Gawker
It's a wonder that Jason Calacanis has kept his insanely ambitious plans for his new venture, Mahalo, out of the press. The technique: misleading bluster, of which the former weblogs mogul is the master, to muddy the waters. So, how well did he do? Here are ten predictions about Mahalo, most of which will be proved right or wrong within the next couple of weeks. Come back then, for the score.
- The site is a human search engine, with results for the popular terms being mediated by a large team of human editors.
- Borrowing from wikipedia, a longstanding obsession of Calacanis, Mahalo will allow readers to suggest additions and edits.
- Some of the content will be video, but that is not the focus of the project. The rumor about a studio was probably put about by Calacanis himself, to confuse.
- After running through several other Hawaiian names, and spending six figures on domains, Mahalo is the final choice.
- Mahalo will launch at All Things Digital, the Wall Street Journal tech conference, later this month.
- Roelof Botha, Sequoia's rising star, and Mark Cuban, the person Calacanis wants to be when he grows up, led seed funding, discreetly, last autumn.
- Calacanis wants to launch with more funding than any internet startup of this cycle: he will probably complete a deal to raise another $20m in time to announce the package at the All Things Digital event.
- Both News Corporation and CBS, two big media companies, will join this latest round. As well as finance, they will promote Mahalo, most importantly by passing search queries to the Mahalo engine.
- That deal will not include News Corporation's Myspace, which makes too much money from its search powered by Google. This is a guess.
- For all his oft-stated love of competition, even Calacanis will not dare declare Google the enemy. He will need to run Google text ads to support Mahalo's cost base, and he'll depend on high placement of Mahalo's topic pages in the search engine's results for those same terms.
