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Posts with tag Jason Calacanis

Filed under: Social Software, Podcasts, Search, web 2.0

Squadcast 10 - Searching for the future


Can you believe the Squadcast is now on episode 10? Well, we're excited anyway. This week Grant and Christina discuss the future of web search, specifically social search. Christina chats up Jason Calacanis from Mahalo to get the inside scoop on social search and its benefits over traditional methods.

The Squadcast's "The Five" takes a look at five of Download Squad's favorite social search tools and plugins.

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Take the jump for show notes and links to items discussed in this episode.

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Filed under: Web services, Social Software, Search, web 2.0

Mahalo takes human powered search to social extreme


True social powered search arrives today. Mahalo is beefing up its human-powered search engine by letting users submit additional links directly to any of the site's 26,000 human edited search pages.

Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis is announcing the new social link submission network today at the Le Web 3 conference. If Mahalo can attract the right user base, the human-powered search engine could straddle the line between Google and Wikipedia.

Already a year ahead of its published goal to create human edited result pages for 25k of the most popular search terms and, having a declared 400 paid contributors through it's Greenhouse program, Mahalo's next phase blends social networking with search in a way no service has quite attempted before.

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Filed under: Video

The Squadcast - Episode #3


Christina and I celebrate all the things we have to be thankful for by talking Vista, Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales and Mahalo while roasting frozen turkey dinners.

This week's episode features music by Binärpilot.

Filed under: Business, Blogging

Om Malik brings Calacanis and Rose together for a rare photo-op

It's no secret that Jason Calacanis -- founder and former head-hancho of Weblogs, Inc. -- and Kevin Rose -- that Digg kid -- have a mild feud between them. After Calacanis re-launched Netscape.com as a competing social news portal, albeit with a different target market, Rose and Calacanis fought publicly on their respective blogs in the public eye.

Valleywag reports on a not-quite tearful reunion and burying of the respective hatchets at a launch party thrown by Revision3, Rose's on-line video company.

Aww, it's good to see thekids play nice for a change.

Filed under: Internet, News, Web services

Is there really that kinda money in search engines?


It's no secret that we've got a soft spot right in the middle of our chest for Mahalo. The company's founder, Jason Calacanis, also founded Weblogs, Inc and, having worked under his absolutely boundless energy, we can say first-hand that he's a force to be reckoned with. Apparently the New York times thinks so as well.

The Sunday edition of the New York Times included this great article on the small change left over in the search space outside of Google. Well, small change if you can call a 1 billion dollar market cap "small change". According to one of the experts the NYT spoke with, "1 percent of the 7.3 billion searches performed in the United States in March, multiplied by 12 cents in advertising revenue per search, would yield annualized revenue of $105 million. Assuming a market cap that is 10 times revenue, his arithmetic leads to a billion-dollar company."

We're keeping a close eye on Mahalo, and the rest of the search market that exists outside the Google-sphere.

Filed under: Business, Design, Developer, Internet, Web services, Social Software

Calacanis launches human based search engine, Mahalo

mahalo human powered search

Jason Calacanis, the man behind the Weblogs Inc empire, (that this blog is a part of) has officially announced his latest project, Mahalo, and its main goal is to help people - a lot. Jason has kept a great number of people itching to know what he's been working on during his Entrepreneur in Action at Sequoia Capital and the news was dropped today at the Wall Street Journal's D conference.

Mahalo (thank you, in Hawaiian) plays off what Yahoo and Ask did way back in the early days of the internet and what DMOZ is still well known for today, indexing internet content by hand. However Mahalo spices things up to provide much better end results for users. But how can people do this better then say for instance, Google's machines? Typically when searching Google, Yahoo, or other machine based search engines, top quality results can get lost in the mix, and a real deep quality search might not get made. Mahalo's search guides that compile these results do use top locations like Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN, Flickr, Delicious and other services to create clean and organized results, except they aim to get the best results possible for users. Could it ever beat out Google? No, they really are not in competition, but it sure can provide an additional location to search for more accurate and higher quality results.

The 40 person team behind Mahalo currently has the top 4,000 search engine result pages complete so far in the initial Alpha launch, and hopes to have over 10,000 by the end of 2007.

Featured Time Waster

Forumwarz - a potentially offensive time waster

I pwn UAfter spending the better part of an hour on Forumwarz I still can't decide if it's just sick or if it's kind of fun. It's a bit like a car wreck on the highway. I know I shouldn't be looking but I can't quite turn away.

It's sick, it's twisted, it's the internet on it's worst level and darn it, it's kind of fun. At least for a little while.

Forumwarz is a parody role-playing game that takes place on the internet - or at least the Forumwarz version of it. Your goal is to complete missions that are given to you through a mock up of GoogleTalk called Sentrillion.

Your first "friend" is ShallowEsophagus who begins giving you missions to pwn various forums by being a troll. Depending on the character type you are assigned at start up, you have tools like drooling on the keyboard or bashing your head on the keyboard that you can use to destroy forum threads and eventually, pwn a forum.

Future missions involve buying illegal software from the Russians, pwning more difficult forums and other internet oddness.

Completing missions gives you cash, called Flezz in game, and items that you can pawn or use in other missions. The game is NOT for those easily offended. It's crass, coarse and there are frequent f-bombs in the fake chat sessions.

This is also a game for a more mature audience as it requires you to shop at the Drugs R Fun store to get various concoctions to improve your playing, engage in certain cyber activities to get more Flezz and just generally use a more adult perspective.

If you can get past that, here are the more enjoyable and time-wasting aspects.

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