"Ning and Twitter: If I could be CEO of any two companies aside from the one I'm currently CEO of, which is obviously the one I'm the most fond of, it would be those two companies," says Jason Calacanis, the founder of social search engine Mahalo.com Inc., in part three of Tech Confidential's Behind The Money video interview.
Click to play As the third-most followed blogger on
Twitterholic.com, Calcanis is obviously a big fan of the microblogging developer. They are doing a "bang-up job," he says of Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey. Twitter is a "very powerful platform."
Calacanis sees significant potential for
Ning Inc., which white-labels social networking. In the future, he predicts, companies won't want to give their social networking business to Facebook Inc. or MySpace (owned by Fox Interactive Media Inc.).
Calcanis also likes social shopping site developer
ThisNext Inc. and sits on its board. "Social shopping is a new space, and there's a lot of education that's going to have to occur," he says. "The basic concept is that your friends are going to be a good arbiter of certain types of purchases, like fashion, clothes, furniture -- stuff that's hard to discern whether you should buy or not, and you need a little advice."
Click here to see
part one of our video interview, in which Calacanis (who co-founded Weblogs Inc., which America Online acquired for $25 million in 2005, and was the founding editor of "Silicon Alley Reporter," early chronicler of the New York's dot-com industry) defends his controversial comment that startups should fire people who are not workaholics, and here to see
part two, in which he explains his hiring practices and mentoring style. -
Mary Kathleen Flynn
