Mahalo Sells Corporate SEO Services?

There's smart, shrewd, duplicitous, deceptive, and finally downright dishonest. I don't know the man personally, but it's my opinion that Mr. Calacanis's business practices moved into that final category some time ago.<p>It's actually really sad. I wonder what's driven him to this level. Greed? Ego? 3rd party investor pressure? Simply not wanting to ever have his name associated with a repeat failure?<p>Especially amongst the entrepreneur crowd which he espouses to represent, truthful "honest" failure itself is looked upon less harshly than shady "gamed success".<p>Though in retrospect totally full of late 90s Internet hype, I remember being inspired by his Charlie Rose interview back in the "Silcon Alley" days of NYC:<p><a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9192442030075924272#43m" rel="nofollow">http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9192442030075924272#...</a><p>What happened to THAT Jason?

I always did find it funny that the CEO of a so-called "human-powered search engine" could get away with claiming to not understand SEO.

I don't quite understand the issue, but I think the conflict being , is that because google loves content and backlinks , he had first built a service under the disguise of just being a legitimate human powered search, and can now leverage his network to give credibility to other links for the highest price ? Can anybody else provide more context ?

Is it possible that JC <i>under</i>represents the value of his services - which purport they are "Helping people find information they can trust"?<p><a href="https://mahalo-press.s3.amazonaws.com/MahaloPressKit.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://mahalo-press.s3.amazonaws.com/MahaloPressKit.pdf</a> :<p>Perhaps Mahalo will (at no extra charge) help steer people away from secret pre-release details about Apple mobile devices.

In this specific presentation Mahalo is advertising a platform for how-to guides and answer services that can be used on other sites - how is that wrong? Google is about producing good content that's relevant and useful. Mahalo does that along with the right linking structure in place. If I was paying someone to help create content+an engine around it I'd find SEO to be an important sales point worth touching on.

Who cares if he is ignorant about SEO or not? I don't see the big deal. And even if he is ignorant, he could have employees who do the SEO stuff.

Nothing shady in that PDF. Looks like someone is holding a grudge.