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As part of our ongoing series of posts about how to use Splashtop to its full advantage, I wanted to tell you about Mahalo.

Mahalo is a "human-powered search engine" that competes with traditional algorithm based search engines like Google and Yahoo!. The theory behind Mahalo (as I understand it) is that while Google may return lots of relevant keyword results, it is also cluttered with advertisements and spam. Mahalo seeks to avoid spammy results by having actual human people submit and review results for a given search term to make sure they are truly relevant and useful.

If you think that sounds labor intensive, you're right. But users can sign up for an account and submit results they think make sense; other users vote on the relevance, making it a a very social, user-driven experience. Mahalo was started by internet mainstay Jason Calacanis - we actually met Jason at Blog Haus during this year's CES in Las Vegas.

Comscore shows that their popularity and traffic is skyrocketing - they have over 2 million monthly page-views now. From their own "about us" page:

We focus on the areas where traditional search engines struggle

Search results for certain categories, such as products, travel, cars, and health, are cluttered with people selling things, making it difficult to find great information on those topics. We focus on those topics and provide organized results that offer great links for every type of info you could need.

My own experience is that for very generic searches Mahalo has lots of results, most of which are strongly relevant. For very specific or esoteric search terms there may not much in the way of Mahalo results, but they will still display Google results, or returns from other search engines.

Another very worthwhile feature of Mahalo is Mahalo Daily, a video blog hosted by internet personality Veronica Belmont. Mahalo Daily videos are usually tech-related and very topical. They're also pretty fun. Here's todays:

Splashtop, as you know, allows you to instantly boot up your computer and access the internet. Our full-featured Splashtop browser will let you make use of the whole variety of rich internet applications available out there in the ether. Mahalo is one such, and well worth visiting.

So Robert Scoble came to the ASUS booth today. For those not in the know, Robert is a former MS guy and started one of the very first blogs, called "Scobleizer." Scobleizer to this day is one of the most widely read blogs around.

As part of his blogging duties Robert interviews and investigates various technologies and finds innovative ways to share the information, things like qik; qik allows you to stream video from your cell phone, and publish it to people who want to view your videos. From the qik "about" page:

"Qik enables you to share moments of your life with your friends, family and the world - directly from your cell phone!"

So Robert came to the booth with his (really cool) Nokia phone and filmed our Splashtop demo and elevator pitch. I won't lie to you, it was a little intimidating being on camera. The video is embedded below:

It's nice to have a chance to share Splashtop with the world, and to simultaneously embrace new and interesting ways of sharing content with readers and viewers. Thanks Robert for coming by the booth and giving us an interview and a neat video.

This is David; I wanted to pop up a quick post about my first tour of duty at our booth at CES. Today was the first day of CES 2008, and the traffic in Las Vegas Convention Center was impressive. Getting our badges was a challenge this morning because the registration computers were having issues. The Consumer Electronics Show computers were down... irony is truly the spice of life. :)

To deal with the mammoth lines the convention employees handed out temporary badges. Bright orange stickers that say "Temporary" on them. Not the coolest looking badges in the whole world, but they got us inside.

After those hiccups, my tour of duty at the booth was almost a relief. It was a lot of fun actually. Quite a few members of the press / Blog-o-sphere came by to see us and check out the new demos. In addition to the P5E3 Premium motherboard (which just launched recently) we are showing off a new ASUS M70 laptop demo with Splashtop on it. For ASUS notebooks, Splashtop is being branded as "Instant Fun." The notebook demo is really cool, and everyone seemed duly impressed. Thanks to all of you who stopped by to chat and to check out our demos - we appreciate the support.

Booth duty is mostly pretty fun, especially when the booth is hopping. Interesting people from all over the world come to CES, and I am constantly impressed with all the exciting innovations.

We will continue to update the blog throughout the show. If you're here at the show, please stop by and say hello.

Thanks everyone,

David

In my last post I wanted to highlight some of our new Splashtop blog features while looking at the implications of those features on the web. Digg is a great example of a site that has changed the way we find quality content. Similarly, how we organize the information of the web is a fascinating process. I came across this video which I thought was pretty incredible. More and more, the web browser is the gateway to all you seek. This is why Splashtop is really centered around the browser. Seconds to the web.