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  • Mahalo Press Release

    • Human-powered search engine Mahalo.com launches with investors including Sequoia Capital, Elon Musk, News Corp, CBS Corporation and Burda Media.
    • Wall Street Journal's D Conference (Northern San Diego), May 30th, 2007: Serial entrepreneur Jason McCabe Calacanis today launched Mahalo.com, a human-powered search engine, at the Wall Street Journal's D Conference. The site is currently being launched in Alpha with the Internet's 4,000 most popular search terms completed. The Santa Monica-based company hopes to reach 10,000 search terms by the end of the year. At that point it will enter Beta, and launch shortly thereafter.
    • "We're in month five of a five-year project," explained Calacanis, "but we wanted to get some real-world feedback, so we're launching it early here at D Conference."
    • The site is focused on the top English-language search terms, including verticals such as travel, products, news, entertainment, sports, food, and health. "Google's mission is to index the world's information; our mission is to curate that wonderful index," said Calacanis. "It's my belief that humans can play a significant role in the development of search results and we're going to try to figure out exactly what that role is over the next couple of years. I am really looking forward to hearing what people think of the Alpha," he added.
    • Roelof Botha, a partner at Sequoia Capital who serves on Mahalo's board, said, "We're thrilled with the results Jason and his team have produced in such a short period of time—we look forward to user feedback so we can continue to improve the service."
    • Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind PayPal, SpaceX and Tesla Motors, said, "Search results edited by objective human experts mean you get all the important information on the first page and don't have to waste time sorting through low value links. The incredible growth of Internet access, combined with what Mahalo has developed, have finally made this approach cost effective." Mr. Musk is co-lead of Mahalo's second round of financing and will be joining Mahalo's board.
    • "Plainly, human editing can improve search; the promise here is to aggregate that process at scale," said Jeremy Philips, News Corporation's executive vice president, office of the chairman. Mr. Philips will be joining Mahalo's board.
    • Additionally, the firm announced that it has closed two rounds of financing to date. Lead investors include Sequoia Capital, Elon Musk and NewsCorp. Additional investors include CBS Corporation, Hubert Burda Media, Allen & Co., David Bradley, Gigi Brisson, Sandy Climan, Mark Cuban, Matt Coffin, Ted Leonsis, Jonathan Miller, Mark Pincus, Ryan Scott, and Fred Wilson.

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    Who does PR for Mahalo?   (2 Answers) 
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  • About Sequoia Capital

    • Sequoia Capital provides startup venture capital for very smart people who want to turn ideas into companies. As the "Entrepreneurs Behind the Entrepreneurs," Sequoia Capital's Partners have worked with innovators such as Steve Jobs of Apple Computer, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Bob Swanson of Linear Technology, Sandy Lerner and Len Bozack of Cisco Systems, Dan Warmenhoven of Network Appliance, Jerry Yang and David Filo of Yahoo!, Jen-Hsun Huang of nVIDIA, Michael Marks of Flextronics, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen of YouTube, Steve Goldman and Sujal Patel of Isilon Systems, and Dominic Orr and Keerti Melkote of Aruba Wireless Networks. To learn more about Sequoia Capital visit www.sequoiacap.com.

  • About Elon Musk

    • Mr. Musk is CEO and CTO of Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX), which he founded in 2002. SpaceX develops rockets and spacecraft for missions to Earth orbit and beyond. Last year, SpaceX won the NASA competition to design, build and demonstrate operation of a commercial replacement for the Space Shuttle, which retires in 2010.
    • Prior to SpaceX, Mr. Musk co-founded PayPal, the world's leading Internet payment system, and served as the company's chairman and CEO. PayPal currently has over 100 million customers in 190 countries, processes tens of billions of dollars per year, and went public on NASDAQ in early 2002. Mr. Musk was the largest shareholder of PayPal until the company was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in mid-2002. Before PayPal, Mr. Musk co-founded Zip2 Corp., a provider of Internet software to the media industry, with investments from The New York Times Company, Knight-Ridder, MDV, Softbank and Hearst. He served as chairman, CEO and CTO. In early 1999, Zip2 was sold to Compaq for over $300 million in an all-cash transaction.
    • In addition to his current day to day role at SpaceX, Mr. Musk is also chairman and the primary investor in Tesla Motors and SolarCity, where he plays a significant role in their strategic direction and product development. Both companies are intended to help address the risk of CO2-driven climate change.

  • About News Corporation

    • News Corporation (NYSE: NWS, NWS.A; ASX: NWS, NWSLV) had total assets as of March 31, 2007, of approximately US$62 billion and total annual revenues of approximately US$28 billion. News Corporation is a diversified entertainment company with operations in eight industry segments: filmed entertainment; television; cable network programming; direct broadcast satellite television; magazines and inserts; newspapers; book publishing; and other. The activities of News Corporation are conducted principally in the United States, Continental Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia, Asia and the Pacific Basin.

  • About CBS Corporation

    • CBS Corporation (NYSE: CBS.A and CBS) is a mass media company with constituent parts that reach back to the beginnings of the broadcast industry, as well as newer businesses that operate on the leading edge of the media industry. The Company, through its many and varied operations, combines broad reach with well-positioned local businesses, all of which provide it with an extensive distribution network by which it serves audiences and advertisers in all 50 states and key international markets. It has operations in virtually every field of media and entertainment, including broadcast television (CBS and The CW &mdash a joint venture between CBS Corporation and Warner Bros. Entertainment), cable television (Showtime and CSTV Networks), local television (CBS Television Stations), television production and syndication (CBS Paramount Network Television and CBS Television Distribution), radio (CBS Radio), advertising on out-of-home media (CBS Outdoor), publishing (Simon & Schuster), interactive media (CBS Interactive), music (CBS Records), licensing and merchandising (CBS Consumer Products) and video/ DVD (CBS Home Entertainment). For more information, log on to www.cbscorporation.com.

  • About Hubert Burda Media

    • Hubert Burda Media is one of Germany's leading media companies, with substantial international assets in Central and Eastern Europe as well as Asia. The company's global magazine portfolio comprises over 250 titles, a host of web and radio content, television productions and direct marketing activities. Consolidated group revenues for 2005 were US$1.98 billion. For more information, log on to www.hubert-burda-media.com.
    • Burda Digital Ventures is the Venture Capital arm of Hubert Burda Media. Burda Digital Ventures is committed to building outstanding companies in the Digital Space together with the best entrepreneurial talent available. Since 1999 the company has invested in more than 30 companies in the areas of Media, Platforms, Commerce, Games & Entertainment as well as Wireless.
    • For more information contact: media@mahalo.com

  • Mahalo.com Fact Sheet

    • Company Name: Mahalo.com, Inc.
    • Located: 10,000 square foot factory in Santa Monica.
    • Category: Human-powered search.
    • Launch Time/Date: 3PM PST, May 30th 2007.
    • Launch location: Wall Street Journal's D Conference, Four Seasons Aviara (northern San Diego). D Conference Website: http://d.wsj.com.
    • Product Launch Schedule: Currently in Alpha with the Internet's 4,000 most popular searches; will move to Beta at the end of 2007 with 10,000 pages, and launch shortly thereafter.
    • Founder & CEO: Jason McCabe Calacanis, 36 years old.
    • Previously: CEO of Weblogs, Inc. Weblogs, Inc. was purchased by AOL/TW for a reported $30M; CEO of Silicon Alley Reporter magazine and Venture Reporter; purchased by Dow Jones.
    • Investment: Two rounds, amount undisclosed.

  • Q&A with Mahalo.com's CEO Jason McCabe Calacanis

    • How many search results has Mahalo.com created to date?
    • We've done the top 4,000 SeRPs—short for "search engine result pages"—so far.
    • What happens if Mahalo.com doesn't have a result created for a search?
    • If Mahalo.com doesn't have a result created for a search term yet, it gives the user Google's excellent results, as well as the ability to receive an alert when Mahalo has completed the result. (see screen shot #8 below)
    • Are humans better than machines at creating search results?
    • Yes and no. Humans cannot possibly create as many search results as machines, nor can they go as deep on each search result. However, humans using machines can create much better search results than machines alone. Our "Guides" use Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN, Flickr, Delicious, and dozens of other services to hand-craft the cleanest, most organized, and spam-free SeRPs available today.
    • How much time do you spend building a SeRP?
    • It takes a couple of hours to create a solid search result. However, these results need to be maintained by our Guides on an ongoing basis.
    • What's the business model? I don't see any advertising on the site right now.
    • We're going to start testing various advertising units on the site over the next couple of months. For now we're gonna focus on building out a large number of high-quality results. When we don't have a result we show Google's results and share advertising revenue with them. You can do a search for Corvette to see an example of Google Adsense on one of our pages.
    • Why are you doing this?
    • After leaving AOL, I felt like I wanted to do another project that fit two criteria: 1. something that helped people a lot and 2. something that everyone could use every day. Search seemed like a place where my editorial experience in magazines, blogs, and social news could really help.
    • What's the mission of Mahalo?
    • To help people—a lot.
    • Can you expand on that?
    • We want to help people find what they're looking for and discover cool things they weren't looking for. We want to create the best search results available on the web for the most common search terms. Now, we know we can't hand-write all of the search terms in the world, but we can do the most common ones and that will help people... a lot!
    • How is this different than Wikipedia?
    • Wikipedia produces encyclopedia pages as a goal; we produce guides to a term. Wikipedia is the destination and as such they produce the content. We're not the destination—we don't produce the content—but rather we look at all the content that's out there and we organize it and help people organize and find it.
    • How is this different than DMOZ or the original Yahoo! directory?
    • Those sites use a top-down directory format for their information; we use a search metaphor. Now, we do have a categorization system so you can surf our information like you would DMOZ, but we think most folks want to type one word into a box and get a big payoff—Google's trained people to expect that. Also, the DMOZ and Yahoo! Directory have not been maintained over the past decade, so their results are hit and miss. We only include the *best* links on our pages—nothing borderline. So, I think our results are much higher quality.
    • How is this different than About.com?
    • About.com, like the Wikipedia, is a destination, not a guide to the web. They are tapping citizens to write content about what they're passionate about—we're trying to index all the passionate information on the web. So, again, we're not trying to compete with blogs, wikis, newspapers, websites, or communities on the web... we're trying to curate those sites.
    • Is this a Google killer?
    • Nothing is going to "kill" Google in my estimation. Google has an amazing search product and the world's most efficient advertising infrastructure. We plan on partnering with Google for these services just like I did at Weblogs, Inc., AOL and Netscape. That being said, head-to-head Mahalo's human-powered search results will be much better than Google's machine-created results—when we do have a result. My feeling is that ultimately people will use Mahalo for popular search terms, and machine-based search engines like Google and Yahoo! for long-tail searches.
    • How do you plan on getting people to pay attention to Mahalo? Are you going to do a big marketing push?
    • The best products on the Internet rise to the top by word of mouth. Our plan is to focus all our energy on making the best possible product and let the public do the marketing for us.

  • Video

    User Reactions: Download

  • Screenshots

    1. Mahalo Home Page: Mahalo Main Page Screenshot | Download Hi-Res version
    2. Mahalo search result page for Paris Hotels: Paris Hotels Screenshot | Download Hi-Res version
    3. Mahalo search result page for iPhone: iPhone Page Screenshot | Download Hi-Res version
    4. Mahalo search result page for Apple: Apple Page Screenshot | Download Hi-Res version
    5. Mahalo search result page for Mini Cooper: Mini Cooper Page Screenshot | Download Hi-Res version
    6. Mahalo search result page for George W. Bush: George W. Bush Page Screenshot | Download Hi-Res version
    7. Detailed shot of our search result page for Apple's iPhone, highlighting 20 things you should know about Mahalo: 20 Things About Mahalo | Download Hi-Res version | Screen-sized
    8. Mahalo "no human results" page. When Mahalo doesn't have a direct hit we show related searches and Google's excellent machine-powered results. So, there is no downside to switching to Mahalo if you're a Google user: No Results Page Screenshot | Download Hi-Res version
    9. Comparison of Mahalo's search result for Paris Hotels and Google's search result for Paris Hotels: Paris Hotels Mahalo vs Google | Download Hi-Res version
    10. Mahalo's message board for Paris Hotels: Paris Hotels Message Board | Download Hi-Res version

 


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