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In a post on his blog, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis has announced that his human powered search engine has laid off 10% of its staff. Along with the layoffs Calacanis writes that the company will be doing some “smart things” to help cut costs, including outsourcing much of its editorial department to freelancers instead of in-house staff. Calacanis pegs the number of full-time staff cut at around 5 or 6, but that number could change depending on how well the freelancers work out for the company.

From his blog post:

While I anticipated and prepared for the ‘internet winter’ we’re now facing (you’ve read my posts and e-mails about the startup depression I’m sure), I failed to realize how bad the situation would get. It’s much worse than I thought it would be, and ignoring market conditions today would only mean deeper cuts down the road.

It’s my responsibility to make this hard decision and I don’t take it lightly. To the people impacted I’m very sorry that I wasn’t able to anticipate this better. It’s my fault and I’m sorry that you’ve got to bear the burden of my inability to better prepare.

The news isn’t surprising given the waves of layoffs we’ve been seeing in the current economic climate, especially given the fact that Mahalo investor Sequoia Capital recently presented the CEOs of its portfolio companies with a PowerPoint Presentation of Doom emphasizing the need to cut costs.

Aside from the grim tone about the economy, Calacanis does show optimism for the future of Mahalo. The cost-saving measures will give the company an extra year of “runway’, allowing Mahalo to stay afloat until 2012 without making any revneue (which should hopefully be more than enough time to weather the storm).

Disclosure: Jason Calacanis and Mahalo are partners of ours in putting on the TechCrunch50 conference.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Google Analytics just got better. Google will begin rolling out a set of major upgrades today to the free Website measuring tool. The new features include the ability to create custom reports, better ways to look at audience segments, the ability to track and measure AdSense inside Google Analytics, an API (on it’s way), the introduction of cool bubble “motion charts,” and some user interface improvements. Let’s take these new features one at a time.

1. Custom Reports: Lets you create reports using any source of data (such as people who have bought something on your site, average number of pageviews, geography, visiting source) as the X and Y coordinates for a chart.
2. Audience Segmentation: Lets you look at custom slices of your Website’s audience (such as people who stay for more than two minutes, people who came from TechCrunch, people who came from the New York Times, people who bought something, people who came from Techcrunch and bought something).
3. AdSense integration: This was along time coming. You can already track how your AdWords campaigns impact traffic to your site. Now you can see data from your AdSense account as well. Marry that with Google Analytics data and you can get new insights into not only which ads you place through AdSense are doing the best, but from which referring sites. (Read more on the AdSense blog).
4. API: This will be rolling out “soon,’ but is also being announced today. Google will open up an API to Gogle Analytics that will allow developers to pipe all of the data in Google Analytics to other Websites, tools, widgets, or even mobile apps. So if someone wants to create a widget that will let people show their Google Analytics charts on their blog, that will be possible.
5. Bubble Charts: The new motion charts allow you to visualize data across five dimensions (x axis, y axis, size of bubble, color of bubble, and position over time). It lets you create an animation to show you what’s been happening with your Website’s key metrics. This feature comes out of the Trendalyzer software Google bought from Gapminder in 2007. (See video below).
6. User Interface Tweaks: You’ll notice some new subtle shading and highlighting. But the biggest change will be in the management dashboard. Now, if you track more than one Website with Google Analytics, you will be able to see trends across all of them at once.

Below is a video of the new “motion charts,” which let you track data across time. You can find more videos showing off these new features here.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

The first Android phone. the G1, goes on sale today at T-Mobile stores. And, although I have some issues with the software/hardware interface, those are more than overcome by all the great software on the phone. I’ve been testing out a phone for about a week, and I don’t think I’ve made more than five actual calls on the phone. For me, it’s all about the apps.

The apps I use the most come with the device: Gmail, the Web browser, and Google Maps, in that order. The phone also comes with the Amazon MP3 store, which lets you buy songs and download them over the air directly onto the phone. But you can also download apps from the Android Market, which is similar to the iPhone’s App Market. Many of the original apps on the review phones have been scrubbed, and about 50 are supposed to be loaded onto the market for today’s launch.

Right now, I count 40 apps on the market (all of them are free, but paid apps are coming with a 70 percent cut going to developers), and I know of several that are supposed to launch today that have not yet appeared on the phone. But if you are going to get a phone today, here is my list of the top ten apps worth downloading and checking out.

1. imeem Mobile: It’s a jukebox in your pocket, and the progressive download means that your song doesn’t skip when you go into an elevator, ’nuff said.

2. ShopSavvy: From Big in Japan, this turns your phone into a barcode scanner and then gives you price comparisons both online and in nearby retail stores. In my tests, the product database is good for household items, but can stumble with obscure products. But this is a killer app once the product database becomes more comprehensive. (Also try CompareEverywhere, which does the same thing).

3. Pac-Man: The original arcade game from Namco. Free on the Android (it costs $7.99 on the iPhone). The rollerball is an excellent joystick.

4. BreadCrumbz: You can leave photo and voice marker breadcrumbz along any route that others can then follow later on. Ties into the phone’s GPS, maps, camera, and microphone.

5. Wikitude: A travel guide that pulls up information from Wikipedia about nearby locations and puts them on a map, along with photos from Panoramio. Really useful geo-mashup.

6. Shazam: Put the phone up to a radio or speaker playing a song and Shazam will tell you the name and the artist, just like the iPhone app.

7. SplashPlay: Teaches you how to play the guitar by playing music and showing a fret board that you can play on the screen in sync with the music. The app is marketing for a similar tutorial device you can buy for your guitar, but it really teaches you how to play.

8. iSkoot for Skype: Lets you use your Skype account to IM your contacts, make Skype calls over the Internet, and uses the phone for SkypeOut calls (this is one of teh apps that was taken down, but should go up again)

9. MyCloset: This one’s more for the ladies, but a very nicely done app. You take apicture of every article of clothes in your closet, categorize them (top, bottom, shoes, accessories, etc.), select months when they can be worn, and then you can mix and match to plan out your outfits. The only thing it needs is some way to note weather a piece of clothing is clean or not.

10. Cab4Me Light: A simple app that gives you phone numbers of cab companies based on where you are.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.