Jason Calacanis' Tumblelog

http://www.mahalo.com/2010-grammy-awards-performances

http://bit.ly/abOJNk

http://www.mahalo.com/grammy-awards-2010

2010 Grammy Award Nominees and Winners

RECORD OF THE YEAR

• “Halo,” Beyonce
• “I Gotta Feeling,” The Black Eyed Peas
• “Use Somebody,” Kings of Leon - WINNER
• “Poker Face,” Lady Gaga
• “You Belong With Me,” Taylor Swift

ALBUM OF THE YEAR

• “I Am…Sasha Fierce,” Beyonce
• “The E.N.D.,” The Black Eyed Peas
• “The Fame,” Lady Gaga
• “Big Whiskey and the Groogrux King,” Dave Matthews Band
• “Fearless,” Taylor Swift

SONG OF THE YEAR

• “Poker Face,” Lady Gaga & RedOne
• “Pretty Wings,” Hod David & Musze
• “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It),” Thaddis Harrell, Beyonce Knowles, Terius Nash & Christopher Stewart -WINNER
• “Use Somebody,” Caleb Followill, Jared Followill, Matthew Followill & Nathan Followill (Kings of Leon)
• “You Belong With Me,” Liz Rose & Taylor Swift

BEST NEW ARTIST

• Zac Brown Band - WINNER
• Keri Hilson
• MGMT
• Silversun Pickups
• The Ting Tings

BEST FEMALE POP VOCAL PERFORMANCE

• “Hometown Glory,” Adele
• “Halo,” Beyonce
• “Hot N Cold,” Katy Perry
• “Sober,” Pink
• “You Belong With Me,” Taylor Swift

BEST ROCK ALBUM

• “Black Ice,” AC/DC
• “Live From Madison Square Garden,” Eric Clapton & Steve Winwood
• “21st Century Breakdown,” Green Day - WINNER
• “Big Whiskey And the Groogrux King,” Dave Matthews Band
• “No Line On The Horizon,” U2

BEST RAP/SUNG COLLABORATION

• “Ego,” Beyonce & Kanye West
• “Know You Down,” Keri Hilson, Kanye West & Ne-Yo
• “Run This Town,” Jay-Z, Rihanna & Kanye West
• “I’m On A Boat,” The Lonely Island & T-Pain
• “Dead And Gone,” T.I. & Justin Timberlake

BEST COUNTRY ALBUM

• “The Foundation,” Zac Brown Band
• “Twang,” George Strait
• “Fearless,” Taylor Swift - WINNER
• “Defying Gravity,” Keith Urban
• “Call Me Crazy,” Lee Ann Womack

BEST COMEDY ALBUM

• Back From The Dead, Spinal Tap
• A Colbert Christmas The Greatest Gift Of All, Stephen Colbert - WINNER
• Internet Leaks, Weird Al Yankovic
• My Weakness Is Strong, Patton Oswalt
• Suckin’ It For The Holidays, Kathy Griffin
• Tall, Dark & Chicano, George Lopez

BEST MALE POP VOCAL PERFORMANCE

• “This Time,” John Legend
• “Love You,” Maxwell
• “Make It Mine,” Jason Mraz - WINNER
• “If You Don’t Know Me by Now,” Seal
• “All About the Love Again,” Stevie Wonder

BEST POP PERFORMANCE BY A DUO OR GROUP WITH VOCALS

• “I Gotta Feeling,” The Black Eyed Peas - WINNER
• “We Weren’t Born to Follow,” Bon Jovi
• “Never Say Never,” The Fray
• “Sara Smile,” Daryl Hall & John Oates
• “Kids,” MGMT

BEST POP COLLABORATION WITH VOCALS

• “Sea of Heartbreak,” Rosanne Cash & Bruce Springsteen
• “Love Sex Magic,” Ciara & Justin Timberlake
• “Lucky,” Jason Mraz & Colbie Caillat - WINNER
• “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” Willie Nelson & Norah Jones
• “Breathe,” Taylor Swift & Colbie Caillat

BEST POP INSTRUMENTAL PERFORMANCE

• “Besame Mucho,” Herb Alpert
• “Throw Down Your Heart,” Bela Fleck - WINNER
• “The Fire,” Imogen Heap
• “Phoenix Rise,” Maxwell
• “Funk Joint,” Marcus Miller

BEST POP INSTRUMENTAL ALBUM

• “In Boston,” Chris Botti
• “Legacy,” Hiroshima
• “Potato Hole,” Booker T. Jones - WINNER
• “Modern Art,” The Rippingtons Featuring Russ Freeman
• “Down The Wire,” Spyro Gyra

————— Forwarded message —————
From: Jason Calacanis
Date: Sun, Jan 31, 2010 at 10:11 AM
Subject: Thanks again Aaron!
To: aaron@

Aaron,

We’re taking a bunch of your advice and refining our SEO over the coming weeks. 

1. The pages that are short content we’re going to noindex after seven days of inactivity and delete them after some period and warnings to users. we don’t have any interest in breaking any rules or even doing anything border line…. 90% of our traffic comes from the big content pages (how to, Q&A and walkthroughs) so there is no upside in these in progress/stub/whatever pages. Do you think is a good plan?

2. WRT to the “scraping” advice we are using Google, Bing, etc APIs to pull in their searches and refreshing them as the pages get traffic. Not sure what the issue is because our design takes shorter abstracts than Google/Bing/etc! 

3. Do you think we should remove nofollow from our links? we added this to avoid the problem of SEOs coming in and turning Mahalo into a link farm… this has worked really well IMO. We’ve seen discussions on message boards where folks say “don’t bother trying to use Mahalo for building links.” 

Anyway, thanks for keep us on our toes and we look forward to more great (free!) advice from you and your team. Our team had dinner in Korea Town last night during our quarterly “codejam” and they were all raving about your advice and brainstorming over it for an hour! We really do appreciate you spending so much time on our site, design and model. 

Our new goal, now that we’ve reached the top 200 sites in the United States, is to:

a) be the largest content site in the United States (bigger than even Wikipedia and About.com!)

b) be the largest and most efficient Q&A site in the United States (yes, even bigger than Yahoo Answers so day)

c) be the best provider of comprehensive search results in the United States (note: comprehensive search to us is five or more search APIs on a page including things like links, news, blogs, twitter, products, books, images, videos, facebook, ebay, etc). 

Without the critical eye of experts like yourself we’ll never get there…. and for that we’re thankful!

Where are you based? Would really love for you to come by Mahalo and have lunch with the team and continue the discussion of how we can do better—and even how we can use your SEO techniques to grow! Additionally, would love to have you on This Week in Startups. 

all the best, j
——————————-
Jason McCabe Calacanis
CEO, http://www.Mahalo.com
Office: 310-593-6134 / Mobile: 310-456-4900
Blog: http://www.calacanis.com
Mailing list: http://bit.ly/jasonslist
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/jason
AOL IM/Skype: jasoncalacanis

The TSA is a complete disaster…. you get what you pay for a I guess.

Starting Salary for a TSA agent? Around 24k.

best jTSA Supervisors keep score and ridicule women, gays and minorities
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/01/30/florida.tsa.investigation/

(CNN) — The Transportation Security Administration has launched an
internal investigation into an air marshal field office in Florida
where supervisors are alleged to have used a crew assignment board to
ridicule and keep score on women, gays and minorities, sources told
CNN.The board, resembling the TV game show “Jeopardy,” includes categories
such as “pickle smokers,” “our gang” and “creatures,” which sources
said were names used by managers for gay men, African-Americans and
lesbians.

just got this from superfan Larry Miller. www.ustream.tv rocks! 

This is cool

http://www.usdebtclock.org/

www.mahalo.com/ipad 

Amazing Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

It was clearly a joke and I thought people got it. All the feedback I got on Twitter was that folks—the top people in the industry—thought it was a joke. It was only until I woke up the next day that I found out that the Wall Street Journal, CNN and the New York Times had printed my joke as reality. 

http://bit.ly/cIYPTB

http://venturebeat.com/2010/01/28/calacanis-tablet-tweets-accidentally-hoax-mainstream-media/

Technology Alert from The Wall Street Journal Microsoft’s quarterly profit jumped 60% to $6.66 billion, benefiting from strong holiday sales of PC running the Windows 7 operating system. Revenue jumped 14% to $19.02 billion, including $1.7 billion in revenue Microsoft had to defer in previous quarters through its Windows 7 upgrade option. Peter Klein, Microsoft’s chief financial officer, said the company sold more than 60 million copies, making it the fastest selling version in the company’s history.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704878904575031521661435134.html?mod=djemalertTECH

Fro the buzz team….. “Catcher in the Rye” author JD Salinger died today at the age of 91
http://www.mahalo.com/jd-salinger-dead

From the Mahalo Buzz team… Did Chris Matthews just give credit to Obama for rising above his blackness? Perhaps it didn’t come out the way he intended it.

http://www.mahalo.com/chris-matthews-forgot-he-was-black

Following President Obama’s State of the Unionaddress, Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC’s Hardball, commented that Obama “is post-racial by all appearances” and added, “You know, I forgot he was black tonight for an hour.”³

Matthews continued” “You know, he’s gone a long way to become a leader of this country and passed so much history in just a year or two. I mean its something we don’t even think about. I was watching and I said wait a minute, he’s an African America guy in front of a bunch of other white people, and there he is, the president of the United States and we’ve completely forgotten that tonight. Completely forgotten it. I think it was the scope of his discussion, it was so broad ranging, so in tune with so many problems and aspects and aspects of American life that you don’t think that you don’t think in terms of the old tribalism and the old ethnicity. It was astounding in that regard, a very subtle fact, its so hard to talk about, maybe I shouldn’t even talk about it.”⁴

Just posted this response to the dude who founded Newsvine.
http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2010/01/never-dupe-your-readers/ Thanks for the feedback Mike.

First: Hope everything is going well at MSNBC. I respect what you set
out to accomplish with Newsvine and as I’ve told you I think it is/was
an interesting experiment and fairly well executed—but perhaps a
little too early. You could say I’m a fan of your work. Second: I don’t judge myself by twitter follower count—I think such
things are absurd and I’ve been fairly clear about that from the
start. Additionally, I never asked to be a “weblebrity” or whatever
folks choose to call folks who get 5x the attention of an average
person online.

I simply build products that I think people will enjoy and find
helpful, and that I enjoy building. The 100+ blogs at Weblogs, Inc,
Silicon Alley Reporter, TechCrunch50, This Week in Startups, Mahalo
and Open Angel Forum (to name a few) are all project I took on and
created because I had a passion for the space the folks who would
consume and use the products. Since you’ve made this personal I will tell you that I try not to
judge myself too much, I try to just be a good person and doing things
I enjoy. When I do take the time to reflect I base my worth on if I’m
a good husband, father, friend, brother, son, teacher, mentor, angel
investor and human. There is a human behind the persona that has
become Jason Calacanis.

I certainly do not judge myself on my Twitter count—especially since
half of it was gamed from offing free Nexus One phones and a Mac Book
Air. :-) Getting that out of the way, in all honesty, I didn’t think I was
fooling anyone. I actually thought I was making a joke. What you left
out of the tweets above were the ones where I said:

a) the iPad had a solar panel for charging ($200-300 in cost)
b) the iPad had an HDTV tuner ($150-250 in cost)
c) the iPad had a DVR (a DVR!!!) ($500 in cost)
d) the iPad had a wireless pad you could lay it on to charge ($300 in cost)
e) the iPad had two cameras front and back so you could do augmented
reality video conferencing ($500 in cost)
f) the iPad had facial recognition and that was how you logged in.
g) the iPad and biometrics on either side where you could login with
your thumbpring and flip through pages ($100-200 in cost)
h) the iPad had a mesh gaming network for playing a custom Farmville
application that let lifestock move from one iPad to another. It was intended to be an absurd joke and 95% of the feedback I was
getting was from folks who were laughing saying it was a brilliant
joke.

So, I went to bed and slept well only to wake up to the fact that a
couple of blogs and the Wall Street Journal took my spec and said it
was fact. They didn’t look at the other half of the conversation on
twitter where EVERYONE was laughing and joking. If it was a performance, and well, the WSJ didn’t see the audience
laughing. They didn’t look at the RESPONSES to me from that night.

The device I describe above would be well over 7-10 pounds and have at
least $2,000 in parts. The hard drive and memory of that device would
make it a VIDEO GAME LEVEL LAPTOP FROM ALIENWARE! There is no way it
could be designed for $499 in a 1.5 pound package!!! Only a lazy person or someone who was so hopeful and drunk on Steve
Jobs ability to bend the laws of physics and economics would ever
believe this was possible….. or a journalist who was soooooooo
desperate to get page views that they would print an OBVIOUS joke as
reality.

… or perhaps journalist who doesn’t think about the laws of physics
and economics. In that way my simple joke that the JesusPad was everything and I that
I was blessed to get one for 10 days before anyone AND in that
position of trust was willing to destroy Steve Jobs’ keynote, was SO
ABSURD only a zealot, an idiot or someone playing along would believe.

It seems our industry has become filled with Apple zombies who believe
that Steve Jobs can walk on water, and it’s obvious that the iPad is
no better than the HP Slate or an HTC running Google’s Chrome. In
fact, Bill Gates built better tablets five years ago! Steve Jobs pulled the wool over everyone by making them believe this
product was a revolution, and I inadvertently exposed the fact that
some folks loose all common sense when it comes to Apple products.

The Reality Distortion Field is strong!!! That being said, I’m sorry to have designed a device that everyone
wants in the face of Steve Jobs’ tablet which, apparently, is
underwhelming when compared to the Jason’s Tablet—also known as the
JTab.

If you want to pre-order the JTab please send $2,500 to my paypal at
jason at calacanis.com. DISCLAIMER: If you are too stupid to know that
was a joke, and you do send me $2,500 I will donate it to Haiti under
the name of Owa Tagoose Iam. all the best,

jason

Friends, I’m looking for a bright, hard working, tech savvy, problem solving
person to help me run events like the Open Angel Forum, TechCrunch50,
This Week in Startups and another event I’m planning. This person
doesn’t need to have any experiencing working in event production.
They simply need to be:

1. very detail oriented
2. technically savvy (think spreadsheets, email, setting up a blog,
uploading a video, using social networks, buying a domain name, etc).
3. A/V savvy (or the ability to quickly pick up how microphones, video
cameras, etc. work)
4. great communication skills
5. presentable and personable (i.e. can’t be introverted if you need
to greet 25 people at an Open Angel Forum event!)
6. positive, resourceful and fun
7. inquisitive
8. resilient
9. hard working
10. good under pressure (and a very intense boss—me!) This is a great first or second job for someone—out of school is just
fine. $30-40k to start, work directly with me and Tyler.

This opportunity is in Santa Monica—NO REMOTE WORKERS (sorry!) Send a cover letter telling Tyler and I about yourself and why you
think you would be good in this role, as well as your resume.

Send to: gig@calacanis.com

Thank you…. thank you very much.

http://www.mahalo.com/ipad
http://www.mahalo.com/ipad-photos
http://www.mahalo.com/apple-ipad
http://www.mahalo.com/apple-tablet

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile