Last month we Launched Los Angeles Tech and in the announcement we provide the Hot List for the first half of January 2009. Top for January 16, 2009 - January 31, 2009 Posts Are You Selling Online Yet? The Scott Sanfilippo Interview Media Optimization Firms Are Red Hot In Southern California in 2009 Proliferate - Aggregate - Integrate Startups Uncensored #4 - “Finding and Working with Partners” SoCal VC’s absent This hot list is based on various social signals of what people are writing about, reading, bookmarking, searching, etc. You

12.     Mark Jeffrey - CTO, Mahalo Why 1.     Rosalind Resnick - Founder of NetCreations Why Why listen: Rosalind bootstrapped a company that she eventually took public. You’ll learn the trial and error that went into finding that golden idea. 2.     Timothy Sykes - Author of An American Hedge

SMCLA ( Social Media Club Los Angeles ) will be hosted tonight at the Mahalo offices in Santa Monica. Date: Monday, July 13th, 2009 Mahalo Office 902 Tags: Events andy sternberg mahalo smcl They have invited a writer from the LA Times, an editor from LAist, and a partner from Real Poiltech to discuss  ”Citizen Journalism: Social Media’s Affect on How News is Reported and Consumed”. This panel sounds very interesting to me, and happens to be moderated by one of our favorite LA tech reporters, Alexia Tsotsis .

Santa Monica-based Mahalo , the high profile "human-powered search engine" run by Jason Calacanis, rolled out a new, revamped site late Tuesday evening, offering to split advertising revenues with users who help to create pages on the site. Mahalo will allow users to claim and build pages for any topic on the site, supplementing the firm's use of employees and contractors to create pages. Mahalo has received funding from Sequoia Capital, Elon Musk, and News Corp., among others.

Enter Mahalo , the search engine formerly known as human-powered. Sometime Tuesday Jason will reveal “Mahalo 2.0,” a complete overhaul of the site based heavily on aggregated content. It seems Mahalo’s biggest strength, the humans themselves, were also its biggest weakness. “The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a (bull)dog. The man will be there to feed the dog.

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, 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.

Santa Monica-based Mahalo , the online search site headed by Jason Calacanis, rolled out version 3.0 Among other changes, the site's home page now features a prominent "ask any question" box, links to Mahalo Answers and How To pages, as well as ways to search and browse topics on the site. Tags: mahalo search engine wikipedia onlin of the firm's web site. The new version of the site is looking to combine search, content, and Q&A.

Mahalo is sold for 50-70 million, a respectable exit although much lower than Jason’s original goal of a 30 gazillion dollar sale. However in 2009 he has taken Mahalo to huge traffic numbers and even some revenue. Although sponsored bar events continued to decline in 2009 due to the economy, you all managed to get out on way too many school nights. One silly year end tradition tech blogs love to do is those damn prediction posts. As if writing a tech blog makes these guys some type of Nostradamus.

Neurotictrepenuer Johanthan Harris is leaving Tesla powered startup Mahalo . Tags: mahalo santa monica People jonathan harri Citing irreconcilable bulldogs, he leaves behind a great legacy on Colorado Blvd. Part of the original pool house group, he ends his role as Director of Sarcasm some time in the next 2 weeks.  We’re not sure if it was the constant

High profile entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, CEO of Los Angeles-based Mahalo , emailed an impassioned note to his mailing list Thursday, which he also posted to his personal blog, detailing how one of the firm's employees has just been sentenced to 48 months in jail for computer hacking. Calacanis said that Mahalo has a "rigorous" hiring process, but that the firm failed to do a "simple Google search" which would have revealed the fact that Schiefer had been convicted of hacking. According to the FBI indictment, the employee, John Scheifer, infected 250,000 computers with malware to create a "botnet"--a network of hacked computers used to steal account data.