Mahalo started off as a human powered search engine, but then they turned into a Q&A website last year. Now the company is focusing purely on education. The company has been ramping up their staff in the past year too. The company went from 40 employees to 104 in the last 6 months. A lot of the new employees are videographers for producing short educational videos.

Rather than serving high-fructose corn syrup drinks, Mahalo offers fresh-brewed tea and organic coffee. For those who want a caffeine boost, there are dual-espresso machines.

“We spend about $10 a day per person on food, which results in a cost of $2,500 a year per employee. With over 60 people, we’re spending close to $200k on this program. However, we find that our team is more focused during work because they are not making poor food choices (i.e. pizza, soda, sandwiches, fast food, burgers), and they are really excited to work at Mahalo since they feel taken care of and appreciated,” added Calacanis.

On top of offering healthy food and drinks, Mahalo.com has a boot-camp style “Fit Club” in the parking lot three times a week. Calacanis said that the obesity rate at Mahalo is less than 5%. This is one-sixth of the national average.

“Because of these special health/wellness perks, we can afford to make our starting salary cost lower than competing companies and we still have a line of folks out the door who want to work at Mahalo — including developers, which are very hard to find. We never use recruiters, which cost $10-15k per developer in our industry. On that basis alone it’s worth it. We have also experienced bizarrely low turnover in the past six months (zero!), and year (one or two people). On that basis it is worth it as well,” added Calacanis.

[AMEX Open Forum]

Mahalo already has currency called “Mahalo Dollars.”  Mahalo Dollars can be traded in for an exchange rate of 75 cents to the dollar or can be used to buy and sell other Mahalo pages.  Mahalo Answers reached about one million users last month.  These users can create their own topic pages and manage them.  There can be only one editor per page and Mahalo would split the Google AdSense revenue: 50-50.  Not a bad deal considering how much traffic Mahalo receives.  The Mahalo topic pages are first come, first serve.

Calacanis believes in Mahalo so much that he even offered Twitter $250,000 to be a suggested user to follow.

[via TechCrunch]

Jay Adelson’s Stance On The A.P.
Not everyone reacted negatively towards the AP.  “While I definitely love the idea of syndication and democratization of information, I tend to sympathize with the A.P.,” Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg and Chairman of Revision3 told The New York Times. “It is their decision how their content gets used.”

“The way we designed Digg was to protect copyright owners, not abuse them,” added Adelson. “Digg’s job is to direct you to the source.”

Sometimes Digg receives requests to take down posts that violate DMCA copyright protection and they conform.  It doesn’t happen often, but it still happens.  Digg users that constantly violate DMCA copyright infringement gets their account banned.  Reddit has never received a DMCA copyright infrigement takedown notice.

———
Update:  Jay Adelson added this as a comment in response to the article [Thanks Sebastian (comment #1).
A couple of clarifications:

1) We are not supporting A.P.’s position, by any stretch. I mean by my comment that we honor copyright law and ownership, which is why Digg doesn’t host content in the first place, merely directs to it.

2) We enforce copyright infractions when we receive an official and verifiable DMCA takedown notice. Our process is totally transparent – when we act on such a notice, we direct the original links to Chilling Effects where the notice can be viewed.
———

Jason Calacanis’ Stance On The A.P.
Jason Calacanis, founder of Weblogs Inc. and Mahalo on the other hand, has a difference in opinion from Adelson.  Calacani stated:

“We’ve never had a policy for this at Netscape or Mahalo because it is absurd, and we don’t waste time making rules for absurd behavior. If you’re linking to someone with their headline it’s clearly a small fraction of the overall work, used for navigational purposes, doesn’t confuse the public, and doesn’t impinge on the originators ability to do commerce. If the case passes all those tests with flying colors than you’re just abusing the legal system. If you were to take EVERY SINGLE AP news headline and quite 200-300 words automatically I could see them complaining, but we’re talking about 20-80 word quotes.”

My Stance On The A.P.
Traditional media outlets have been taking a hit lately since the rise of enterprise blogging.  Everyone is stealing content from everyone else and making it their own.  If you quoted all of my original material and did not link back to my site, I’d obviously be pissed too.

If The Drudge Report did not link directly to the Associated Press or did not even mention that the work belong to the Associated Press, then they acted unfairly and deserved the DMCA takedown notice.

By linking back to the original owner of the material, it is ethical because you are telling the reader that the content on your site does not exclusively belong to you.  And linking to the original owner is beneficial for your traffic ranking and drives more people to your site.  This also leads to higher monetization.  And who in their right mind says no to extra money that someone helps you make?

Jason Calacanis is often associated for Netscape turning into a Digg clone and is often seen as Kevin Rose’s arch-enemy, but did not seem to act that way on the second episode of the GigaOM show.  Calacanis was also known for hiring top users of social bookmarking sites Digg, Reddit, Newsvine, Flickr, etc. and having them shift over to Netscape.

The new Netscape homepage will look like netscape.aol.com, but Netscape’s social bookmarking platform hasn’t found a new URL home yet.  Calacanis no longer works as a General Manager at Netscape, but is instead invested heavily in his search engine start-up, Mahalo.com.