Jason Calacanis born in Brooklyn
0 0 reuben reuben2014-11-26 00:38:022014-11-26 00:38:02Jason Calacanis born in BrooklynSaved from delinquency by martial arts
0 CommentsAt the age of 15 Calacanis is on the verge of dropping out of the local Catholic high school in Bay Ridge, due to problems that include heavy drinking. A teacher intervenes on the condition that he takes up martial arts. He quits drinking, and starts studying Tae Kwon Do, and stays in high school.
It saved my life.
Tae Kwon Do black belt
0 CommentsCalacanis obtains a black belt in three years of study.
I’m an extreme person. If I did drugs or gambling or alcohol I’d be very dangerous.
Starts Silicon Alley Reporter
Calacanis starts the publication as a 16-page photocopy modeled after trade magazines like The Hollywood Reporter. It is poorly made with spelling mistakes and typographical errors and dropped off by hand at the offices of New York tech firms, but carries a significant scoop on Microsoft’s views towards content producers:
MICROSOFT ALIENATES ALLEY
NYMag feature
0 CommentsCalacanis is interviewed in a profile on Silicon Alley by the magazine. He talks about how people who joined the tech scene after the mid-90s are considered latecomers:
It means you did not get it. You did not believe. You did not have religion.
Silicon Alley Reporter folds
0 CommentsCalacanis says the magazine has published its last issue, as the dotcom crash hits the tech industry, while the September 11 attacks affect the broader economy. Calacanis:
The story’s over. You can’t have a magazine about unemployed people. You can’t have a magazine about people who are taking time off.
The magazine had grown from a 16-page photocopy to a 250-page glossy but has shrunk back to 64 pages by its last issue.
Weblogs, Inc.
0 0 reuben reuben2014-11-26 13:12:592014-11-26 13:12:59Weblogs, Inc.$1,000 a day from Adsense
Calacanis says Weblogs is generating $1,000 a day purely from the Google platform after some optimization:
[..] my old-school, reader-driven publisher sense tells me that the reason blogs are doing so well is because they don’t kill folks with ads.
The blog network also has other advertisers but considers the revenue from Google as a useful backup:
It’s such a nice feeling to know that if we have an advertiser cancel, or we start a new blog without an advertiser, we have revenue coming in the door.
AOL buys Weblogs
AOL is reported to pay $25 million for the blog network that includes Engadget, Autoblog, and around 82 others, in an all-cash deal. Calacanis says ad space on 12 of the blogs is sold out until the end of the year:
What every advertiser says to us is, ‘Please get us more traffic. We want to spend more money’. That was one of the major factors [in selling].
Bloggingstocks.com
AOL launches the new blogging network that features bloggers posting about individual stocks, from Google to Time Warner. It is the first new product for Weblogs since AOL bought the company. The bloggers are encouraged to be stockholders, although not necessarily in the companies they write about. They must sign a code of ethics, disclose their holdings, and not trade on insider information.
Relaunches Netscape
0 CommentsCalacanis relaunches the site for AOL, with a social news focus like Slashdot and Digg but adding an editorial layer, with news ‘anchors’ who follow up some of the more popular stories with their own reporting.
It’s sort of like open source journalism. The hive mind takes it to a certain place based on what they read in the mainstream media and blogs. And then we’re taking it to the next level with follow-up. I think it’s the evolution of Digg and Slashdot.
Leaves AOL
Calacanis leaves the company after CEO Jonathan Miller is fired. Calacanis:
I’m not inclined to start over with a new guy. I’m perplexed. Why now?
Traffic falls
0 CommentsValleywag reports that stats show a 70% drop in traffic to Netscape.com in the two months after Calacanis’s revamped version launches. It says traffic in the middle of June was around 130 million but as AOL decommissioned the weather and news segments the number of visitors fell to 115 million within a week, and within a week of the launch of the social news-focus front page on June 29, traffic fell further to 72 million.
Sequoia Capital
Calacanis joins the venture capital firm as Entrepreneur In Action:
They’re good guys, they’ve made some good bets. Now, I have to figure out what to build. Got any ideas? I’ve got time. I’ve got a backer. Call me.
Starts Disrupt
Arrington and Calacanis announce the conference, which is designed to allow startups to demonstrate their product for free.
Jason and I are going to do something a lot different than the pay-to-demo model. The TechCrunch20 conference will be a two day event, held this fall (more details soon), where twenty hot startups will demo their new products—and they don’t pay a dime to do this.
Mahalo raises $16 million
The Series B round is reported to value the company at a pre-money $100 million. News Corp., CBS, Elon Musk, and Acton Capital Partners join Sequoia Capital and Mark Cuban, who both renew their investment from the previous round.
Starts Mahalo.com
0 Comments
Calacanis launches the ‘human-powered search engine’ which aids to avoid search spam from advertisers, a method that hasn’t been used since the early days of search with sites like Ask Jeeves and Yahoo. Calacanis:
It turns out a human being in two, three or four hours can build a search result that’s much better than Google, Yahoo or Ask.
Shiny Media interview
Jason Calacanis talks about Mahalo.com, his online rivals including Nick Denton of Gawker Media, and a new announcement about the human powered search engine:
The internet’s environmental crisis
0 CommentsCalacanis talks at Gnomedex about how the pollution of the internet by spammers is creating an environmental crisis:
The internet was synonymous with good things, and intelligence, and freedom, and now it’s synonymous with spamming, and phishing, and I think we’ve let this happen a little bit, and we’ve been complacent
Neil Patel interview
0 CommentsCalacanis and Patel talk about issues like spam, the search engine optimization (SEO) philosophy as a whole and its problematic frictions between publishers and users in the battle for visibility and search relevance, and his search company, Mahalo.com:
[Mahalo.com] is sort of a search engine but of course there’s no engine, the engine is people…and it’s not all of a content company so you can’t call it Wikipedia…what it’s best described as is somewhere between Wikipedia and Google or Yahoo
