"Folks didn't really get it, but I think their widget says it all." — Conference organizer Jason Calacanis, offering the best defense of a company EVER.

"Eating $95 white truffle pasta and damn proud of it... Sooooooo dope!" — Internet entrepreneur and former overweight guy Jason Calacanis, living large and risking a return to fatblogging by blithely ingesting overpriced carbohydrates.
[Twitter]

Nothing sends me for my back button faster than another pitch for a new search engine. But wily reporter-turned-ringmaster Jason Calacanis has fooled me into giving his new human-powered search tool, Mahalo, a spin. How? Calacanis cleverly talks up Mahalo between photos of his impossibly adorable new puppies. Just as teenage boys find themselves reading the articles in Penthouse, I've been poring through Mahalo's impressively hand-compiled page of 55 links on — what else — bulldogs.

Techdirt, the ever-opinionated analysis blog, has weighed in and found Demo's lineup of startups and new products more compelling than last week's TechCrunch40. Why? Mike Masnick doesn't come out and say it, but his implication is clear: Unlike the parade of Web 2.0 one-note-Johnnies drummed up by TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington and entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, most of experienced Demo organizer Chris Shipley's picks were focused on useful improvements to existing technology, not gimmicky new ideas. Arrington and Calacanis launched TechCrunch40 because they felt that it was somehow wrong for conferences to charge startups to present. Nonsense, of course. I think that the fact that Demo charges presenters — reportedly $18,500 apiece — was actually what makes it a stronger event.

Even on YouTube, Internet entrepreneur Jason Calacanis dogs the every step of Nick Denton, the owner of this blog. A promotional video for a new book from Gawker, a sister site to Valleywag, lists an interview with Calacanis as one of its related links.

We hear there were actually two companies who chose to forgo this week's Demo conference and present at Jason Calacanis and Michael Arrington's TechCrunch40 conference instead. The startups in question? Media-sharing service Wixi has confirmed that they will not be presenting at Demo, and we hear that avatar service mEgo is also off the list. (Two flacks for mEgo didn'tt return our call from this morning and sent us straight to voicemail when we followed up a few minutes ago.) Both companies presented onstage during Tuesday afternoon's "Rich media and mashups" section. If Demo followed its usual cancellation policies, these companies would seem to have lost their $18,000 entrance fees. (Representatives for Wixi had no comment on the fee.) We hope these two companies were able to get a worthwhile experience from TechCrunch40. They may not have won the $50,000 grand prize, but they learned something about the value of a contract.

In Silicon Valley, one no longer picks, chooses, selects, or even edits. One "curates." Take, for example, Jason Calacanis's self-congratulatory wrap-up of TechCrunch40, a blog post titled "Conference Curation." What does that mean, exactly?

We hear that Chris Shipley and the rest of the Demo conference team are coming down hard on companies who violate their exclusive contract. A tipster "has it on on good authority" that one presenting company has been "yanked off the stage" at tomorrow's fall Demo conference in San Diego, because it demo'd its wares at Michael Arrington and Jason Calacanis's competing TechCrunch40 conference last week. No surprise there: The whole point of these startup-demonstration conferences is to show something new, and an already-launched product won't make the cut. But Shipley's crew is being especially tough: We hear that the company isn't gettting its $18,000 entrance fee back either. So who is the culprit? And did they make the main stage, or did they lose out on Demo just for debuting in TechCrunch40's also-ran DemoPit? If you know anything more, fill us in.

Embargoes, in the age of instant journalism, are the silliest of PR conventions. In fact, they're counterproductive — especially for publicity-seeking startup conferences like this week's TechCrunch40 and next week's Demo, organized by Chris Shipley (left). And yet not everyone gets this. Blogger Paul Boutin sent TechCrunch40 organizer Jason Calacanis into a rage by committing an act of journalism: Going to the open site of the startup conference last Sunday and copying down, by hand, the names of the 40 startups due to present. What prompted Boutin to do this? Why, the organizers' ham-handed, ridiculous embargo demands.

Congratulations to entrepreneur Aaron Patzer, pictured above with an oversized novelty check. His financial-services startup Mint was the big winner in this week's TechCrunch40 conference, bringing home the $50,000 prize for being the "best in show." So, what was the overall view of TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington and entrepreneur Jason Calacanis's big event? This take, sent to us late last night from an out-of-town journalist, explains it better than we could.

My fellow Valleywaggers Owen Thomas and Nick Douglas were banned from the TechCrunch40 conference, and, odds are, I would have been banned from the afterparty at Fluid nightclub, had I asked permission to attend. So, I didn't bother asking, and scrounged up a ticket though back-channel connections, instead. Specifically, through the generosity of my new crush, the mysterious "TechCrunch40" Twitter guy, who left an envelope with an extra ticket and a cryptic note with the bartender at the House of Shields around the corner from Fluid. (Turns out "TechCrunch40" is a group effort — the note was signed by Rick Diculous, El Guapo, Mr. Gray, and Harvey Farquard.)

Only the more grizzled members of San Francisco's press corp even remember Comdex. The once-legendary — and infamous — tech expo was hot well into the '90s, but it rapidly fell to pieces as it overexpanded. As desperate gadget hawkers tried to lure attendees to see their wares, they hired comely "booth babes" to staff their exhibits. TechCrunch40, the Web 2.0 startup conference organized by TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington and entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, is infinitely smaller than Comdex ever was. But the comparison is still apt. Bypassing Comdex's successful years, TechCrunch40 is going straight for the seedy, desperate late stage of Comdex, as these two short-shorts-wearing publicity-mongers prove. (Photo by Myles Weissleder)

So much for old pals. Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks and billionaire founder of Broadcast.com, was Jason Calacanis's original backer at Weblogs Inc. And Cuban had agreed to show up at Calacanis's latest venture, the TechCrunch40 conference, as an expert judge. Cuban's still listed on the site, but he's a no-show at the conference, attendees say. Why? Apparently he's taping the ABC reality series "Dancing with the Stars." He's surely having a better time being critiqued for his soft-shoe technique than debating the merits of startups like Orgoo, Kerpoof, and ZocDoc. Once again, old media trumps new media.

The new "old" Netscape, AOL's clone of My Yahoo, is rumored to go live at the classic netscape.com domain tomorrow, September 19th. The old "new" Netscape, Jason Calacanis's clone of Digg, is already accessible at propeller.com.

TechCrunch40 is different, organizer Jason Calacanis claims, from most startup conferences in not charging companies to present there. Never mind that, in fact, he and TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington are charging 100 companies to present at the conference's subsidiary DemoPit. The notion was that TechCrunch40 might discover promising companies that couldn't afford to present at a pay-to-play conference. But in reality, most of the 40 startups presenting here don't even need the $50,000 cash award. For them, at most, it might fund a nice victory bash.

You would think that relentless self-promoter Jason Calacanis would take advantage of the attention he's receiving for his TechCrunch40 startup conference and use the spotlight to further push his new project, people-powered search engine Mahalo. You'd be wrong. Mahalo's sole contribution to TC40 is a Mahalo-branded baseball hat in the conference schwag bag. Why? Because the sharer in Calacanis wants the attention on the actual participants... and because Mahalo needs no promotion. That's right. The mere suggestion that Calacanis would promote Mahalo or that Mahalo even needs promotion is "so silly." Calacanis says, "We're in 'put your head down and make the product great' mode and we will be for the next four years." Indeed, Jason. We agree that Mahalo needs no promotion. Now please stop pitching Mahalo in search engine presentations, conducting interviews about the company, and signing blog comments with "Mahalo" for the next four years. Sadly, we suspect his no-promotions promise is just as binding as a Robert Scoble blog break.

Silicon Alley Insider is trying to figure out how AOL's BloggingStocks has surpassed Seeking Alpha in the stock blogging market, and they've discovered the obvious: mentioning nude pics, particularly those of controversial pop figures, is a tried and true method of promoting your site through search engines. The top keywords people use to find BloggingStocks are "vanessa hudgens nude" and "amanda beard playboy," whereas top terms for the more serious and boring Seeking Alpha are "seeking alpha" and "visa ipo." Valleywag and BloggingStocks are not alone in appealing to the salacious side of the Web. Many sites know the search engine optimization, or SEO, value in mentioning the latest nude photographs of an attractive young pop star. Including, curiously, Mahalo.

I've always had trouble understanding Jason Calacanis's rationalizations for DemoPit, the sleaziest part of the TechCrunch40 conference. Calacanis and his partner-in-wasting-time, TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, launched the conference promising not to charge companies to demonstrate, as other startup conferences did. But then Calacanis turned around and announced DemoPit, a side room for also-rans to hawk their Web-based wares. He snuck in the news that the 100 DemoPit participants would have to buy a ticket — a sneaky way to charge, after all, for the right to demonstrate. Taking into account all the direct costs, Calacanis should turn a tidy profit on the sideline, I calculated. When I called him on it, Calacanis blustered and blathered, calling me a "pariah" for daring to question him. Charming. But then I figured it out: Jason Calacanis is Willy Wonka, the magical candyman. And the DemoPit participants are his Oompa Loompas.

Conference paraphernalia is normally comprised of useful but boring office supplies and t-shirts. Except, it seems, at Michael Arrington and Jason Calacanis's TechCrunch40 conference. Rafe Needleman of CNET blog Webware is shocked by one giveaway from "natural-language" search engine Powerset — test tubes of cranberry juice and vodka. We're not shocked, of course. We just suspect Powerset CEO Barney Pell is pulling the usual bar pick-up trick of buying drinks for the person you're trying to seduce. Everyone knows you're prettier when they're drunk.

TechCrunch40 organizer Jason Calacanis is madly spinning the glitch-filled presentations at his conference as a success. The back channel — on Twitter and IRC — begs to differ. The biggest problem: There's no cell phone service deep inside the Sheraton Palace, the hotel in which the conference is being held. You'd think organizers might have checked such a thing before scheduling wireless startups to go on stage with live demos, but no. Instead, with no canned presentations to show, entrepreneurs are attempting to talk about how cool their mobile Web products would be ... if they worked.