Brian Alvey

Yesterday the wonderful Crowd Fusion team launched our second site: a green news site called Super Eco. Super Eco has been in the works for several weeks now and it showcases many of the platform features that you may have already seen on our consumer electronics news site Obsessable. You can follow Super Eco on Twitter, on FriendFeed and on Facebook.

Here are some of my favorite Super Eco links:

• Feature: What’s in your underwear?
• Feature: What ‘organic’ means
• Topic: The greening of the White House
• Interview: Matthew Modine
• Profile: Al Gore
• Profile: World Wildlife Fund
• Comparator: Shampoos compared

C.K. created a brief video tour of Super Eco.

Super Eco’s tagline is “This planet means the world to us.” Here’s a quick overview of Super Eco’s mission from the about page:

Super Eco is the website for people who want to live a more environmentally conscious life but may not know where to begin, as well as for those tracking breaking news and trends. Super Eco is able to contextualize research and how-to’s within stories and news so that information about dishwashers, or compost bins, or Al Gore, or global warming, or hybrid vehicles are presented in a radically fresh, exciting, high energy and helpful manner. Super Eco promotes less worry and more wonder.

Less worry. More wonder. And away we go!

Robert Scoble wrote a couple of interesting posts about having to give up Diet Coke and the end of health privacy last night. His health privacy post is especially timely with Steve Jobs’ leave of absence and all of his recurring cancer and liver transplant speculation.

I used to drink a ton of regular Coke in high school and college, easily more than two liters a day. Years ago I made the switch to Diet Coke. Almost two years ago I gave up Diet Coke cold turkey and haven’t had a soda since.

Scoble’s posts made me reflect on my life with and without soda:

I drink really weak iced tea all day, plus orange juice and sparkling water. Sparkling water wasn’t something I was ever into before, but now Pellegrino and Perrier give me that feeling like I’m drinking bubbly soda again, putting some action back in drinking.

Six weeks after I gave it up, I was tempted by people bringing Diet Coke into my house.

I even had dreams where I went back to drinking Diet Coke by mistake.

More than a year after I gave it up, I wrote about how important living without soda has been for me.

Still, if I know I was having my last meal ever, I would definitely have a Diet Coke with it.

I crave it almost every day.

I’m wishing Scoble lots of luck on this one.

I had read some reviews of the new animated Batman team-up show, but I hadn’t caught the show myself until last night. We were eating dinner and I turned it on in the middle of one with Green Arrow, Speedy and a hooded guy who was floating with a ghost Batman, Ebenezer Scrooge-style. My first guess was that he was the Phantom Stranger, but it turned out to be Deadman. It was a decent show that I’d definitely watch it again, even with the distraction of Batman sounding like a cross between Christian Bale’s raspy Batman and Oswald from the Drew Carey show.

I just looked it up and it actually was Diedrich Bader as the voice of Batman. I’ve heard him in a bunch of other cartoons — as Buzz Lightyear’s foe Warp Darkmatter and in a Scooby Doo Halloween special — so I’ll get used to him. Michael Rosenbaum, Lex Luthor from Smallville (and the Flash from the animated Justice League show), was the voice of Deadman.

Next episode’s preview was for a Batman and the Blue Beetle team up. I wasn’t going to TiVo it until I saw today on ComicMix that Wil Wheaton is the voice of the Blue Beetle. Well that changes everything.

ComicMix has a Brave and the Bold preview video and pictures from the episode. Unlike the one I saw last night, the dialogue in this one is really interesting. In the clip on ComicMix, Batman and the Blue Beetle are breaking into some villain’s fortress and sharing tips about the tools of their trade: lasers, stun guns, knockout gas pellets. I’m not going to transcribe it. It’s a short clip that you should watch for yourself. Cool show.

Tonight I’m catching a redeye or two home after some great meals and meetings with my Crowd Fusion team and a generally successful CES. I didn’t make it to dinner with the team last night, so I tried to make up for it today. What was I doing last night? I was hanging out with some Twitter friends at yet another Intel party. (They do throw good parties.) This one was a private Counting Crows concert at LAX, the nightclub inside of the Luxor.

Brooke Burke was the party’s host. I came close to getting my picture with her like Brian Solis did, but it wasn’t meant to be. I was jammed right up against the stage for the whole show with Brian and Frank though, and I got photos of her welcoming us to her show and some great close-up shots of the Crows.

The band played a great thirteen song set including A Long December, Big Yellow Taxi, Mr. Jones, Omaha, Hanginaround and Color Blind. Pretty much everything I wanted to hear except for Accidentally In Love, Rain King and Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby and a dozen more songs, but who’s counting?

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Last night I went to the Intel party, hosted by @sarahcuda, @somewhatfrank, @briansolis and @zappos, and got to introduce people like Maralyn from AOL (what, no Twitter name?) to @MCHammer and watch @juliaallison be as shy and cameraphobic as usual.

At the party, plenty of people had iPhones and plenty of other people (like me) were talking about how Palm had debuted their Palm Pre iPhone killer earlier that day. Maybe Bono’s big investment wasn’t a mistake after all.

No one played any Elvis songs, even though it was his 74th birthday.

I still have a list of people to meet up with at CES before I go and I’d like to handle some more gadgets like the Sony VAIO P netbook, but I got a lot done in a single day.

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.
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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.
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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.