Author Archives: Brian Alvey

Smart designers are asking why QWERTY keyboard layouts still exist on modern mobile devices. @mezzoblue Yep. Especially on smartphones where we don’t have decades of legacy muscle memory.— Mike Davidson (@mikeindustries) June 25, 2014 For a while now, I’ve been thinking that QWERTY actually does make sense on phones in a way that it neverContinue reading “The revenge of QWERTY”

I woke up on Sunday morning and saw four spam messages in my inbox from an old AOL account of mine that I almost never use. This isn’t a new thing, nearly every email address gets used to send spam via a process called “spoofing.” Spoofing happens because anyone can send email as billgates@microsoft.com via sloppy,Continue reading “AOL address books hacked”

If your embedded tweet has an image in it, that image shows up at the top of the embedded tweet. Compare a screen shot of one of my tweets on twitter.com with the embedded version of the tweet here on my site. On Twitter: That is one fine looking embed! As I recall, older versions had theContinue reading “Embedded tweets with photos are hot”

I met the Contently founders a long, long time ago when I was co-hosting the NYC Open Angel Forum. Of all the companies who pitched our audience of investors over Shake Shack burgers and beer, I think they’ve gone the farthest. I mean furthest. Anyway, they’re a great NYC startup success story and they interviewed me for theirContinue reading “The Contently Show: How Nimble Publishers Survive”

Kim LaChance Shandrow, a great writer I worked with in the early Crowd Fusion days, is now writing for Entrepreneur.com. She interviewed me about building mobile web sites. Some of my answers were too long to make it in: Invoca is a cloud-based service for tracking inbound call activity. When I first saw them years ago, theyContinue reading “Entrepreneur’s 10 Questions on Mobile”

Mergers are risky, and the chance for failure is high: Two-thirds of corporate marriages fail to produce enough financial gains to justify their cost. There’s some good advice from CNN Money on successful mergers today and it has quotes from Ceros CEO Simon Berg. When I talked to Simon about acquiring Ceros in early 2012, he hadContinue reading “CNN Money: How to survive a merger”

Writing LinkedIn recommendations is like eating Lay’s potato chips. You can’t stop after just one. I think the process releases endorphins or something. Maybe it’s just the karma, but it makes me feel really good. The first one I wrote today was because one of my friends suggested I recommend another friend. It was long overdue andContinue reading “LinkedIn recommendations”

Although I described a fantasy scenario where Steve Jobs used his iPad 6 on the way to unveil the first ever iPad, we know that wasn’t the true story of the iPhone’s launch. Jobs wasn’t playing with a future model iPhone on his way to demo the first iPhone. They barely had a working first generation iPhone. TheyContinue reading “Launching The Daily”

One of the best things about talking to the startup CEOs I advise is that they often remind me of stories or good advice that I’ve forgotten to share on my blog. A few weeks ago I was talking to one of my favorite entrepreneurs. He was venting about some of the personality conflicts onContinue reading “The burden of a startup CEO’s roadmap”