Thanks to team Mahalo I have five iPhones to give away. Yes, I'm going to give these away in a Mahalo.com contest. I'm not sure exactly how to give them away. I was thinking about:

1. a photoshop contest
2. an easter egg contest where we hide something on a Mahalo page
3. give one to each Part-time Guide in the Mahalo Greenhouse as they hit 100 completed search result pages (aka SeRPs).
4. give them to whoever creates the best proposed Mahalo search result page (i.e. folks post to their blog their best search result for a creative topic they pick--our staff pick the best ones).

How do you think we should them away?!?! Looking for feedback.

I just landed at the D conference--the best conference in the business today IMO--and who do I bump into having my coffee? Walt Mossberg... we traded a bunch of stories and I got the low down on the how the conference came together this year. None of which I will blog here for obvious reasons... but hold on to your seats because there are a number of HUGE announcements coming out of D this year. Plus George Lucas, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates... wow.

If you're here and want to meet me/say hello/chat I'm in the lobby drinking coffee.
email jason at calacanis dot com
cell/SMS 310 456 4900

lets all tag our posts d2007 for technorati.

I'm enjoying my black MacBook for the past couple of months, but I have to say the screen isn't as good as my tiny Sony microlaptop. For one, the MacBook's glossy screen reflects so much that I see myself more than this blog post when I'm sitting in the backyard (like I am right now).

Second, the screen looks like it is on low brightness when outside even when I have it on the highest setting. Finally, I hate the fact that this thing does not have a standard PCMCIA slot.

Other than that this is a great laptop and I would recommend it. I've been hearing rumors of the a microlaptop from Mac and I think when that comes out I'm going to snap it up. I've found that with the amount of traveling I do the MacBook is too heavy--I always take my Sony instead. I just like the idea of not breaking my back when running through airports and walking from 57th street to City Hall in NYC.

Steve Jobs, hear my prayer. :-)

Note: I wish I had read this months ago.

Based on the number of requests I've decided to transcribe the CalacanisCast Beta 7.... you can read the transcript below. I'm thinking about having folks (i.e. the audience) insert links in the content at the wiki. This would take some responsibility... but would be helpful. So, the idea would be to put a link on Dave's name to his blog (or wikipedia page), a link to a product mentioned on the show, etc.

I've got a great person helping me with the transcription.. he might be able to start us off with somegreat links.

best j

Jason Calacanis: Welcome to CalacanisCast beta 7:
I am here with Dave Winer the founder of RSS, OPMS...

Dave Winer: How many times are we going to do this...

Jason: I gotta do it because there are people who listen to the podcast who don't know what any of this is – so I try to be a little magnanimous about it. So...

Dave: Why don't we try this version of the CalcanisCast that we are all real jerks. No that that wouldn't come real hard to any of us, right? Based on what I've heard about all of us...
Well, not you Peter, Peter is...

Jason: Not Peter, actually. Peter is known as...

Peter Rojas: Well, I keep a low profile...

In my "what next" blog post last week I put in an inside joke about starting a gadget company with Peter designing the products. Peter picked up on it and now others are pinging me about it--but taking it seriously.

So, that leads me to the question: Could two guys in a garage create an indie gadget company?

If anyone knows what a gadget should be, and where the market is going, it's Peter. Dave Winer joked with me at dinner this past summer that Peter would make a better iPod than Steve Jobs--I think I agree. So, back to the origional question: What would it take/cost to make a gadget hardware company?

I've been to China and seen the knock-off devices (in fact, Engadget's "keeping it real... fake" covers the knock offs), so it's clear that you can make devices cheap. So, what if Peter designed a wifi-enabled media player for geeks. Like something with built in podcasting software and the ability to sync podcasts whenever and IP device is detected?

Adam Curry mentioned that someone should make a super cheap podcast MP3 player on a recent DSC.

Is this something we could actually do? What would it cost to design a media player? How many do we need to order? Who would design it? Who would built it? Anyone have insight into how to make an Mp3 player out there?

I can just imagine the "Rojas vs. Zune vs. iPod" shootout on CNET.