Although Michael Arrington described PayPerPost’s Ted Murphy has the “most evil person in the room” yesterday during his mesh keynote, he is, in fact, a really nice guy. I spent a good chunk of time last night talking to Murphy about PayPerPost’s origins, its business model (they pay bloggers to blog about products and services), and the flack he and the company have taken for tainting the blogosphere. While there are plenty of critics, Pay-Per-Post has resonated with advertisers. He said the company has 6,500 advertisers looking to reach out to bloggers looking to make a few more bucks than they get from AdSense. I’m not a fan of pay-to-play and it’s not something we would ever entertain at b5media but I don’t think it – or Murphy – are evil. Clearly, Murphy and the PayPerPost business model have struck a nerve within the blogosphere – much like Skype caused a lot of panic within the telecom market. (In the photo, Murphy’s the one getting some “love” from 1938media‘s Loren Feldman)
Calacanis’ New Gig: Mahalo
So Jason Calacanis is back in the start-up game with a human-powered search engine called Mahalo. First impressions: it reminds me of the early days of Yahoo when its search engine index was put together manually. The difference is Mahalo wants to build its index through crowd-sourcing. No one could ever accuse Calacanis being shy given this comment:
“Please take a look at our results and compare the ones we have side by side with machine powered search by folks like Google, Ask, Yahoo, Technorati, AOL, and MSN. I think you’ll find that humans can really help make search results better.”
Mahalo has raised two rounds of financing from a group that includes: Sequoia Capital, Elon Musk, News Corp., CBS, Hubert Burda Media, Allen & Co., David Bradley, Gigi Brisson, Sandy Climan, Mark Cuban, Matt Coffin, Ted Leonsis, Jonathan Miller, Mark Pincus, Ryan Scott, and Fred Wilson.
My Chat with Craigslist’s Jim Buckmaster
After getting to enjoy most of mesh yesterday (I only had to moderate one panel), I’ll be in the hot-seat this morning when I do a keynote chat with Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster. In so many ways, Craigslist is a fascinating phenomenon: a business plan that could easily generate tens of millions of additional dollars in revenue if the management team gave the green light; a service that is mostly free to use; a no-frills Web site that’s just so un-Web 2.0 (or maybe it is because there’s lot of white); and a brand that has become one of the world’s most popular with little (or no) investment in marketing. It should be a really interesting conversation. For a deep look at Craigslist, check out this story that appeared in the Wall Street Journal last year.
Technorati Tags: mesh07
mesh Day One
What a day – fantastic! Lots of great keynotes and panels, amazing energy. The highlight for me was a panel “Digital Blinders – Are We an Inch Wide and a Mile Deep” that was so deep intellectually, insightful and thought-provoking, my brain started to hurt. When I’ve collected my thoughts and get a few hours of sleep in a day or two, I’ll post about it in more detail.
Technorati Tags: mesh07
Open Source Energy Savings
Now, this is cool: Austin Hill and Ron Dembo of Zerofootprint are launching a program called Dark Green PC that will use open-source software that people will install on their computers to reduce the amount of energy consumed. At the mesh conference, Hill said the key to making Dark Green a success is making it a social and fun activity by letting people broadcast on Facebook, on their blogs, etc. how much energy they’re saving. The question is how much energy could we save just by turning off our screen savers: Hill said if 100 million people installed Dark Green software on their computers, it would be equivalent to planting 13 million trees, or taking nine million cars off the road, or not building 200 power plants. “This is an example of something small that can have a huge impact,” he said. Dark Green is looking for a open-source project leader, and hopes to have some early code developed by the Fall. For more, see Austin’s blog post, which includes a video from StandoutJobs about the open source project leader position.
Technorati Tags: mesh07
A New Buyer’s in Town
Wow – CBS is buying Last.fm for $280-million – days after it confirmed its purchase of Wallstrip. I guess there’s yet another suitor for all those Web 2.0 entrepreneurs to dream about other than Google, News Corp., Microsoft, Yahoo and eBay.
