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 24 hours to get in because the tickets that MySpace gave out were first come, first serve (ours were reserved seats).
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 Mahalo, YouBundle is more of a Web guide than an actual search engine. Bundles of Web links, YouTube videos, Flickr images, Amazon product descriptions, and uploaded photos and documents are created around different topics. These can be anything from “VC Funding Resources” to “Tibetan Buddhism” to “Apple Rumors Sites.” Bundlers add titles, tags, and descriptions to each bundle. The company explains to beta testers in its guidelines:
A bundle is a collection of your expertise on any given subject. A bundle should NOT BE a completely exhaustive list of links to cover every possible point of the subject. It should rather be a finely tuned and specialized list of links to relevant information on the subject. The idea is NOT to replicate the 1st page of Google or a link farm. We want every single link in the bundle to be tested, relevant and offering quality information. Just because a link comes from an authority site such as Wikipedia, does not mean that you have to include the link – we want flavor and variety – not sterility.
You should consider a bundle your work of art. . . . Remember the purpose is not to get AS many links as possible. The purpose is to create a well balanced bundle with many different types of links of only the highest quality.
Unlike Mahalo, YouBundle does not rely on a paid staff of editors to create its topic guides. It is all done by the community. While Mahalo does incorporate some social feedback as well, it is more controlled. Each submission is reviewed before being included on a Mahalo page. This policy is one way to control spam from clogging up the system.
On YouBundle, the community does all the work. So in this sense it is more akin to Topicle or Wikia Search. The latter is a slightly different beast, since it truly is an algorithmic search engine whose results are re-ordered and modified by the community. But like Wikia Search, YouBundle relies on its community to flag spam and inappropriate content. Any bundles tagged “SPAM,” “PORN,” or “TOS,” are reviewed and moderated. (The TOS tag refers to bundles that violate the site’s Terms of Service).
The YouBundle community is also be able to vote the best topic pages up by “bumping” them, or vote them down by “dumping” them. Dumps are “anonymous in order to prevent retribution dumps,” says the guideines. Members can also “bag and tag” other people’s bundles. Bagging a bundle is like bookmarking it as one of your favorites, and once you do that you can up to three tags to improve the categorization of the site.
I was not able to test the site out myself, so I can’t say if it is producing better results than Mahalo, Topicle or Wikia Search. But the steep rise in Mahalo’s traffic, much of it driven by the SEO juice its pages have, is no doubt a motivating factor here. According to comScore, Mahalo attracted 2.6 million unique visitors worldwide in April, up from zero when it launched last summer. Total pageviews were 5.6 million.
Disclosure: Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis is a partner of ours who helps us put on the TechCrunch50 conference. Neither TechCrunch, its employees, nor Michael Arrington owns any stake in Mahalo.
Putting a value on private companies is hard enough for insiders and venture capitalists who have full access to the company’s financial statements. When outsiders try to do it, even well-informed ones, it is nothing more than a guessing game. But it is nonetheless perhaps one of Silicon Valley’s favorite parlor activities.
Today, Henry Blodget & Co. at Silicon Alley Insider try to peg valuations on 25 private Web companies. Facebook is at the top of the list, but it is valued at $9 billion instead of the $15 billion that Microsoft’s investment put on the company. Why? Because everyone knows that the $15 billion is too high, so SAI decided to apply a 25X multiple on Facebook’s 2008 revenue forecast of $350 million. Does that make its valuation correct? Probably not. But in the absence of any true market pricing, anyone can go ahead and make a guess.
The same goes for any of the valuations on the SIA 25 list, which puts Wikipedia’s worth at $7 billion, Craigslist’s at $5 billion, Mozilla’s at $4 billion, LinkedIn’s at $1.3 billion, Ning’s at $560 million, RockYou’s at $325 million, and Spot Runner’s at $250 million. Note that three of the top five (Wikipedia, Craigslist, Mozilla) are essentially not-for-profits sitting on very valuable assets. The valuations for those three are based on what they would be worth if they were run differently with an eye towards maximizing revenues—which, of course, could impact how consumers interact with them, which in turn would impact their valuations.
Another 25 startups make up the contenders list, which includes Federated Media ($245 million), Yelp ($225 million), Meebo ($220 million), Mahalo ($150 million), Digg ($125 million), Etsy ($115 million), Powerset ($80 million), and Twitter ($75 million). A full list that changes dynamically every 20 minutes, based on changes in the Nasdaq, can be found here (although, exactly how the valuations are linked to the Nasdaq is never clearly explained)
Some of these valuations have more merit than others. Some have none whatsoever. For instance, SAI gets at its $125 million valuation for Digg by “splitting the difference” between a $200 million buyout rumor we reported and the $60-to-$80 million that Kara Swisher came up with. Splitting the difference between two rumors is not exactly the height of financial analysis.
But what are you gonna do? At least SAI acknowledges that the list is an imperfect work in progress. Don’t get too caught up in the actual numbers. It is more useful really as a starting point to think about relative valuation between different startups. Is Meebo really worth three times as much as Twitter? Is Ning worth as much as Slide? Let the parlor game begin.
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 to pitch to the celebrity judges with one person being picked to become Mahalo Idol, the new host of Mahalo Daily. The site doesn’t give specifics but it would be a safe bet that the entire process, complete with judging, will be filmed and shown on Mahalo. Men need not apply, Mahalo is seeking female hosts only.
Jason’s embrace of quality television such as Idol is classy, but copying everything down to the logo is a lawsuit waiting to happen, unless he used the Mahalo millions to legally purchase the rights.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Gossip pages as an example: that’s not search results, that looks and smells like content generation to me. Calacanis has always been good a building multiple traffic streams so it’s probably part of that strategy, but at the current rate Mahalo wont primarily be a search tool by the end of 2008.
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.
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 to pitch to the celebrity judges with one person being picked to become Mahalo Idol, the new host of Mahalo Daily. The site doesn’t give specifics but it would be a safe bet that the entire process, complete with judging, will be filmed and shown on Mahalo. Men need not apply, Mahalo is seeking female hosts only.
Geek chick celebrity Veronic Belmont has signed to co-host Revision3’s 
Mahalo founder and serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis has some 
