Author Archives: Brian Alvey

Friends of ours bought us tickets to see Prince at Madison Square Garden. It was my first Prince show ever and now I’m wondering how I waited so long to see him. Prince’s stage was shaped like that symbol he changed his name to years ago. After an opening act by the comedian Sinbad, legendary bass player LarryContinue reading “Too many hits: Prince at Madison Square Garden”

And by machine, I mean he is a powerhouse, not that his writing is stiff and robotic. Good grief people! Yesterday I saw that Darren Murph’s 17,212 Engadget-related blog posts had snagged him a Guinness World Record. My first thought was, “Now that is a staggering number of blog posts.” Between this blog, Blogstakes (from back inContinue reading “Darren Murph is a blogging machine”

Back in 2001 when Niki and I were having tons of fertility trouble — before we had our three kids — we did what fertility-challenged couples are not supposed to do. We got a puppy. Barkley was the first of our three Cavaliers, but she wasn’t the first Cavalier we tried to get. Our breederContinue reading “My dog died today”

Last fall at TechCrunch 50 (video here) professional Internet celebrity judge Robert Scoble asked me why I didn’t spend time talking about all of the big successful content management systems I’d built in the past. I answered that I only had 6 minutes on stage, so I focused on the product. But at NY Tech Meetup in March IContinue reading “Crowd Fusion for everyone”

About a month ago, I heard a beer commercial in my car and decided Crowd Fusion should have a more beer slogany slogan. Our current tagline is “It serves you right.” So I tweeted a few new slogan ideas: I’m thinking about rewriting @crowdfusion‘s site to sound more like a beer commercial. People like beerContinue reading “When you say Crowd Fusion, you’ve said it all”

Crowd Fusion needs to add three more solid developers ASAP just to work with our existing customers, but we hire really slowly because these aren’t traditional developer jobs. I mentioned that Craig posted to Authentic Jobs looking for developer talent. That got me thinking about the people we’ve worked with at Weblogs, Inc., Blogsmith, Netscape and Crowd FusionContinue reading “You can’t coach height”

On Thursday night I was a co-host of the first New York Open Angel Forum dinner with Charlie O’Donnell, Jason Calacanis and Tyler Crowley. More than a dozen great local angel investors networked and watched investment pitches over burgers and beer at Dogpatch Labs. I was at the first OAF dinner in Los Angeles three months ago. Since then they’ve had events in SanContinue reading “Open Angel Forum: NYC”

Thursday night while I was waiting for a meeting at the bar at the Four Seasons hotel in L.A. to begin, I had a beer and did some star watching. I wasn’t planning on star watching and maybe it doesn’t always happen like this there, but it was three nights before the Oscars so IContinue reading “Drinking with the stars”

Friday night I flew home from L.A. to make it back in time for the birthday my wife and I share. I landed just after midnight and was wondering if since I was in the air between time zones when March 6 arrived that maybe I hadn’t turned 40. No such luck. I don’t rememberContinue reading “Surprise!”

In December I was lucky to be in town when Jason’s daughter was born. That evening I was in their hospital room holding her and got to see her again later that week. I didn’t make it to his wedding in Hawaii, but that was bigger by far. Last week I was again lucky toContinue reading “Open Angel Forum in L.A.”