Hello, Hulu

The joint venture between NBC/Universal and News Corp. finally has a name: Hulu.

"Why Hulu? Objectively, Hulu is short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and rhymes with itself. Subjectively, Hulu strikes us as an inherently fun name, one that captures the spirit of the service we're building," says Jason Kilar, Hulu's CEO (formerly of Amazon). Not to mention it is a couple letters shorter than YouTube (YuTu?), sounds vaguely Hawaiian (hula) and a little Star Trekky (Sulu). And this report from Reuters explains that Hulu is the Chinese word for a kind of gourd.

Hulu's beta version isn't scheduled to launch until October, providing some on-demand traction – and revenue – for the networks' new season of shows. More on Hulu from BusinessWeek and Adweek. And get the Wired take on the other video newcomer Joost here.

UPDATE: Now NBC/Universal says it won't renew its contract with Apple to sell TV shows through the iTunes store. Is it one of Jeff Zucker's negotiation tactics or...ba buh bum...or will Hulu sell shows for NBC?

FURTHER UPDATE: Apple says "oh no you didn't" and decides it won't sell any new episodes of NBC shows currently for sale. So NBC teams up with Amazon.com to sell them through it Unbox platform. One problem. Downloads won't play on iPods. Say whuh? Fix it fast. Please.

Mahalo for searching

If it's not an algorithm doing your search, what else is there? How about people. Mahalo bills itself as "human-powered search." It's from Webrepreneur Jason Calacanis and, according to this Fast Company article, is backed by "...$20 million in venture capital from a bevy of blue-chip investors--Sequoia Capital (original backer of Yahoo and Google); News Corp.; CBS; maverick Mark Cuban; and Elon Musk, the founder of PayPal..." Basically Mahalo is a series of hand-culled directories for popular search terms. If they haven't put together a page for your term yet, they politely reroute you to Google. Mahalo even accepts -- and pays for -- user-created directories via the Mahalo Greenhouse.

And just what does "Mahalo" mean? It's Hawaiian for thank you. The Hawaiian lexicon also gave the Web the word wiki, which means fast. (The tram at the Honolulu airport is called a wikiwiki.) Now only if someone would come up with the online equivalent of the pu-pu platter.