Santa Monica-based Mahalo, the search and news site run by Jason Calacanis, has cut 10 percent of the firm's staff, Calacanis said in a post on his blog Wednesday. Mahalo is venture backed by Burda Digital Ventures, CBS, News Corp., Calacanis said that the moves were due to a "challenging economic environment." According to Calacanis, the firm is "fairly certain" that advertising for the next two years will be "severely depressed."

SMCLA ( Social Media Club Los Angeles ) will be hosted tonight at the Mahalo offices in Santa Monica. 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.

Santa Monica-based Mahalo, the high profile startup headed by Jason Calacanis, has launched a new questions and answers site it is calling Mahalo Answers. Mahalo is a human powered search engine which uses a team of editors to cull the web for information on the most popular search topics. The new service is similar to offerings from Yahoo with its Yahoo Answers service, Los Angeles-based Sodahead , and Demand Media's Answerbag Q&A service. The new Q&A service is the mysterious "Project A" which Calacanis was drumming up beta testers for earlier this month.

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.

Jason Calacanis, the high profile founder of Santa Monica-based search engine Mahalo , claims that it now has a number of writers who are making over $20,000 a year writing freelance articles for the site. Mahalo now has about 3,000 how to articles on the site. Tags: mahalo calacanis jason search engine online writers freelance writing google adsens According to Calacanis, the firm is now paying $5 - $10 to writers to write articles for the site, and then splitting revenues from Google AdSense with those writers. Calacanis claims that writers of its how to articles are