Rapp, whose last position was president at how-to video maker Mahalo, is supposed to “find and develop new opportunities for the Science portfolio and offer strategic counsel to the firm.”

Science is best known for funding and launching e-commerce companies like Dollar Shave Club.

Rapp’s e-commerce experience includes a stint running Gifts.com for Barry Diller’s IAC conglomerate. Rapp also worked on M&A at IAC, and had a similar role at the New York Times.

Google is funding a new batch of video makers to join the 100 it launched in the last year. And it’s making an international push, by adding content for the U.K., German and French versions of the site.

YouTube says it will put money into more than 60 new “channels” — branded destinations that show a mix of original programming and clips pulled from around the Web. The idea is to make the site more “TV-like” — and convince viewers and advertisers to spend more time and money there.

Meanwhile, YouTube is in the midst of renewal talks with its first set of channels, that expect to hear about their fate in the next few weeks. In the announcement touting its new deals, YouTube is spending more time playing up the Web brands it is working with, like Everyday Health and PopSugar. A year ago, it touted links with the likes of Jay-Z and Madonna.

The expansion announcement comes as some channel partners have begun questioning the way YouTube has run its experiment. Their biggest gripe: They haven’t received much guidance or support from the video platform and have been left to their own devices — especially when it comes to marketing and distributing their clips.

Privately, YouTube officials argue that channel partners shouldn’t be complaining, since the deal terms were well-established at the beginning. Publicly, they point to statistics that show growth for the new channels. They say 25 of the channels now average more than a million views a week, for instance, up from 10 channels earlier this year.

Robert Kyncl, the former Netflix executive who has spearheaded the channel push for Google, says new YouTube programmers may need “a couple of years to gain a certain velocity and a certain volume.” Once they do, he says, the company plans on offering a group of them even more incentives to work for the platform.

“What we will look to do is provide them with greater revenue predictability, for multiple years, so they can focus on building their channels and on building their audiences,” he says. (Full interview)

YouTube’s new channels deals are roughly similar to the ones they offered last year: Google hands the channel makers interest-free advances in exchange for exclusive access to their content for a year or more; Google keeps all ad revenue until it clears its advance and shares it with creators after that.

But there are some variations. People familiar with the deals say that Google is likely handing out smaller advances to European programmers, because the video ad market pays out less than in America.

And some of the American deals are different than last year’s as well. In some cases, for instance, Google has made multiple-year committments to the content-makers, instead of making them year-by-year renewals.

Several of the new American channels are extensions of brands that already existed prior to YouTube’s involvement. Mahalo and Vice will contribute channels, for instance. So will ESPN’s Grantland site, run by Web star Bill Simmons. Several of those sites, like Grantland, have already launched their channels in recent weeks.

Also signing up: Revision3, the Web studio now owned by Discovery Communications. In August, Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback argued that some YouTube stars were abandoning the platform, a move he called misguided.

Here’s a clip from SourceFed, arguably the most successful of the new YouTube channels launched in the last year. It’s run by Phil DeFranco, who was already an established YouTube star prior to his deal.

(Shutterstock/Tatiana Popova)

Jason Calacanis

The layoffs eliminated 18 employees, leaving Mahalo with a headcount of 49, Rapp said. They happened on Oct. 5.

These aren’t the first layoffs for Mahalo. The company had 102 employees in February of this year before making layoffs spurred by Google’s “Panda” update, which downgraded content designed to rank highly in search results. Mahalo was even larger a few years ago when it focused on building its own search alternative, Rapp said.

Rapp noted that while Mahalo’s videos get 30 million views per month, they are not necessarily profitable based on YouTube ads. Educational iPad apps, by contrast, seem to be instant money makers, because users will pay for them. Mahalo plans to gear up to release one app per week, though it only has four out so far. It will also continue to make educational videos.

Mahalo, which is backed by Sequoia Capital, News Corp. and CBS, soon plans to move its headquarters to Culver City from Santa Monica, Rapp said, and it has $5 million of funding in the bank to fuel its shift to instructional content.

Calacanis photo by Flickr user eirikso.

Latest example: ChallengePost, a two-year-old start-up that helps companies and non-profits run “challenges” that use the Web to crowdsource everything from cool app ideas to slogans that promote absentee voting.

The New York company has raised a $4.1 million Series A round from a group of investors led by Bob Borchers, a former Apple executive who’s now at Opus Capital, along with names like BetaWorks, Delicious’s Joshua Schachter, Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis and Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs.

The new money, which came after $600,000 in angel funding, is being used to expand the company from a two-man operation to one that employs 14 people.

The idea is to expand the company’s client base — to date, its most visible clients have been the federal government (including Michelle Obama, who used it to run an “Apps for Healthy Kids” challenge) and New York City (which has used the company to run a Gotham-specific apps contest.  So far the challenges they’ve hosted have offered more than $40 million in prize money.

Founder Brandon Kessler says he also wants to expand the company into “problem identification,” where Web users can suggest challenges that ought to be sponsored. There shouldn’t be a shortage.

“This report is completely unfounded and false, and nothing has changed in our approach,” a Google spokesperson told AllThingsD.

Published to the Launch Conference blog, the report alleged that Google had forbidden manual adjustments to its search results since its infamous “Panda” algorithm update ostensibly because of “multiple government investigations–and possible investigations.”

According to Google, that’s not at all the case. Its search methods are unchanged since Panda, a measure against the “shallow or low quality content” being driven into the company’s search results by content farms.

“Computer algorithms are the most scalable way to deliver relevant results,” the spokesperson said. “However, manual controls are necessary to improve the user experience in very limited cases, such as security concerns, legal issues and spam.”

In other words, Google denies that a government investigation has caused it to adjust its search approach and, further, that it hasn’t adjusted that approach at all.

But have government investigators asked it for examples of manual, non-algorithmic changes to its search results?

Google won’t say. “We don’t discuss the details of our conversations with government officials,” a spokesperson said.

Still, Launch and its founder, Jason Calacanis–who operates Mahalo, a “human-powered search engine” severely impacted by Google’s Panda update–hold firm to their allegations.

“We stand by our story,” Calacanis said. “Google search teams are behaving differently by laying off manual changes–which they admit doing in the case of spam–because government investigations are asking for examples of manual changes. They, of course, need to take the public position that nothing has changed.”

“No one expects them to say, ‘We used to make a lot of manual adjustments to make search better–you know the obvious stuff that any intelligent person would make–but now that the government is investigating our search results we’re being diligent about not handing them ammunition to regulate us.’”

FURTHER READING: Google and the Evolution of Search

1. Human Evaluators — Google Engineering director Scott Huffman
2. Cheating the System — Google software engineer Matt Cutts
3. What’s Next in Search? Much, Much Better Search — Google Fellow Amit Singhal

What’s funny is that Crowley, who was executive producer of Calacanis’ Launch Conference this week, did actually launch a product there, but it was not Skweal. Crowley demoed LinkPops, which overlays a user’s friends’ tweets about articles onto news sites. But he said afterwards that LinkPops was an idea he and a buddy put together on a whim in the week before the show.

Skweal, on the other hand, is something Crowley has been working on since last year. He said he will soon leave his full-time role as director of corporate development and strategy at Calacanis’ Mahalo to pursue Skweal.

Explaining his odd reluctance to show off Skweal to the home crowd, Crowley said he thought the Launch audience was more interested in consumer products, while Skweal is targeted at retailers.

What Crowley wants to do with Skweal is help retailers “keep negative feedback offline.” The site differs from the many user-generated feedback forums that give users the platform to publicly cast judgment and read each others’ posts–for instance the recently launched Tello, which invites users to review service providers, or Glassdoor, which has employees grade their workplace environments.

Skweal is much more like submitting a paper slip to a locked comment box. And I can see the appeal for us non-confrontational types who would feel more comfortable keeping gripes out of a public forum. But the problem for Skweal is how to attract and connect users and retailers.

Crowley’s solution is this: participating retailers tell customers via a sign or sticker to go to the Skweal Web site to leave feedback. Users offer a rating and comment along with their email address. Skweal disguises that email address and alerts the retailer to log onto a CRM dashboard to review the feedback and respond.

Skweal retailers can choose to get SMS alerts for instant feedback, and they can also see reviews laid out in charts that highlight problem locations and time slots.

If a retailer isn’t registered with Skweal (and of course, the majority currently aren’t), customers can still leave feedback. The company then uses “dark arts,” as Crowley described them, to track down contact information for the retailer, whether email, SMS or Twitter. Crowley deadpanned, “If they don’t respond, then we forward it to a competitor.”

Skweal is free for businesses and users, but retailers with more than one location will have to pay $1 per day per location.

Yesterday was the launch of the two-day Launch Conference, a start-up demo orchestrated by entrepreneur Jason Calacanis.

Aside from presiding over the event–playing a cross between a master of ceremonies and Jerry Lewis at a telethon–Calacanis also put together a field of start-up judges to give feedback to the companies. (Full disclosure: BoomTown’s Kara Swisher will serve as a judge this morning.)

At the end, winners will be crowned by winning a combo of judge and audience votes.

But, since nearly every company that has presented thus far has mentioned that they are seeking funding, the real winners will be the ones that go home with a pocket full of checks signed by the angel investors present.

If that focus was ever far from the minds’ of the audience members, they’d be immediately reminded by Calacanis’ shuttling back and forth between the angel investors in the front row, mic in hand, asking them which companies they will be investing in after the show.

Early Adopter took a swing around the demo pit where all the companies present have set up shop, so here are a few quick hits and highlights:

Trend: Deals are the new social.

It seemed everyone who offered a location-based service was also serving you contextual deals of some kind.

One company, Karma Key, gets my vote for most interesting implementation of the deal at Launch.

While it was not the most polished, and has significant hurdles ahead to reach scale, the company hopes to replace all the paper loyalty-cards we carry in our wallets through a combination of low-tech point-of-sale partnerships and high-tech points systems that are more flexible and secure than punching holes.

Karma Key also delivers metrics on loyalty conversion to the merchants.

Trend: Tech your workout.

The only company demo I saw that made every judge sit forward in their chairs with the glee of new user was Zepp Labs, with a product called GolfSense.

Although it’s little more than a three-axis accelerometer (the kind inside your smartphone) worn on a golf glove, the app allows you to view your golf swing in 3D, and get feedback on both the regularity and conformity, so you won’t repeat a bad swing.

There were other fitness-related companies present, but honorable mention for addressing a real pain point goes to Shoefitr–it maps the inside shape and size of running shoes, so you can see how a new model will fit based on your previous shoes. You can even see a 3D model of the inside space of your desired shoe, with a heatmap of where the new shoe will be looser or tighter.

It is already live at Running Warehouse, an online running shoe retailer, and I imagine tools like this will pop up elsewhere soon.

Early Adopter Picks:

Cabana:

The Cabana team made its demo simple, essentially creating a clone of Instagram, the popular photosharing app, on-stage, with no coding.

Most apps rely on a stock series of functions. Cabana allows the app creator to design the app graphically in a visual programming environment (think Yahoo Pipes, or Max MSP, which is popular with artists and musicians).

Several of the judges who started life as developers did quietly grunt in disapproval over not owning your own code, but similar folks once had the same attitude toward WordPress.

OnCompare:

Its quick pitch: OnCompare is like Yelp for software as a service.

If you have a small or medium business, and aren’t sure which cloud file storage system to use, for example, you can answer a few questions and get statistical recommendations from several service providers based on the features they offer.

Those feature-based recommendations are then added to ranks from people with the hope of helping decision-makers be better informed, at a lower cost, without the need for an RFP.

Moso:

This video-editing app, which is currently for sale in the Mac app store, might be called an Instagram for video, or it might be called a Vimeo for control freaks.

The app allows users to live mix effects, text, and transitions into video (without rendering time) and then post those live–or near-live–video and photo creations to social streams.

I can’t yet tell if users will sink their teeth into this type of social video creation and mixing, but I’m always a fan of a divergent solution to a popular problem.

The valuation for the Pasadena, Calif., start-up founded by well-known entrepreneur Bill Gross (pictured here)–which was actually struck some month ago–is $40 million.

Accel’s Jim Breyer will join the board of UberMedia, maker of social media reading and posting tools, which is currently largely aimed at the Twitter ecosystem.

“We are hoping to work very closely with Twitter, which is certainly our goal, as well as other social media platforms like Facebook,” said Breyer in an interview with BoomTown this morning, answering a question about previous tensions between Twitter and UberMedia. “There will be a lot of efforts to monetize Twitter and there is no silver bullet.”

Index Ventures and Steve Case’s Revolution Ventures also participated in the round.

The company did not reveal the amount raised, nor the valuation for UberMedia.

But many like him are trying to find a way to monetize the huge microblogging platform–including Twitter–and take advantage of its enormous scale.

Gross founded the start-up last spring.

Armed with $3.5 million in venture funding from a group of leading investors, including Index, Revolution, betaworks, First Round Capital and angel investors such as Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis and BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis.

Started in Gross’s Idealab start-up incubator and called TweetUp (and then PostUp), it was initially cast as a keyword-based bidding marketplace akin to Overture/Goto.com, the first paid search system he created a decade ago.

TweetUp also offered an organic search service to surface the best tweets. This put it at odds on several fronts with Twitter, which began to aggressively move to take over key parts of its business that had largely been left to third-party developers.

That still remains UberMedia’s essential goal, and Breyer hopes that the new investment will show Twitter that UberMedia hopes to work in harmony with it, as other developers have done successfully with Facebook. (Accel and Breyer himself are big investors in the social networking giant, so he should know.)

“Like Twitter, we want to drive the customer experience,” he said, pointing out successes such as the Zynga gaming service. “This is a lot like Facebook several years ago and cooperation worked out well for everyone.”

Here’s the official press release:

Accel Partners Leads Investment Round in UberMedia, Jim Breyer Joins Board of Directors

PASADENA, Calif.–February 14, 2011–UberMedia, the leading independent provider of applications for reading and posting to Twitter and other social media platforms, today announced that it completed a financing round led by Jim Breyer of Accel Ventures. Existing investors Steve Case of Revolution Ventures and Danny Rimer of Index Ventures also participated.

“At UberMedia, our goal is to enhance the Twitter experience with functionality in our clients and to be the best partner with Twitter in growing and enhancing their ecosystem,” said Bill Gross, Founder and CEO. “In particular, the addition of Jim Breyer to our board will really enable us to succeed at this mission. His experience on the boards of Wal-Mart, Facebook, Marvel Entertainment, Dell and so many other high-profile consumer brands will be particularly helpful.”

“We’ve been watching closely Bill’s efforts at UberMedia to build upon the ground-breaking communications platform created by Twitter,” said Jim Breyer of Accel Partners. “We see a tremendous business in the kinds of innovations in user experience being developed at UberMedia. The result of these efforts will be an expansion in the number and variety of people engaged with Twitter as well as a method for advertisers to reach consumers in highly targeted and relevant ways.”

And here are two video interview I did with Gross last April when the company was founded:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110214/ubermedia-raises-17-5-million-from-accel-index-and-steve-case/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110206/enswers-acquires-soompi-korean-entertainment-community/ http://allthingsd.com/20110206/enswers-acquires-soompi-korean-entertainment-community/#comments Mon, 07 Feb 2011 07:24:56 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=3266 Korean video fingerprinting company Enswers has acquired Soompi, a San Francisco-based company that runs the largest English-language Korean pop culture (K-pop) community site.

Seoul-based Enswers plans to extend Soompi into a video portal, based on relationships it already has to provide video search and copyright detection technology to Korean content providers.

The plan could be particularly interesting given Soompi’s audience is international by design, while online video licensing is traditionally not. A large part of Soompi’s audience is in the U.S., but the company has active members in more than 50 countries.

Soompi founder Susan Kang will remain with the site as chief evangelist, while CEO Joyce Kim will move on. Other terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Soompi has 1.4 million uniques and 22 million page views per month. It started as Kang’s personal Web site in 1998. With Kim at the helm, the company took seed funding in February 2010 from Softbank Ventures Korea.

Kim said she is likely to found another Web start-up. She hails from a family of tech entrepreneurs, including Jared Kim (her younger brother) of WeGame and Jason Calacanis (her brother-in-law) of Mahalo.

Enswers, which was founded in 2007, noted that this is the first time a Korea-based company has bought a Silicon Valley start-up to expand into the U.S. market.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110206/enswers-acquires-soompi-korean-entertainment-community/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110125/roll-camera-jason-calacanis-makes-a-video-push-at-mahalo-and-wants-you-to-know-about-it/ http://allthingsd.com/20110125/roll-camera-jason-calacanis-makes-a-video-push-at-mahalo-and-wants-you-to-know-about-it/#comments Tue, 25 Jan 2011 11:00:46 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=28523 Jason Calacanis has overhauled his Mahalo start-up yet again. Just ask him.

Actually, no need to: The not-at-all bashful entrepreneur has been working hard to make sure we’re all aware of what he’s calling “the Mahalo 4.0 launch/pivot.”

So there will be no shortage of places to read about this today. And if you want to hear Calacanis pitch his pivot himself, you can do that too, via a livestream of the DLD conference, where he’s presenting right now.

So here’s what you need to know:

• Calacanis, who launched Mahalo in 2007 as a “human-powered search engine,” then turned it into an “answers” site, is now trying to move deeper into the “how to” category dominated by Demand Media. Which just happens to be going public today in a very hot offering that will value the company at more than $1 billion. [Correction: Demand will start trading on Wednesday, January 26]
• The most important part of the move is a new emphasis on video, which Mahalo is creating itself. That’s a different strategy from Demand’s, which relies on a computer to spit out editorial assignments, then hands them out to an army of freelancers.
• Calacanis and Mahalo president Jason Rapp, who came on board last spring, have hired a team of 50 editors, who are now cranking out some 900 videos a week on topics like “How to Cook a Ham.” They plan to have a staff of 100 dedicated to videos by the end of the year.
• Mahalo still relies primarily on Google ads for revenue, which the company won’t disclose. But last week Calacanis said incoming dollars from Google’s YouTube have shot up 9x in the last year.
• Rapp says Mahalo still doesn’t need to raise any more money beyond its initial round, which brought in $20 million from investors like Sequoia, CBS and News Corp. (News Corp. also owns this Web site.)

If you missed Calacanis’s pitch this morning but still want to see people talking about his site, here’s a promo clip the company supplied. It features Calacanis’s employees, but not Calacanis, so it’s a lot less interesting. But you’ll get the idea.

Mahalo 4.0 from Mahalo.com on Vimeo.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110125/roll-camera-jason-calacanis-makes-a-video-push-at-mahalo-and-wants-you-to-know-about-it/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100604/d8-video-ford-ceo-alan-mulally-tells-jason-calacanis-why-were-not-going-to-drive-electric-cars-anytime-soon/ http://allthingsd.com/20100604/d8-video-ford-ceo-alan-mulally-tells-jason-calacanis-why-were-not-going-to-drive-electric-cars-anytime-soon/#comments Fri, 04 Jun 2010 17:39:19 +0000 Peter Kafka http://d8.allthingsd.com/?p=1984 Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis loves his Tesla. So why can’t the rest of us drive an electric car, too? Ford (F) CEO Alan Mulally fielded the question in the final panel of the D8 conference today.

Bonus question for our readers: Since Calacanis won’t tell us how much his Tesla cost, can anyone hazard a guess?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100604/d8-video-ford-ceo-alan-mulally-tells-jason-calacanis-why-were-not-going-to-drive-electric-cars-anytime-soon/feed/ 12 http://allthingsd.com/20100602/mahalo-taps-jason-rapp-as-president/ http://allthingsd.com/20100602/mahalo-taps-jason-rapp-as-president/#comments Wed, 02 Jun 2010 17:31:56 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=41806 Jason Rapp, the former New York Times (NYT) exec who was moved by IAC (IACI) last year from its M&A department to head up Gifts.com, left the company back in February without a word about where he was headed.

Turns out he’s found a new gig: President of Mahalo, a human-powered search engine backed by Sequoia Capital, News Corp. (NWS) and CBS (CBS).

In that capacity he’ll be scaling and commercializing the company’s business, which he said had a record search-advertising month in May. Rapp will be joining Mahalo’s board of directors as well.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100602/mahalo-taps-jason-rapp-as-president/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100411/paid-search-inventor-bill-gross-moves-to-monetize-tweets-with-tweetup-and-without-twitter/ http://allthingsd.com/20100411/paid-search-inventor-bill-gross-moves-to-monetize-tweets-with-tweetup-and-without-twitter/#comments Mon, 12 Apr 2010 04:00:45 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=26418

Just as Twitter finally prepares to announce its plans to make money–after what has seemed an eternity–the man responsible for the invention of paid search is beating the microblogging site to the potentially profitable punch, and without its involvement.

Armed with $3.5 million in venture funding from a group of leading investors, well-known entrepreneur Bill Gross is launching a public beta of TweetUp, a keyword-based bidding marketplace akin to Overture/Goto.com, the first paid search system he created a decade ago.

Gross will be the CEO of TweetUp, which will also offer an organic search service to surface the best tweets, a move that seems to put it in competition with Twitter’s own search service.

This comes just as Twitter is aggressively moving to take over key parts of its ecosystem, which has largely been left to third-party developers.

TweetUp could now give these developers a chance to make money on Twitter without relying on Twitter.

TweetUp is backed by Index Ventures, betaworks, Revolution LLC, First Round Capital and other investors, including Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis and BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis.

And TweetUp has struck a number of distribution deals with well-known Twitter search clients and Web sites–such as Seesmic, Answers.com and others–and will pay them half its revenue.

Gross has been working on the service since February at his Idealab start-up incubator in Pasadena, Calif.

He said he got the idea after he was struck by how hard it was to sort through good tweets from the TED conference, as well as how quickly a substantive tweet he posted, which was related to the global climate change event, disappeared as more recent ones replaced it in real time.

Said TweetUp in a press release about its system:

“In addition to an algorithm that combines a variety of factors to determine relevance, tweeters can bid on keywords in a competitive marketplace very similar to what now occurs at Internet search engines. This sophisticated combination of factors pushes the best tweets to the top of the results of users’ searches, allowing them to find the most compelling tweeters, and it enables serious tweeters to expand their following quickly and cost-effectively. TweetUp search will work alongside Twitter’s traditional search to provide a richer array of results.”

Twitter is also making several moves to monetize itself of late, with most observers expecting an advertising system to be announced soon.

The company has also been adding tools, which puts it in direct conflict with outside developers. On Friday, for example, Twitter announced it was purchasing Tweetie, maker of a popular Apple (AAPL) iPhone client for the messaging service.

The start-up has traditionally relied on third-party developers to build apps for the service, much as Facebook did at its start.

But Twitter management and key investors have recently been signaling that the company would be taking over key aspects of its business. This has caused tensions, obviously, in the wider Twitter ecosystem.

Thus, it will be interesting to watch how Twitter reacts to what Gross is doing with TweetUp.

(BoomTown also did an exclusive video with Gross about it all, which is posted here, as well as a tour of Idealab.)

Here are a few screenshots of TweetUp (click on images to make larger):

TweetUp Client

Answers.com

Business Insider

Business Insider Search #1

Business Insider Search #2

And here’s the official press release from TweetUp:

TweetUp Establishes Twitter Marketplace Where the Best Tweeters Rise to the Top

Unique Combination of a Relevance Algorithm and Bidding System Increases Number of Followers and Improves the Quality of Twitter Searches

PASADENA, CA–APRIL 12, 2010–TweetUp, Inc., announced today a new Twitter marketplace designed to showcase the world’s best tweeters and enable them to grow a highly targeted following. TweetUp is a new patent-pending platform that combines the popularity, relevance and influence of tweets and tweeters with a bid-based marketplace. Major partners, including leading Twitter search clients and top web sites, will display the results, enabling users to easily find the best tweets and tweeters in the world.

TweetUp was founded by Bill Gross at Idealab, where he also devised the first model for paid internet search, Overture/Goto.com, over a decade ago. TweetUp is backed by Index Ventures (investor in Skype, last.fm, Myheritage and Playfish), betaworks (investor in Twitter, TweetDeck, Bit.ly), Revolution LLC (founded by Steve Case, investor in Zipcar, LivingSocial, Everyday Health), First Round Capital (investor in Mint.com, StumbleUpon, CoTweet), Jason Calacanis (founder of Mahalo) and Jeff Jarvis (founder of BuzzMachine).

“Twitter has such tremendous potential as a real-time information network far beyond what has been realized to date,” said Bill Gross, Founder and CEO of TweetUp. “For most people, though, 80% or more of the tweets that fly by them when they’re searching for something are useless noise. For serious tweeters, the task of attracting interested and relevant followers is equally daunting. TweetUp will change all of that.”

TweetUp has addressed the needs of both users and tweeters in a single search mechanism. In addition to an algorithm that combines a variety of factors to determine relevance, tweeters can bid on keywords in a competitive marketplace very similar to what now occurs at Internet search engines. This sophisticated combination of factors pushes the best tweets to the top of the results of users’ searches, allowing them to find the most compelling tweeters, and it enables serious tweeters to expand their following quickly and cost-effectively. TweetUp search will work alongside Twitter’s traditional search to provide a richer array of results.

Danny Rimer, a partner with Index Ventures, TweetUp’s lead investor, said, “TweetUp is an opportunity to bring real-time information to the entire Web, and to do it in a way that creates value for everyone concerned. We feel that TweetUp can dramatically improve both the utility and ubiquity of Twitter, and in doing so build a monetization mechanism for real-time search that rivals that of traditional Internet search.”

TweetUp’s search results will be available to hundreds of millions of individuals through revenue-sharing distribution agreements with leading Twitter clients, including one of the leading multi-platform clients, Seesmic, one of the leading Android clients, Twidroid, the leading source of tweets, TwitterFeed, and the leading social media authority and influence ranking system, Klout, as well as popular web sites including BusinessInsider.com, Answers.com, and PopURLs.

Together, these clients and web sites will bring TweetUp search results to more than 40 million unique users per month and serve more than half a billion impressions per month.

“Increasingly, people looking for answers want more than just black and white facts, but also real-time insights relating to the issues surrounding their questions,” said
Bob Rosenschein, Answers.com CEO. “We are at the forefront of meeting that demand, and partnering with TweetUp is an exciting new way to add value to the
Answers.com user community.”

“I have been sharing in social networks and blogs for ten years and realized the power of having a true community,” said Loic Le Meur, CEO of Seesmic. “This is why
I was immediately attracted to working with Tweetup. People who are serious about sharing and having a community around themselves are also often those who have the most interesting ideas to contribute.”

“We believe that the impact of the real-time web, and of Twitter in particular, has only just begun,” explains John Borthwick of betaworks, a major investor in TweetUp, as well as in TweetDeck and Bit.ly. “Because TweetUp will be accessed on mainstream websites across the world, Twitter will be introduced to hundreds of millions of new people. Furthermore, these new users will experience thoughtful tweets, in context, targeted to them according to their areas of interest, and delivered from serious tweeters who care about building a passionate audience.”

“When we created AOL 25 years ago, we believed in the power of community and built a significant company around it,” said Steve Case, AOL co-founder and founder
of Revolution LLC. “Twitter is proving the power of community continues to thrive, and I am excited to be backing Bill Gross and TweetUp as they innovate in the social
media space by making Twitter more useful to a mainstream audience.”

With today’s announcement, TweetUp launches a public beta period in which tweeters can open an account and begin adding search keywords to their profile. For the first 1000 who sign up, the company is providing a $100 in credits to allow tweeters to see how TweetUp’s network can improve their standing in search resultsand attract more followers.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100411/paid-search-inventor-bill-gross-moves-to-monetize-tweets-with-tweetup-and-without-twitter/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20091020/rise-of-the-machines-why-demand-media-is-worth-more-than-the-new-york-times/ http://allthingsd.com/20091020/rise-of-the-machines-why-demand-media-is-worth-more-than-the-new-york-times/#comments Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:00:04 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=12235 The New York Times’s model for content creation, which revolves around well-paid professionals who rely on their experience and judgment, looks increasingly threatened. What does a new model look like? Perhaps one where a computer spits out assignments to day laborers who work furiously for low pay.

That’s the worrisome conclusion you can draw from Dan Roth’s excellent profile of Demand Media in the new issue of Wired. The piece is well-worth reading, but here’s the very short version: Demand has figured out how to generate a massive stream of low-cost stories designed to extract the maximum dollars from Google’s (GOOG) advertisers.

The company has plenty of competitors that do similar stuff–Associated Content, Mahalo, and About.com, owned by the New York Times (NYT)–but Demand’s secret sauce is an algorithm that helps it figure out the most valuable stories to assign, based on search terms and keyword prices. Which leads to stories like “Where can I donate a car in Dallas?”

Demand currently produces about 4,000 new stories a month, paying the freelancers who create them between $15 and $20 a piece. But CEO Richard Rosenblatt wants to up that to a million per year. At that point, Roth notes, “the payouts could easily hit $200 million a year, less than a third of what The New York Times shells out in wages and benefits to produce its roughly 5,000 articles a month.”

Which is why Demand is constantly floated as a potential acquisition candidate for the likes of Yahoo (YHOO), at price tags of $1.5 billion or more. Investors, who bid up Times stock a bit after the company announced plans to cut its newsroom headcount by eight percent, currently value the publisher at $1.3 billion.

All of that make you queasy? Then you’re going to hate reading paragraphs like this:

Here is the thing that Rosenblatt has since discovered: Online content is not worth very much. This may be a truism, but Rosenblatt has the hard, mathematical proof. It’s right there in black and white, in the Demand Media database–the lifetime value of every story, algorithmically derived, and very, very small. Most media companies are trying hard to increase those numbers, to boost the value of their online content until it matches the amount of money it costs to produce. But Rosenblatt thinks they have it exactly backward. Instead of trying to raise the market value of online content to match the cost of producing it–perhaps an impossible proposition–the secret is to cut costs until they match the market value.

I think there’s an equally worrisome story–worrisome, that is, from the admittedly self-interested perspective of content creators like me–about the pressure from advertisers, armed with their own technology, to push the value of online content down even further. But we’ll save that for later. One downer a day is plenty.

Want to know what the face of new media looks like? Here’s a 2008 interview Kara Swisher conducted with the preternaturally peppy Rosenblatt:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091020/rise-of-the-machines-why-demand-media-is-worth-more-than-the-new-york-times/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090701/gadget-gods-peter-rojas-ryan-block-finally-unveil-their-newest-gadget-site-gdgt-get-it/ http://allthingsd.com/20090701/gadget-gods-peter-rojas-ryan-block-finally-unveil-their-newest-gadget-site-gdgt-get-it/#comments Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:00:42 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=8856 Does the world need another gadget site? Yes, say two of the gadget world’s biggest stars, who are launching gdgt.com today.

The site is the work of Peter Rojas, who helped build Gizmodo and Engadget, and Ryan Block, who took the torch from Rojas after he moved on. Gizmodo and Engadget are the best known and most powerful of the new generation of gadget sites, which makes Rojas and Block revered by the gadget gang. That’s why we’ve been hearing about gdgt, in dribs and drabs, for many many months.

But as well known as Rojas and Block are, they’re still going to have to work hard to make a dent in the crowded field. In addition to the two blogs they created, the gadget spectrum includes everyone from staid players like CBS’s (CBS) CNET to rumor sites for Apple (APPL) obsessives, like MacRumors, to sites for real obsessives, like the handful of people who still own Palm (PALM) Treos. (And, of course, there’s All Things Digital’s Walt Mossberg, who bestrides all of this like the colossus he is, and is also my boss. Hi, Walt!)

Rojas and Block argue that their site is different because it’s not going to be driven by editors but by the site’s users, who will gather there to swap info, stories, rumors, opinions, etc. In other words, Facebook for gadgets, though I gather they’d recoil if they heard that. The other pitch, though they won’t spell this out, either: Their site takes a bunch of features and content that you can find other places and presents them in a better way.

There’s a bunch of nifty features, like a gadget-finder that lets you find products via specs instead of brands, and the site seems to be pretty slick. But it’s better if you have a look yourself instead of having me describe it. And gdgt.com won’t really hit its stride until actual users start using it. I look forward to hearing what they have to say about my upcoming phone dilemma: iPhone 3GS, Palm Pre or Blackberry Tour?

But as much as Rojas and Block argue that this is a community site, it’s their names and reps that have people interested in the project. And that’s what has convinced investors to plow money into an ad-supported Web site in an era when the economy sucks and there are way too many ad-supported Web sites.

The duo won’t discuss funding, but I’m told that last fall they were discussing investments of up to $1 million, but ended up taking less than that via a group of VCs and angel investors. I don’t have a complete list of investors, but people familiar with the company tell me that early-stage investor True Ventures led the round, which also included New York-based incubator Betaworks and Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis.

Calacanis’s name will resonate with longtime followers of the tech blog world: He was one of the founders of Weblogs Inc., which created Engadget as a rival to Gawker Media’s Gizmodo, and hired Rojas away from Gizmodo. Calacanis eventually sold Weblogs Inc. to Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL for a decent pile of cash, some of which I believe ended up in Rojas’s lap.

Click the image below to see a screenshot of what gdgt’s homepage ought to look like.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090701/gadget-gods-peter-rojas-ryan-block-finally-unveil-their-newest-gadget-site-gdgt-get-it/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090602/jason-calacanis-tries-turning-mahalo-into-a-wikipedia-that-pays/ http://allthingsd.com/20090602/jason-calacanis-tries-turning-mahalo-into-a-wikipedia-that-pays/#comments Tue, 02 Jun 2009 23:59:40 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=7863 Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo is getting a two-part makeover.

There’s a visual overhaul for the search engine,  which involves cramming a lot more stuff on each results page. This is becoming standard operating practice on the Web, both because it offers readers a lot more stuff, and because it seems to help improve search engine rankings. (You can see the before and after pages at the bottom of this post.)

The other change isn’t as easy to see, but it’s a big change for Calacanis, who originally envisioned his company as “human-powered search engine,” where his employees would build out results pages one at a time.

But now he’s hoping to get Mahalo users to do the work, Wikipedia-style, with a twist–he’ll pay them.

The pitch: Calacanis will offer users the chance to “own” a results page, and split any advertising revenue the page generates, primarily via Google (GOOG) AdSense. He’ll be paying users with “Mahalo bucks,” which cash out at 75 cents on the dollar, so users are really keeping 37.5 percent of each dollar their page generates.

Calacanis says some of his pages are generating up to $10,000 a year, but most will make far less. Will that be enough to encourage people to build and maintain Web pages on a piecework basis?

He is betting it will: Right now Calacanis employs about 50 people to make his results pages, but he says that over time, that number will shrink to a couple dozen editors who will oversee “hundreds” of workers: “We think this will become a half-time to full-time job for a large number of out-of-work people.”

Calacanis says the move isn’t designed to save him money, since he’ll be carving out a chunk of his ad revenue to pay his people. He’s raised $20 million and says that will last him four to five years, thanks in part to cuts he made last fall; he predicts he’ll be breaking even within a year.

Here are the before and after screenshots:

Mahalo 1.0

Mahalo 2.0

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090602/jason-calacanis-tries-turning-mahalo-into-a-wikipedia-that-pays/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081215/jason-calacanis-rolls-out-the-new-mahalo-yahoo-answers-killer/ http://allthingsd.com/20081215/jason-calacanis-rolls-out-the-new-mahalo-yahoo-answers-killer/#comments Mon, 15 Dec 2008 09:00:13 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=2088

In October, Mahalo.com founder Jason Calacanis laid off staff at his human-powered search engine. Then he announced he was hiring engineers for a mysterious new “Project A.”

Today he’s unveiling it: An “answers” service designed to compete with one of Yahoo’s most successful sites.

Like Yahoo Answers, Mahalo’s new product relies on users to answer other users’ questions. Unlike Yahoo’s (YHOO) site, Calacanis promises to give his most prolific answer-givers a chance to make money, via a virtual currency they can earn by answering questions.

The proposition: Users can ask questions for free. But they can also buy “Mahalo Dollars” using real money and reward people who answer their queries. Users can eventually cash out the Mahalo currency they earn for real dollars, with Calacanis taking a 25 percent cut.

This aligns him with a growing number of Internet execs who think they can make money via virtual goods and currencies. That’s worked well for Asian companies and a handful of Western videogames, like Activision Blizzard’s (ATVI) World of Warcraft. But the market for virtual stuff has yet to appear at most U.S.-based Web sites.

Still, Calacanis thinks he’s got a better shot of making it work next year than his original plan for 2009: Selling ads on his site besides the ones he runs from Google’s (GOOG) AdSense. “I think it’s going to be very hard to make money selling ads,” he said. “The market needs this more than it needs us out there trying to sell inventory.”

All of this supposes that people are actually willing to pay for advice they get over the Internet. I’m dubious, but then again I had no idea Yahoo Answers was as successful as it was until Calacanis walked me through the user stats in his demo*: 24 million unique users in the U.S., according to Quantcast.

I did try it out myself, and found that Calacanis’s beta users (who are presumably incented to answer as many questions as they can) did a decent job of answering my query about moving my Palm data to my BlackBerry via my MacBook–and much better than the people at Yahoo Answers and Answers.com, who didn’t even try.

But it’s still not good enough. Looks like if I want to get this done I’m going to have to pay someone real cash.

*A note for anyone who ever has to demo a product: Find some way to watch Calacanis go through his paces live if you can. You can get a sense of the experience by reading his tutorial, or by watching video of him in action. But it’s another thing to get it in real time, and watch him simultaneously hype and soft-sell. Really effective stuff.

[Image Credit: Joi Ito]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081215/jason-calacanis-rolls-out-the-new-mahalo-yahoo-answers-killer/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081103/is-the-new-york-times-selling-aboutcom-no/ http://allthingsd.com/20081103/is-the-new-york-times-selling-aboutcom-no/#comments Mon, 03 Nov 2008 22:52:33 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=488

The New York Times (NYT) is in lousy shape, so it needs to sell off About.com, the kind-of-portal, kind-of-blog-aggregator it bought from Primedia in 2005. So says Jason Calacanis, whose Mahalo.com is a kind-of-portal, kind-of-blog-aggregator.

Not true, say two people familiar with the Times and About; they say the paper isn’t shopping the property.

Calacanis, who made the remarks during the most recent This Week In Tech podcast, doesn’t go into much detail about his claim. Gawker has a link to the audio, but here’s the relevant transcript, in its entirety:

They’re going to have sell About. They’ve been trying to sell About.com, from what I understand.”

NYT spokeswoman Catherine Mathis offered up the standard we-don’t-comment-rumors-and-speculation line.

That said, it doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen at some point in the future. The Times really does need money, and since About.com is both growing and profitable, it may be the most valuable asset the Times now owns.

But that’s exactly why the New York Times would be reluctant to part with it. Like it or not, About.com may well represent the Times’ future.

This isn’t the first time a Web reporter has suggested that About.com is on the block, by the way. I wrote the same thing earlier this year, and I was wrong then.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081103/is-the-new-york-times-selling-aboutcom-no/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081030/they-will-survive-silicon-valley-entrepreneurs-talk-downturn/ http://allthingsd.com/20081030/they-will-survive-silicon-valley-entrepreneurs-talk-downturn/#comments Thu, 30 Oct 2008 21:32:57 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=5850

Earlier today, BoomTown posted a video of star venture capitalist John Doerr’s 10 tips to start-ups for surviving the econalypse that he ticked off at a roundtable in Silicon Valley on Wednesday.

Beside the words of wisdom from the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner, I also trolled for advice from the panel of well-known entrepreneurs I moderated at VentureBeat’s “How to manage your start-up in the downturn” event.

Thus, here is the i-will-survive take from Jason Calacanis of Mahalo, Toni Schneider, chief executive of Automattic, the company that makes the WordPress blogging software, Nirav Tolia of Web 1.0′s Epinions and Max Levchin of Slide.

As an added bonus, Ram Shriram, one of Google’s first investors, also weighs in. And, of course, the inevitable blogger Robert Scoble gives his two cents (and also freaks me out once again!).

Here’s the video of the entrepreneurs, and below it, for your viewing pleasure, two versions of “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor (the classic) and Cake (the weirdly good one):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081030/they-will-survive-silicon-valley-entrepreneurs-talk-downturn/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20081030/the-entire-video-of-john-doerr-giving-10-tips-for-start-ups-to-avoid-the-econalypse/ http://allthingsd.com/20081030/the-entire-video-of-john-doerr-giving-10-tips-for-start-ups-to-avoid-the-econalypse/#comments Thu, 30 Oct 2008 09:29:59 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=5821

Here’s a video of star VC John Doerr reciting his 10 tips for start-ups to follow in the economic downturn.

Doerr gave out the advice at VentureBeat’s “How to manage your start-up in the downturn” roundtable event, which took place at the Stanford Park Hotel in Palo Alto yesterday morning.

The Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers VC got a lot of attention for his list, which he culled from a survey of 18 of the companies his firm has invested in.

Doerr didn’t need a massive, noisy PowerPoint like Sequoia Capital to make his quick and clear points, which he delivered in four minutes flat.

Doerr was on an investors panel with Ram Shriram, one of Google’s first investors, Ron Conway, Kittu Kolluri of New Enterprise Associates and Matt Cohler of Benchmark Capital.

I moderated the second panel of entrepreneurs, including: Toni Schneider, chief executive of Automattic, the company that makes the WordPress blogging software; Max Levchin of Slide, Jason Calacanis of Mahalo; and Nirav Tolia of Web 1.0′s Epinions. Video of interviews with them and also Shriram to come later today!

But here’s Doerr reciting his 10 tips:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081030/the-entire-video-of-john-doerr-giving-10-tips-for-start-ups-to-avoid-the-econalypse/feed/ 7 http://allthingsd.com/20081028/how-to-manage-your-start-up-in-the-downturn-well-come-to-this-event-and-find-out/ http://allthingsd.com/20081028/how-to-manage-your-start-up-in-the-downturn-well-come-to-this-event-and-find-out/#comments Wed, 29 Oct 2008 00:05:44 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=5764 Tomorrow, BoomTown is trying to find a silver lining from a group of entrepreneurs at VentureBeat’s “How to manage your start-up in the downturn” roundtable event.

It will take place at the Stanford Park Hotel in Palo Alto from 8 a.m. to noon.

Toni Schneider, chief executive of Automattic (the company that makes the WordPress blogging software) will join Max Levchin of Slide, Jason Calacanis of Mahalo, O’Melveny & Myers’ Sam Zucker, and Nirav Tolia of Web 1.0′s Epinions.

Along with my group, for whom I am planning all sorts of verbal tortures (“Exactly how much do you make?”), there is also a panel of investors, moderated by VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall, which features: John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; Ram Shriram, one of Google’s first investors, Ron Conway, Kittu Kolluri of New Enterprise Associates and Matt Cohler of Benchmark Capital.

Oh, it is sure to be a festival of Web 2.0 pondering.

Said Marshall in a post about the gathering:

One goal of this event is to provide context and advice for start-up CEOs and founders facing the recession. We’ve handpicked the speakers for their remarkable records and experiences in the previous downturn. …

While the Sequoia [Capital] ‘RIP Good Times’ presentation gave a broad overview of the economic problems facing the tech world, it provided mostly a macro analysis, and a general prescription for companies.

Now is the time to take the analysis one step further, and discuss the variety of situations we see among valley investors and their start-ups: How cleantech companies are different from Internet start-ups, and how under certain conditions, a profitable company may actually be poised for aggressive growth, hiring and M&A–and not necessarily ideal for cost cutting. We intend to explore all of this and more.

Given the fairly predictable ‘Silicon Valley is in circle-the-wagons mode’ story line we’ve been seeing so far in the media, this event is also the Valley’s opportunity to help dispel this myth and explain how the area’s start-ups are actually quite diverse and that there are a mix of strategies at play.”

The event is sold out, but it will be streamed live.

And, as usual, look for a shaky video report of the roundtable from me later!

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081028/how-to-manage-your-start-up-in-the-downturn-well-come-to-this-event-and-find-out/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20081023/mahalos-jason-calacanis-in-better-days/ http://allthingsd.com/20081023/mahalos-jason-calacanis-in-better-days/#comments Thu, 23 Oct 2008 09:13:07 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=5508

As usual, serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis makes lemonade from lemons–or is it vice versa?–touting cost-cutting at his human-powered search engine start-up and newest venture, Mahalo, almost as much as he touted its prospects when he started it up more than a year ago with $20 million in funding.

The colorful Calacanis has been around the Web space for a long time, with a range of ventures back in the day, like “Silicon Alley Reporter,” up to the last of which–Weblogs Inc.–was sold to AOL in 2005 for $25 million.

But in a blog post yesterday, Calacanis sang perfectly in tune with the new, decidedly grimmer, times. Thus, he announced the cuts at Mahalo, which include layoffs, with his typical showman style.

The venture was funded by–among others–Sequoia Capital and its wunderkind VC Roelof Botha.

But, after Sequoia lowered the boom on the start-ups it invested in recently, it’s no surprise they are lining up to show how well they can play “Survivor.”

Wrote Calacanis, in part:

Although we’ve got a significant amount of cash on hand, and the business is ahead of schedule in terms of traffic (4m uniques a month, double where we thought we would be at this point), we’re fairly certain that the advertising climate for the next two years will be severely depressed. To ignore this obvious fact would be irresponsible…While I anticipated and prepared for the ‘internet winter’ we’re now facing (you’ve read my posts and e-mails about the startup depression I’m sure), I failed to realize how bad the situation would get. It’s much worse than I thought it would be, and ignoring market conditions today would only mean deeper cuts down the road.”

Ah, for happier times, such as in these three videos of Calacanis, which I shot when life was quite a bit sunnier.

The first two are of my visit to Mahalo’s Santa Monica, Calif., HQ last summer (tony digs and giant screens for all) and the third is the video from when Walt Mossberg and I demoed Mahalo at the fifth D: All Things Digital last year.

Now that the plot has inevitably thickened, it’s interesting that Mahalo means “thanks” or “gratitude” in Hawaiian. And BoomTown is surely thankful for the ongoing drama that Calacanis brings to the Web.

Here are the videos:

Visit to Mahalo:

Interview with Calacanis:

Mahalo Demo at D5:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081023/mahalos-jason-calacanis-in-better-days/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20080429/kara-visits-econsm-and-lives-large-with-jason-calacanis/ http://allthingsd.com/20080429/kara-visits-econsm-and-lives-large-with-jason-calacanis/#comments Tue, 29 Apr 2008 12:00:18 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20080429/kara-visits-econsm-and-lives-large-with-jason-calacanis/ Yesterday, I traveled to Los Angeles for paidContent’s second Economics of Social Media conference, which opened last night and is being held all day today at the Skirball Cultural Center.

This morning, I am interviewing Steve Wadsworth, who helms Walt Disney’s (DIS) Internet businesses.

And after sating myself with as much Club Penguin info as possible, I will be sitting rapt in the front row, as folks like Yahoo’s (YHOO) Jeff Weiner, Bebo’s Joanna Shields and AOL’s (TWX) Ron Grant talk about how social media is going to finally make money.

BoomTown is on a vision quest to answer that question in the coming year, so we are kicking entrepreneurs and taking names!

Here’s a short video I did on the opening night, including talking to paidContent’s Staci Kramer and Seth Goldstein of Social Media.

But, first, it starts with a tour of my temporary L.A. abode at the home of Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080429/kara-visits-econsm-and-lives-large-with-jason-calacanis/feed/ 0