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.

Based on Walt Mossberg's video review below, I'm going to buy an iPhone. Steve Jobs told me that if I trust the keyboard I would do fine going from blackberry to iPhone. I didn't believe Steve to be honest, but I do believe Walt when he says it.

So, I'm gonna give it a go.

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...

Feels like every time I turn on TV Peter is there....

Just stumbled on this one...
.... and this one (on some show called Wallstrip):

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.

Our whole team has MacBook Pros. We paid a lot of money for them, and we set them up with BootCamp so our team could be really effective.

Turns out a bunch of us are having horrible problems with the Wifi dropping out (in Windows and OS X). You'll surf fine for 20 second and it pauses for a minute then BANG the pages load and you're good for another 20-30 seconds.

I don't see any official response from Apple about this, but folks are really on fire about it on Apple's Message Boards. It's not an OS issue, and it is not a software issue it seems (we've reinstalled all the software).

One thing that seems to have helped is turning off bluetooth.

Why does wifi suck on my brand new, $3,000, dual boot MacBook Pro? I've been on five or six different wifi networks and most of them can't connect and go from fast to slow in some random pattern.

You'll sit there waiting for five tabs to load in Firefox for 90 seconds and nothing... then BANG! they all load in four seconds.

I see there is a long thread over at Apple support about it... what is the story!??! How could apple ship a new product like this--with a huge price tag--and have the wifi suck?!

Very frustrating to have a Ferrari that stalls half the time... Steve Jobs where are you!?!?

You can when something is gonna be big when....