Moses Kagan's Aurora Borealis

Tons of buzz recently about Mahalo, the new search engine launched by Jason Calacanis. Mahalo has a team of human editors focused on improving search quality for the top 10,000 search terms.

I search 'loan' on Mahalo to get a sense for how they handle blatantly commercial searches. Here are the results: http://www.mahalo.com/Special:Search?search=loan. Note that the results include sections on Tony Blair and the Cleveland Cavaliers - neither of whom provide debt financing or information about debt financing, so far as I am aware.

The top 5 Google results for "loan", displayed by Mahalo below their own results, show: eloan, loans.com, wikipedia's loan entry, bankrate.com and govloans (a government loan site).

For now, I'm sticking with Google.

Orange released its new Digital Media Index recently. Approximately 2m of Orange's 15m UK subscribers have visited the Orange WAP portal in the past month. If we assume that another 1-2m have used off portal services but not visited the portal, 20-27% of Orange customers are using the mobile internet.

The question is: How does this compare to the internet to internet penetration? According to Harris Interactive (http://blogs.zdnet.com/ITFacts/?p=10998), the US had internet usage rates of crossed the 30% threshold during 1996-7. Those years also marked the emergence of the first wave of successful non-porn internet companies.

Are we approaching lift-off for successful, non porn mobile internet companies?

Labels: mobile, Orange, wap, Yahoo