Mahalo

ValleyWag, the Silicon Valley gossip blog, has a breaking news story about Mahalo, a new venture founded by Jason Calacanis. Mahalo is described as a search engine that will actually have humans working to guide search results, a concept that goes back to the Mining Company of the '90s, a predecessor of About.com. ValleyWag claims that Mahalo will have Wikipedia like features and will debut at a Wall Street Journal conference later this month. I've known Jason since his early days with Silicon Alley Reporter. Bruni PR was an advertiser. I am sure that this will be successful. Good luck, Jason.

Houseparty.com

Last week, the "boys" on HBO's Entourage threw a b-day party for Vinnie and, amazingly, got sponsorships from Victoria's Secret, Grey Goose and others. Models with skimpy Secret garments showed up along with cases of Grey Goose. A great idea, I thought. A few nights later, at the NY Tech Meetup, Silicon Alley mover/shaker Gene DeRose presented Houseparty.com, a website where companies seeking to promote products/services can "sponsor" house parties. Sure, Gene is pushing chocolate, soda and other things right now, but the idea is clearly scalable to the Entourage level.
Gene, a founder of Jupiter Research, impressed the audience with his pitch, one of the best we've seen at Tech Meetup.