gleamd

Jason McCabe Calacanis (born November 28, 1970) is an American internet entrepreneur and blogger. His first company was part of the dot-com era in New York, and his second venture capitalized on the growth of blogs before being sold to AOL.

During the dot-com boom, he was active in New York's Silicon Alley community and in 1996 began producing a publication known as the Silicon Alley Reporter. Originally a 16-page photocopied newsletter, as its popularity grew it expanded into a 300-page magazine, with a sister publication called the Digital Coast Reporter for the West Coast. Calacanis's tireless socializing earned him a nickname as the "yearbook editor" of the Silicon Alley community.

With the end of the boom, Rising Tide Studios failed and Calacanis eventually sold it. The Silicon Alley Reporter was renamed the Venture Reporter in September 2001 and refocused on venture capital deals. Calacanis subsequently sold the business to a publishing company, Wicks Business Information, and it ultimately ended up in the hands of Dow Jones & Company.

After selling Rising Tide, Calacanis co-founded Weblogs, Inc. with Brian Alvey. They built the company as a network of blogs supported by advertising. One of the more popular sites, Engadget, was created by Peter Rojas (previously a co-founder of Gizmodo), whom they offered an equity stake in the company in order to leave competitor Gawker Media.

Six months into his tenure with AOL, Calacanis was offered a chance to be the General Manager of the new Netscape website. Lead developer Alex Rudloff used the model pioneered by Digg, Del.icio.us, and Furl and added an editorial layer to the system. The project has launched and occupies the front page of Netscape. Calacanis started by hiring a team of eight "anchors" to follow up to users top stories. He then hired some of the top users of social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, Newsvine and Flickr to go to Netscape as 'Netscape Navigators'.

More recently Calacanis has founded www.Mahalo.com, a "human-powered search engine", which launched in alpha test in May, 2007. He also holds a position at Sequoia Capital as an EIA (entrepreneur in action) abd is dedicated to his blog at www.calacanis.com.