Jason Calacanis
seems to have a special place in his heart for librarians. Or at least he should because the type of
tech businesses he starts.
Among other things Calacanis is a venture capitalist and tech
entrepreneur. I’ve been keeping a loose
eye on him since he launched Maholo. Maholo is interesting because it functions as
a cross between online answer platforms (like Yahoo! Answers) and a search
engine, but also incorporates human curated content. Essentially it packages results on a topic
from a variety of places into a single, authoritative source. Sounds rather like reference services to
me.
The Mercenary Philosopher pointed me to his latest startup this week, a
project called Launch. Librarians, particularly special librarians,
will recognize this as the alert services we’ve provided to our clients for
decades.
Surrounding both projects is the concept of “human-powered search”
results, which I think is particularly intriguing. I’ve struggled over the last ten years with
both friends and The Company to justify why I became a librarian. Their approach is that the search engine can
power any kind of knowledge discovery needed.
Calacanis, however, seems to understand that machines and human working
together can produce information discovery that neither could alone.
I wonder if he’s hiring…
