I interviewed Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo.com while he was in London for the NMK Forum this week.
Broadly speaking, he covered what Mahalo will set out to achieve and how. Mahalo is to be a human powered search engine, creating better results and easier to use information than the brute force of a cold algorithm. As Calacanis said to me after the interview, “Google plus human trumps Google alone”. The human power is to be supplied by 40 “guides” sifting information, which will grow to 100 by the end of the year.
However, as I ask him, what happens if someone, who is not getting a good search result for their company out of Mahalo, decides to switch some of their SEO budget into bribing a Mahalo guide? His answer shows that Mahalo is perhaps a better thought out project than some critics have suggested…
Later on we discuss the entrepreneurial scene in Europe and the US right now.