Brian Alvey

I spent today at the CES 2009 convention center, checking out hot new products and meeting with a bunch of companies that want to know more about what Obsessable and Crowd Fusion are doing. It has been a fantastic trip so far on both fronts.

After a couple of morning meetings, Steve Friedman and walked across the street to the massive Engadget trailer. I wanted to pretend I was either a fanboy who needed to get his iPhone charged or a reader who had problems with a product he’d bought off of Engadget, but everyone was heads down and blogging away.

(We used to get people writing to complain about a product they had bought from us every now and then. Of course, Engadget doesn’t sell any products. These people had just bought something online via one of our ads and assumed that meant Engadget was a store. Wonderful.)

I had a really short list of products to seek out. One was Powermat. It sounded cool in their press email and was even cooler in person. They have these little mats that recharge your gadgets by magnetic induction — not using power cords. So you set your (adapted for Powermat) iPhone on the mat and it just charges. You can even spill water on the surfaces and no one is going to get shocked because there’s no electricity running through them. Powermats won’t be in retail stores until the fall, but I plan to get them ASAP.

The Palm Pre recharges using a similar wireless charging pad. I’ll say more about the Pre later.

Now I’m back in the hotel room, catching up on email, hungry out of my mind and wondering how I’m going to stay awake for a 9pm party. I’m sure this CES trip is way easier for people from California who don’t have to deal with a time change. I’m just thankful I didn’t fly into Vegas from Europe.

Obsessable has a great application called the comparator. Our team uses it to show a grid of specs on a bunch of products and you can do some nifty things with it — but they aren’t all obvious. So we made a brief video tour of the comparator.

Over a decade ago, when my wife and I were first dating, I shaved my head and got an earring and some quality sunglasses. I loved the look. Without the glasses, I looked a little like Mr. Clean. With them on, I’d love to think I looked like The Shield’s Vic Mackey, but I still had the beard. So maybe just from the nose up.

I still have two t-shirts from back then that Niki got me. One was a monopoly shirt that I’ll tell you about later, maybe. The other was a Mr. Clean t-shirt. I was newly bald the first time I wore it into the office of the startup I was working at and everyone cracked up. One of the guys was pointing at my shirt, then at my face, then back to my shirt.

Struggling startups. The impending dot com crash. Ah, the good old days.

House Peter, Jr., the actor who played Mr. Clean in television commercials in the late 1950’s and early 60’s died yesterday. He was 92. So today I’m wearing my Mr. Clean shirt and getting ready for the big Obsessable codejam that starts on Saturday.

Can he clean a kitchen sink? Quicker than a wink.
Can he clean a window sash? Faster than a flash.
Can he clean a dirty mirror? He’ll make it bright and clearer.
Can he clean a diamond ring? Mr. Clean cleans anything.

Update: C.K. IMed me and said he couldn’t imagine me without hair. So I found this old post which has the only bald picture of me I know of. Funny that in the comments Niki is talking about me looking like Mr. Clean.

As I mentioned on Twitter, EZ Street didn’t get a Harvey Award tonight. That award went to the deliciously perverse — but retired, come on now! — webcomic strip Perry Bible Fellowship. Glenn has a complete list of Harvey Awards winners on ComicMix.

One of the other nominees in the webcomics category was Diary of a Wimpy Kid, a book that I’ve seen by the hundreds in shelves of many Barnes and Noble stores. After the awards show, Martha Thomases from ComicMix interviewed Jeff Kinney, the creator of the Diary series. I chatted with him and found out that he has kids who are a little too young for the books, 5 and 3 like mine. I also learned that his day job — which he has no plans to give up — is as a designer/developer on a massively multiplayer online game called Poptropica. After looking at the game’s home page, who wouldn’t have known it was related?

Jeff signed the book for my kids and I got some blurry iPhone pictures.

This was a great week for Obsessable. Well, yeah, it was the only week ever for our little personal technology guide, but still. It was great. Here’s a recap of some of the news about our launch.

David Krug posted a little about Crowd Fusion and Obsessable: On Assembling Blog Dream Teams.

However, I really believe the web is huge and has many opportunities to expand and like their new blog Obsessable I don’t believe this website is about trying to compete with Engadget, or Gizmodo or any tech blog. I believe that they are realistically trying to build a company with a great publishing platform at its base.

Dan Frommer from Alley Insider was the first person to write about Obsessable the evening it launched: Crowd Fusion’s Gadget Site Obsessable.com Launches To Take On Engadget, Gizmodo.

Obsessable is a personal tech/gadget blog/site/aggregator with a twist: It’s built on a brand new, custom technology platform, which includes a lot of geeky database stuff, like the ability to automatically generate nifty comparison charts on the fly, like this one for HDTVs.

I don’t agree that Obsessable is directly targeting Engadget and Gizmodo and even Dan says it’s “no immediate threat to industry leaders”. Whew. That sure takes all the pressure off.

On the Inquisitr, ex-TechCrunch blogger Duncan Riley profiled Crowd Fusion: Weblogs Inc veterans launch new blog network.

The first site is impressive, and this is as smart a team as you could ever put together if you were starting a blog network from scratch. They know the business, and they know it well.
…
I also don’t get the obsession with building a CMS from scratch: it might make life easier but when you’re in the content game, your main concern should be the delivery of great content, and you don’t need a custom built CMS to do that.

It is an obsession of mine, isn’t it? One of my favorite things about that article (besides the comments) was the CrunchBase-style Crowd Fusion profile by TradeVibes/Qbase. Hard to tell if it’s better than the Crowd Fusion profile on CrunchBase or just has more stuff.

Pulse 2.0 also had us taking on the top gadget blogs in Gadget Blog War Heats Up; Obsessable.com Taking On Engadget, CrunchGear, and Gizmodo.

Obsessable has a long way to go before it can compete with the hits that those 3 gadget blogs receive, but I’m sure Obsessable will grow very fast.

Russell Heimlich says Obsessable.com Is Worth Obsessing About. Who am I to disagree?

Sean Percival likes our “curated aggregation” in his aptly-named post Obsessable Launches.

Kevin Tofel likes the concept which “actually melds several existing single-content approaches into a slick all-in-one package” in Obsessable: blog, news, product database and more.

The mother of all Obsessable reviews, however, was written by Marshall Kirkpatrick over on ReadWriteWeb for Blogging Dream Team Joins Forces to Challenge Engadget, TreeHugger and More.

Will a heavy duty publishing system help this new company challenge some of the biggest blogs on the web? The team involved certainly improves the odds.
…
The company’s first site launched this week and we got a look at the blog software powering it – both are beautiful.
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Will a heavy duty publishing system help this new company challenge some of the biggest blogs on the web? The team involved certainly improves the odds.

One of his commenters suggested he was just pasting a press release of ours.

First, we didn’t have a press release. A bunch of reporters asked for one and I sent them two paragraphs from our about page instead. Marshall did actual research and it shows.

Second, I would never have put all of those details in a press release. I’m a “run the company in stealth mode” kind of guy and this article is more of a microscope than I like being under.

But I’m getting used to it.

Obsessable got a bunch of nice welcome posts from around the web yesterday.

One of them from Silicon Alley Insider was called “Crowd Fusion’s Gadget Site Obsessable.com Launches To Take On Engadget, Gizmodo.” As much fun as that sounds, Obsessable wasn’t built to try and beat the top gadget blogs at breaking news about products that are being released six months from now.

I also see one big fact that needs to be corrected:

No immediate threat to industry leaders Engadget — which Alvey co-created with Jason Calacanis — or Gawker Media’s Gizmodo, but something to watch.

Dan got the “something to watch” part right, but saying Jason and I created Engadget is like saying Scotty Pippen and Dennis Rodman lead the Chicago Bulls to their last three championships. Peter Rojas created Engadget — top to bottom from the name to the tone. Jason and I were there for assists, collecting rebounds and throwing the occasional forearm.

This weekend was packed with family events: the final Yankee Stadium game I took my boys to last night, the Squeeze and James show Niki and I saw at Radio City Music Hall on Friday, our nice kid-free dinner in NYC before the show and swimming with all of our kids on Sunday. But one other item keeps popping into my memory.

On Saturday we took Jack to the first of his weekly soccer classes. They gave out team jerseys and his had the number nine on it. He wasn’t that thrilled with the shirt so I tried to put a positive spin on it. I reminded him that a nine is the biggest number you can make with just one number, but he told me I was wrong. He said, “Infinity is the largest number you can make with just one number. It looks like a sideways eight.”

Touché. I love that kid.

A few months before we sold Weblogs, Inc. to AOL, we covered Live8 with them in Philadelphia. We got to meet some of our Philly bloggers for the first time at the Hard Rock Cafe there. One of them was Kevin Tofel. Kevin worked with us on PVR Wire, Engadget and HD Beat — now known as EngadgetHD. Soon after we joined AOL he started writing for a site called jk On The Run with James Kendrick.

A couple of weeks ago, while I was on vacation far, far away from the web, GigaOm acquired jk On The Run. They’re such a great fit for what Om does. jkOTR covers mobile devices — from ebook readers to tablet PCs and ultramobile personal computers (UMPCs). If you own one of those products, the site is a daily read.

Congratulations to Kevin, James and Om!

Last week was fantastic. I was back from a week away with my family — mentally recharged and physically drained. I had played really hard in Cape Cod and was so happy to dive back into our amazing little project.

Velocity Interactive Group released some details on Crowd Fusion’s funding. Reading it now I just noticed how my contributions were edited. No offense to the other less famous people at our VC’s, but my original quote was:

There’s no better way to validate an early stage business like ours than to have smart people like Jon Miller, Ross Levinsohn, Alan Patricof and Marc Andreessen tell the world that they believe in what you’re doing enough to partner up with you.

Thank heaven for blogs.

Of course, there are way more people working with us than those four — specifically Ian Sigalow at Greycroft (who is now on our board) and Jorge Espinel at Velocity — but those are some fantastic investors, don’t you think? I am extremely happy with how our money raising project worked out. Jason was a great coach for me on that front.

Here are some more details on the funding:

• Our valuation was “somewhere south of Facebook’s.”
• Because Crowd Fusion didn’t exist when Jon Miller left AOL, Time Warner’s non-compete couldn’t block him from joining our board.

But seriously, there is some confusion as to whether Crowd Fusion is a publishing company or a platform company. I’ll have to do another post to clear that up better, but for now just know that we’re a publishing company with our own platform and both are named Crowd Fusion. Did that help?

We are not taking on hosting customers. ComicMix and all of our personal sites are enough of a distraction. Right now we are focused on building out some sample sites so we can show people how it all works. More news on that front coming soon.

When we quietly released our new ComicMix comic book reader last Friday, one of our readers quickly wrote me and said, “Congratulations on the new Comics Reader at ComicMix. You’ve made the best reader around even better. Well done.”

Thanks!

We made the layout something way more useable thanks to input from our creators, our readers and some of the best designers I know — including some big suggestions from Mike Propst last year. I posted over on ComicMix today about the millions of new ways to navigate from page to page and many of the other improved reader features. And that’s just our online reader.

I know what you’re all thinking: “But how can you make a comic book reader application that doesn’t make me fill out a registration form or download and install software or force me to learn yet another slow-loading Flash interface?”

That’s easy. We respect our audience. We read these comics too.

Before:

After:

Let me know what you think.