Author Archives: Brian Alvey

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”

“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?”