Catching up on Interesting News

Virgin Altantic Buys a Majority Stake in CircleLending

While Prosper.com and Zopa get most of the publicity regarding their peer-to-peer lending models, lesser known CircleLending made some news of their own with the announced acquisition by Virgin Atlantic.  CircleLending was founded in 2002 and subsequently received venture funding from Venrock, Intel Capital and Omidyar.  Unlike the marketplace solutions adopted by Zopa and Proser, Circlelending provides a set of loan documentation services to facilitate lending between friends and families. This acquisition is welcome news for other sites in the P2P lending / crowd-sourcing space.

Google Buys Feedburner:

Google continues to outpace its rivals in buying quality businesses and teams.  Alarm:Clock has a good write-up on the deal and why it makes sense for both parties.  I am sure Yahoo! and other leading properties would have loved to acquire Feedburner – yet once again Google has the cash and stock price to outbid its competitors.  Perhaps more importantly, Google continues to be the most focused on providing value to advertisers and publishers – and Feedburner can be a huge asset in this quest.

Mahalo: Hello or Goodbye?

Jason Calacanis is a bright guy with a solid track record…and that record is going to be tested with his new venture, Mahalo.  Mahalo is a new search engine with the intent to provide high quality information for the top 10K search queries.  Jason’s approach is to manage the development and maintenance of the content through a large editorial team (currently 40+ editors based in Santa Monica).

Response to the launch has been rather tepid – and maybe this is easy to understand considering the high expectations that Jason set (continuous posts on his blog, announcement at the D5 conference).  Some of his investors even seem a little skeptical.

It is easy to be skeptical.  Can 100 editors really be experts across 10,000 keywords?  Can information be kept updated in a timely manner.  Can the business effectively monetize “popular” terms?  Why will this model succeed with similar efforts have not?  Will the search results really be that much better to change user behavior (i.e., continue to use Y! or Google for all queries)? Can't the current providers make similar improvements on their end?

Yet, we are early in the game and I bet that Jason and team have a few more wrinkles up their sleeves. While Google gets props for their search results - Jason is right that there is a ton of room for improvement.  Google (and other search providers) have indexes full of junk content, and a little more human interaction  / filtering might substantially improve results.   As he states in his press release: "It's my belief that humans can play a significant role in the development of search results and we're going to try to figure out exactly what that role is over the next couple of years”.  So in effect Jason has a massive R&D project underway with the luxury of significant funding.  Assuming Jason sticks with this effort – my sense is that Mahalo will be a far different search engine in two years than it is today. 

Comments

[Jason]

Thanks for the great feedback.

Yes, in a way we are a live R&D company. That is why we launched in ALPHA--not beta.

Can this be done? I don't know, but I know I'm gonna kill myself--and my team--trying! :-)

all the best,

Jason

[Sqausher98]

Actually the fact that people are so skeptical is a great thing at this point as I explain in my post:

http://www.leveragingideas.com/?p=347

Mahalo is like the New York Yankees: if you have money and pedigree, you're never completely out of contention.

[John]

It worked when it was called Yahoo!