Author Archives: Brian Alvey

“Get to the product demo faster.” “No one cares where you used to work or what you’ve built before.” “Save the business model part for the Q&A with the judges.” The secret to making a great startup competition is the rehearsals. I’ve seen some poor presentations from startups at industry events. Event producers figure theyContinue reading “Hack attack!”

The Ceros product team continues to be on fire. Ceros 5.10 added autoplay for background videos, theming for video controls, animated videos, copy and paste between browser windows and faster loading. The decreased loading time is especially impressive. The way browsers work, you can either load content or have smooth animations. You can’t do both. IfContinue reading “The speed of code”

Back in 2001, I was working for my friend Jason Calacanis at his company Rising Tide Studios as CTO. The dotcom crash was hitting our magazine and conferences business pretty hard. It was tough to put out a monthly magazine with two-page spreads showing hot NYC startups when they were rapidly vanishing. With them gone, who wouldContinue reading “The art of interviewing”

When I took Niki to see Sound City, she reluctantly went along thinking she’d be sitting through some boring Foo Fighters documentary. Of course it has a 100% Tomatometer score and she left the show raving about Sound City to all of our friends. It’s a very powerful movie. A few weeks ago I took Niki to see In A World… Again,Continue reading “In a World…”

Ceros switched banks and with that move our old credit cards were phased out. I went through every one of the recurring charges that were still being billed to my card and switched them all onto a new corporate card — all except for J2, which I’ve used since they were called Jfax in theContinue reading “What the fax?”

Here’s what happens when I explain SpokenLayer to most people: “SpokenLayer turns blog posts into audio.”“You mean they transcribe audio?”“No. They do the opposite.”“Why would anybody take perfectly good text that Google can see and turn it into audio? Is this just for blind people?” Good questions. The best answer I’ve seen is that at some pointContinue reading “SpokenLayer: now hear this”

I pointed out that I’ve got a signed program from the Broadway show First Date on my desk. Niki and I saw First Date for our 15th anniversary back in July and we loved it. When tightly wound Aaron (Zachary Levi) is set up with serial-dater Casey (Krysta Rodriguez) a quick drink at a busy New York restaurant turns into aContinue reading “First Date on Broadway”

I advise a bunch of companies, mostly startups, and some of them are in the middle of negotiating acquisition offers while they are raising money. At some point they’ll have to choose one over the other. It always happens that way. If your startup isn’t interesting and you haven’t created any value, investors and acquirersContinue reading “The four ways a startup can go”

I do a lot of sitting in my home office, so a month ago I decided to get a standing desk. Before I even started researching them, I saw my Magento genius friend Bart Mroz post a picture of his new Kangaroo desk on Facebook. So I compared a bunch of solutions and ordered a Kangaroo Pro from Ergo Desktop.Continue reading “Kangaroo standing desk”

I talk about this a bit on my home page, but a lot of people still ask me where the comment forms are on my posts. I don’t have any. I won’t have any.