Jason McCabe Calacanis (created November 28, 1970) is an American Internet entrepreneur and blogger. His first business was part of the dotcom age in The Big Apple, and his second enterprise, Weblogs, Inc., a publishing company that he co-founded jointly with Brian Alvey, capitalized on the growth of websites before being sold to AOL. At the same time as being an angel investor in several technology startups, Calacanis additionally keynotes business seminars world-wide.
Calacanis’s largest success to date is Weblogs, Inc., which was sold to AOL in 2005. Before forming Weblogs, Inc., Calacanis was founder and CEO of Rising Tide Studios, a media firm that printed print and on-line publications. Through the dot-com boom, Calacanis was active in The Big Apple ‘s Silicon Alley community as well as in 1996 started creating a publication called the Silicon Alley Reporter. Initially a 16-page photocopied newsletter, as its popularity grew it grown into a 300-page magazine, having a sister publication known as the Digital Coast Reporter for the West Coast. The firm also coordinated seminars in The Big Apple, Los Angeles and San Francisco focused on the Internet/internet/New Media. Together with the conclusion of the Dot-com bubble, Silicon Alley Reporter failed. The organization ‘s main publication was folded as well as the business was sold from insolvency into a private equity firm. A couple of years after beginning Weblogs, Inc. blogs the company was creating $1,000 a day just from Adsense. Eight months into his tenure with AOL, Calacanis was offered the opportunity to be the General Manager of the newest Netscape web site. Calacanis used the model initiated by Digg, Del.icio.us, and Furl and added an editorial level to the device, like Slashdot. The job has established and inhabited the front page of Netscape. Calacanis began by hiring a team of eight “anchormen” to follow up users’ top reports.