Videocast: Interview with Jason Calacanis

Click To Play 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

Calacanis launches Mahalo Greenhouse at NMK Forum

BREAKING NEWS: The Internet is getting polluted, said Jason Calacanis today in his keynote speech today at NMK Forum 07. He calls it an 'environmental crisis' of bad blogging, gaming the system, SEO gone mad and "pay per post". "The polluting SEO slime balls have destroyed our Internet and it's time to take it back" he said. He introduced Mahalo.com to the UK internet industry, which is a new human

UK new media gears up for summer partying

UPDATE: Word on the street is that the Big Chill, the tres cool festival, will be running the club room at the event. That means some very heavyweight clubbing… UK new media community Chinwag has announced it’s free summer party, planning to entertain more than 2,000 Web 2.0-era Internet people. It’s also signed some big name sponsors including Adobe and Channel 4, along with recruitment firm Purple, all keen no

Videocast: Interview with Sellaband.com

Click To Play An interview with, first, upcoming band SecondPerson, the only UK band to win a deal via Sellaband, and then Pim Betist, Creative director, Sellaband at the first UK showcase of bands on the site. Sellaband offers a model of free legal distribution of new music by enabling a direct relationship between developing artists and their fans. The site enables fans (�believers�) to buy $10 shares in unsigned

Videocast: Interview with Seatwave

Click To Play This week tbites interviewed Joe Cohen, CEO of UK startup Seatwave, the fan-to-fan ticket exchange. You might think selling unwanted tickets to concerts and events is a market normally populated by ticket touts and those selling on eBay – and you'd be right. But Seatwave hopes to bring some order and safety to this market, estimated to be worth around £1bn a year in the UK alone.

Welovelocal.com launches

Welovelocal.com launched today. Yes, It looks like another local listings site with a social media element. Joint the queue guys. You can search for a plumber, a bar or somewhere to repair your shoes. You can read reviews and ratings from people in your network. The usual. What’s different perhaps about this UK startup is that it has an API. The SOAP web service allows you to perform direct queries

First Tuesday re-animates

Anyone interested in the London tech-networking scene will be aware of one of the better ones, namely Second Chance Tuesday. SCT was founded a couple of years ago when the tech sector came out of the cold, in part as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the first great networking shindig, First Tuesday, which boomed then imploded back in the day. That event started out as a cocktail party in Soho's Alphabet

CBS buys Last.fm for $280m, plans more ads

As hinted at back in February, Last.fm has been trawling around looking for a buyer and today it found its harbour in the form of a US media giant. The 'social music' site has been bought by CBS Corporation for $280m (£140m). This is less than the earlier rumour, but still the largest-ever buyout of a UK-based "Web 2.0" site. The site was founded in the UK five years ago

After Feedburner, who?

Following the purchase by Google of Feedburner, one of the only other players in RSS advertising is Pheedo. This currently counts Transcosmos as an investor. Of course, here in the UK Fedafi -which at one point during the last year was put up for sale – should feel their future a little more secure now Google is effectively putting its stamp of approval on RSS adverts. One other point: Publishers

Google buys Feedburner to sell ads into RSS

No wonder Google has acquired RSS management service Feedburner. FeedBurner publishes feeds for PC World, Computerworld, Macworld, Reuters, USA Today, AOL, Newsweek and many many more big and small publishers. That means the bulk of the content from these sites passes through Feedburner, and what does Google love? Content and data, but especially eyeballs. According to TechCrunch (following an unconfirmed rumour on Vecosys) Feedburner is in the closing stages of