Skip to Content

Free TUAW iPhone app -- try it now!
AOL Tech

JasonCalacanis posts

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.

Download this episode (mp4)

(iPod, iPhone, Nano, AppleTV, Quicktime, VLC)

Subscribe to The Squadcast (RSS)

Subscribe to our YouTube channel

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

Read more →

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.

Read more →

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

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

View more Time Wasters

Featured Galleries

Defective by Design, London: Protest Pictures
Microsoft Security Essentials
Chromium Pre-Alpha on CrunchBang Linux
Safari 4 Beta
10 Firefox themes that don't suck
IE8 RC1
Download Squad at the Crunchies After-Party
Download Squad at the Crunchies
WordPress 2.7
Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals
Windows 7 Hands On
Comodo Internet Security
Android First-look: Amazon.com MP3 Store
Android First-look: Twitroid
Google Reader Android
Android Hands-On
Twine 1.0
Photoshop Express Beta
Mozilla Birthday Cake
Palm stuff
Adobe Lightroom 1.1

 


Follow us on Twitter!

Flickr Pool

www.flickr.com

More Tech Coverage

AOL Radio

Joystiq

TUAW

Daily Finance

Autoblog

Urlesque

Engadget

WoW

Switched.com

FanHouse