Thursday, March 19, 2009

Mahalo's Calacanis Offers $500K For Twitter Spot

Santa Monica-based Mahalo, the human-powered search engine run by Jason Calacanis, is in the spotlight again, this time for putting a price on being a top Twitter user. According to Mahalo head Calacanis, he is offering the micro blogging service $500,000, to have Mahalo's new Answers service featured as a "suggested user" for three years. Mahalo Answers is Mahalo's question and answer service, where users can post questions and answers, with the best answer getting paid. Calacanis had originally offered $250k to Twitter for the position, saying that his offer was meant to "get the attention of Twitter CEO Evan Williams, founder Jack Dorsey" along with investors Fred Wilson and Bijan Sabet. It appears that part of the offer is to grab some share of the attention Twitter is getting in recent weeks for Mahalo: Calacanis said that he was "half-bluffing" with the offer and that part of his motivation was to "get the press for making" the offer.