to me as search for the mentally challenged (well he used another word, use your imagination). I’ve always thought that was a little unfair, it’s perhaps search for the Google and/ or Boolean illiterate (so I’m not the target market), but there is value there for the general consumer market. I’m not about to switch to using Mahalo for search tomorrow and I’d expect most of you reading this wont, but ignore the search and take a look at Mahalo Multiprofiles. It’s well implemented, handy, and its something I can see myself using. We still aren’t at the ultimate point of proper social networking aggregation yet (see Google Socialstream for how it will eventually work) but in the mean time Mahalo Multiprofiles may well find favor among the many who struggle to keep up with their ever growing number of social network sites. On a related note, I cant help that wonder exactly in which direction Mahalo is heading. Mahalo offers a social networking platform that now does aggregation, and on the search side it’s starting to look more and more like Weblogs Inc than a search engine, check out the Celebrity → 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 Google and other big engines, saying algorithms have failed to control spam and SEO gaming, and that humans must be involved to get good results. Jimmy was more circumspect, and spent most of his time arguing that large numbers of people will be willing to spend time helping Wikia Search develop good results. Perhaps the most interesting moment, however, was when Google’s VP of Search Product and User Experience Marissa Mayer commented on human v. algorithmic search results from the audience. ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick, who didn’t attend, has a good basic transcript of the session (proving to me once again that it is often easier to cover a conference remotely instead of batting crowds and dealing with terrible Internet coverage). I was able to take some video of a couple of interesting segments, though, embedded below. In the first segment Wales gives the audience his overview of Wikia Search, and Calacanis jumps in with a few observations as well. The second is Marissa’s comment on what she sees as a false dichotomy – Google Page Rank, she notes, is based on real humans linking to sites on the web. Listening to her felt like a cold shower after a night of heavy partying. As an aside, the DLD conference is clearly one of the better events I’ve attended in the last few months. CrunchBase Information Wikia Mahalo Information provided by CrunchBase → 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 seed funding in September from Baseline Ventures, two early Googlers (David DesJardins and Jeremy Wenokur), and the founding team. The company is still deep in stealth and, apparently, working out of a garage in true startup style (see image below). The Blekko website, which today has nothing on it except a picture of a puppet created by Skrenta’s daughter, isn’t even close to having a landing page up, let alone the final product. But eventually Skrenta says they’ll launch a full scale search engine to compete with the big guys. Skrenta, who’s very media savvy, won’t say much about how he’s going to tackle search (he’s not a fan of PageRank though:“PageRank wrecked the web. Google is the cause of all of this. and Google is going down with it.”). He says they are looking at improvements on the back end (indexing and query serving) as well as the user search experience itself. Beyond that, he says we have to wait. And it might be a long wait at that. The company, Skrenta says, may not have a public prototype available until 2009. Normally an entrepreneur announcing they’re taking on Google with a six person team and just $2 million in funding would either be laughed at or ignored. In Skrenta’s case, he has proven himself more than once as capable of taking on big challenges and winning. This will be a company to watch, and speculate on, in 2008. There are other promising search startups out there. Powerset, Cuill (we’ll be hearing more about them soon) and the upcoming Wikia Search Engine are all yet to launch. Mahalo is growing fast (but still tiny). Can anyone unseat Google? Perhaps not any time soon. But you don’t have to get much market share to be a huge winner in this space – every 1%, they say, is worth a cool billion dollars. CrunchBase Information Blekko Rich Skrenta Information provided by CrunchBase → 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 spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term ‘Tampa hotels’, for example, and you will not get any useful results…Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘this page is good, this page sucks.’ Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way…But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves. We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.” A lot has happened since that announcement. Mahalo, a Sequoia backed startup with their own approach to human powered search results, launched in May and is showing promising early growth. Meanwhile Google, perhaps somewhat annoyed by Wikia Search as well as Wikipedia’s ongoing refusal to add Google ads to their pages, announced Knol earlier this month – clearly a shot across the Wikipedia bow. Not much on Wikia search, however. They’ve set up a page to discuss the project. In July Wikia announced the acquisition of Grub, which had technology to allow distributed web crawling by users. And an early screen shot, showing a Facebook-like profile page, was shown in South Africa in November. Wikia Search In 2007 Or Not? Jimmy Wales Say Yes. But the promise has been to launch Wikia Search this year, and time is fast running out. There’s just one week left in 2007. Today a report was published that Wales, in an IRC chat, promised to make the end-of-year launch date: ” the search engine *will* launch before the end of the year, probably in private beta first, and then open to the public in early january. No specific dates are certain yet. But sooon.” I asked Wikia CEO Gil Penchina if the quote was accurate and whether to expect a launch in the next few days. His response was → Read More
New wiki-based search engine Mahalo is launching social networking features today at the LeWeb3 conference in Paris. Mahalo is a search engine that focuses on user link submissions and an editorial process to theoretically produce better search results than algorithm-only engines like Google. It first launched in May 2007. The company already pays users for quality submissions. Today, they are adding user profiles and other social networking features to further incentivize users to submit quality content. Editors decide if links submitted for a particular search term should be inlcuded in search results. If a submission is accepted, the user gets credit and a higher score. If it’s banned, the user’s score takes a hit. All of the results are shown on a user profile (click image above to see larger version), so heavy users will be inclined to add new links carefully and increase their score. The service has around 26,000 pages of search results, and each one represents 10-30 different search queries. If a search returns no Mahalo pages, results from other search engines are shown. 1,000 or so new pages are created each week on the site, says CEO Jason Calacanis. Mahalo has direct competition coming from Wikia. Based on early screen shots that show user profiles, Wikia seems to be taking a nearly identical approach to maximizing user participation. Mahalo is doing very well based on early Comscore statistics, which report 2 million monthly page views and 874,000 unique visitors. More importantly, the trend is clearly towards fast growth. Compete statistics agree. Mahalo has raised around $20 million on two rounds of financing. Another rumor says their last round was valued at over $100 million. CrunchBase Information Mahalo Wikia Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
It was eleven months ago that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales first mentioned his vision for a people-powered search engine that would eventually launch under his for profit startup, Wikia. Not much has happened since then, other than a lot of chatter on an email discussion list, and the small acquisition of Grub, a distributed web crawling company, from Looksmart. The official site for Wikia Search is here. But the promise has been for Wikia Search to launch this year, and it appears to be on track. Yesterday Matthew Buckland reported that Wales showed “some of the first screen shots” of the new project (the first, as far as I know). The main screen shot is a profile page for a user (see above) that looks surprisingly like a Facebook profile. It was taken by Nic Haralambous. The Man v. Machine debate as it applies to search is about to begin. By this time next year we should have lots of data on the performance of Wikia Search, as well as the new startup Mahalo which is also in this space. Until then, we can spend our time speculating and, I guess, continuing to live with Google for our search needs. CrunchBase Information Wikia Mahalo Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
http://blip.tv/scripts/flash/showplayer.swf?enablejs=true&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fmahalodaily%2Eblip%2Etv%2Frss&file=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Frss%2Fflash%2F459870&showplayerpath=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Fscripts%2Fflash%2Fshowplayer%2Eswf The latest Jason Calacanis Mahalo spin-off launches November 5 with a daily video podcast based around well…the rather unexciting topic of Mahalo’s content pages.Mahalo Daily’s star, ex-C-Net producer Veronica Belmont seems to have a good presence on screen and the recording quality is good, even if the topic area going forward will be a challenge. Classic line from the video above: Jason Calacanis saying that Rocketboom isn’t funny, which probably wont make him a lot of friends at Rocketboom. The fart jokes about the dog at the end were rather juvenile, however the piss take of some other video shows was cleverly crafted. As former TechCrunch writer Marshall Kirkpatrick said on Twitter: “I’m not ashamed to say it, I think the trailer for mahalo daily is great”…well maybe I didn’t find it great, but surprisingly it’s pretty good. For those that don’t like the video, I grabbed the below image for you, as I’m sure that Jason would like you to speak to the hand CrunchBase Information Mahalo Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
http://www.kyte.tv/flash.swf?embedId=6357068&appKey=MarbachViewerEmbedded&uri=channels/6118http://media01.kyte.tv/images/updatenotice.swf Above is part 3 of a 3 part Robert Scoble video blog series on “Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years.” To see the other parts scroll on the player; Part 2 at around the 6 minute mark gets to the main points*.Essentially Scoble argues that Google is in trouble because they are unable to adapt their algorithms and business model in the face of social search sites such as Mahalo and even Facebook; Techmeme is thrown in for good measure as well. Scoble argues that the search results from sites such as Mahalo will appeal to more people due to their ability to be socially constructed as opposed to Google’s computer generated results. As much as I think that Jason Calacanis is doing a good job with Mahalo, and that he is creating decent content for those frustrated by current search technologies, I’m not even sure Calacanis would be so bold as to argue that his company is going to kick Google’s butt in four years time. Scoble though does open the more interesting question: what is the future of search? I won’t even start linking to the many, many search startups that are trying to answer that question. Scoble seemingly forgets though that even if Google’s current model doesn’t incorporate social search, there is absolutely nothing stopping Google going out and acquiring one of these companies then incorporating their model within the Google product family. I’m also not convinced that we are yet to see the David to Google’s Goliath, but I could be wrong. * for what ever reason Kyte insists on showing only the latest video in the embed so I was unable to include Part 2 straight up. → Read More
Jason Calacanis has announced the launch of Mahalo Greenhouse, a new program expanding the Mahalo Guide program to part times guides. The new program allows members of public to build search results for search terms not currently included in Mahalo. If accepted, participants will be paid $10 to $15 per search result. Further details are available here. Mahalo launched 2 weeks ago with a human indexed search engine powered by the Wikimedia CMS. Mahalo shares similarities with Wikipedia and Netscape. The company is funded by Sequoia Capital, where Calacanis was previously Entrepreneur in Action. Company profile is here. → Read More
Jason Calacanis, formerly of Weblogs, Inc. and more recently an Entrepreneur in Action at Sequoia Capital, will launch his newest startup, Mahalo, this afternoon at 3 PS PST. The site is password protected until then. Mahalo is a search engine, and will join Powerset as the more interesting new engines to launch in 2007. The service has features that are similar to the new Netscape news finder product that Calacanis launched last year at AOL: expert guides will determine the most relevant results. The main search results are provided by guides (Mahalo employees), who find relevant results for search terms. User submitted results are also included. The primary results for search terms are included at the top, in a “top seven” area. These are hand picked results from the guids that should all be good results for the query (see screen shot below of results for “Paris Hotels” – click for larger view). To the right of the results are “Guide Notes” which include additional information including relevant additional searches and “Fast Facts.” In the case of Paris Hotels, the “Fast Facts” include the country, language, currenty and telephone country code. Additional hand picked results appear below the Top Seven, and Google results round out the query. Also in the right sidebar is a place for users who’ve registered with the site to submit links relevant to the query. The more users who’ve submitted a unique link, the higher it appears on the list. Mahalo will be looking for fraud in this area – if a guide determines a link to be spammy, they will ban the link, the user and the user’s IP address “forever.” However, if a link gets enough votes and is determined to be relevant by the guides, it will move over into the main search results area. Each search page also has a discussion/forum area, where any registered user can add their thoughts to what’s included on the results page. Mahalo has 40 full time guides today and have created 4,000 results pages – each of which will serve approximately 12 various queries. Calacanis says that the guides are steadily improving results and adding more queries – they expect to have 10,000 by end of year, and 25,000 by end of 2008. They are really focusing on top search terms, which they obtain from a number of search engines and other sources, Calacanis says. If → Read More
San Francisco, CA
