Author Archives: Brian Alvey

Eric Snider used to work for Cinematical before AOL bought The Huffington Post to improve AOL’s leadership position as the place where brands go to die. I was just going to link to his scathing Leaving in a Huff post on Twitter, but there were too many great quotes for 140 characters: “Say what you will about AOL, butContinue reading “You’ve got fail”

[This press release originally appeared on the Crowd Fusion website, which has been replaced by ceros.com.] Crowd Fusion Announces it is the Content Management System for The Daily New York, NY, March 16, 2011 — Marking a little over a month since The Daily was revealed, Crowd Fusion officially announces that it is the content management systemContinue reading “Crowd Fusion Announces it is the Content Management System for The Daily”

There’s a great post by C.K. called Dear Apple: You’re not “Post-PC” until you cut the cord. Don’t get me wrong: I’m loving everything I’ve seen about the iPad 2 and I plan on grabbing one next Friday when they become available, but watching the event from Wednesday, the use of the phrase “post-PC” was just blatantly incorrect.Continue reading “C.K. Sample isn’t living in a post-PC world yet, but I am”

I’m in the second row of the paidContent 2011 conference at the amazing TheTimesCenter and I just watched a panel called “Quality, Quantity and Mass Content.” Larry Dignan from ZDNet hosted a panel that included Jason Rapp from Mahalo, Chris Ahearn from ThompsonReuters, Luke Beatty from Yahoo’s Associated Content and Lewis D’Vorkin from Forbes and True/Slant. The feedback IContinue reading “Content farms vs. Felix Salmon’s Twitter stream”

I was a grand jury judge for my buddy Jason’s LAUNCH conference in San Francisco last week. There are two kinds of LAUNCH judges: celebrity judges who spend a half day on stage judging live presentations and the grand jury kind that watch all of the presentations and then pick winners for LAUNCH awards. I was one of theContinue reading “LAUNCH takes off”

A long, long time ago I saw the Chevy Chase and Goldie Hawn’s Foul Play in a Virginia movie theater with my sister Jennifer and my cousin Kimberly. To this day I vividly remember the car chase scene over the hills of San Francisco. Chevy had stolen a cab and it turned out there was a JapaneseContinue reading “Kojak, bang bang!”

I often love Fred Wilson‘s blog, A VC, but sometimes it’s not so easy to love. A few days ago Fred posted a dismissal of marketing. He said marketing is only for companies with lousy products or companies like Zynga, Budweiser or Viagra who can only grow their businesses marginally through customer acquisition. I’ve been on the roadContinue reading “Marketing”

My best friend in Texas, Chris Nottingham, asked me about an old computer wargame we used to play in college. He said his mother just got an iMac and he wanted to put that old game on there. A quick Google search for “old mac game destroyer tank island” uncovered Strategic Conquest. I spent so manyContinue reading “Strategic Conquest”

Lots of people are complaining about how everyone worked on The Huffington Post for free and how they should get paid now that AOL has paid $315 million for their work. Some have suggested $50 per post. Comedian Andy Borowitz tweeted: My share of the Huffington Post sale, zero dollars, was a little disappointing. This is nuts. First, everyone who blogged for free on Huffington PostContinue reading “Apologies to Arianna”

For one simple reason: I was sick of being the guy who runs the second hottest company in Greycroft’s portfolio. Recently, Greycroft partner Ian Sigalow wrote a blog post comparing VC exits to baseball hits. He said an exit of 2-3x is a double. 5x is a triple. I asked Ian if the AOL/Huffington Post deal was a double,Continue reading “I am so glad AOL bought the Huffington Post”