Brian Alvey | |
|---|---|
 Brian Alvey in 2009 | |
| Born | March 6, 1970 Falls Church, Virginia, U.S. |
| Occupation(s) | American serial entrepreneur, programmer, designer and blogger |
Brian Alvey (born March 6, 1970 in Falls Church, Virginia) is an American serial entrepreneur, programmer, designer and blogger. He grew up in Brooklyn and now lives in San Francisco where he is the CEO of Clipisode. He is best known for co-founding the blog publishing company Weblogs, Inc. with Jason Calacanis.
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Alvey designed the first TV Guide website in 1995 and was the senior technical member of the in-house team that built the first BusinessWeek site later that year. He continued designing and developing database-driven Web applications for companies including BusinessWeek, Intel, JD Edwards, Deloitte & Touche and The McGraw-Hill Companies. His Tech-Engine career center application has powered over 200 online career centers including XML.com, Computer User, O'Reilly & Associates Network, DevShed, and the Cold Fusion Developer's Journal. He has been the art director of three print magazines and the Chief Technology Officer of Rising Tide Studios where he personally developed The Venture Reporter Network.
Alvey has also built publishing systems for sites designed by Jeffrey Zeldman including the Web design magazine A List Apart (in 1998) and the Kansas City Chiefs. He was the architect of the system that powers the redesigned global network of Capgemini websites.
In 2002, Brian Alvey was the creator and co-host of the Meet The Makers conference, a series of talk show-style events with Jason Calacanis. In 2003 he invented and launched Blogstakes, a sweepstakes application for the blogging community. He was an early investor and chairman of the comic book publishing company ComicMix, which he still advises.
On September 23, 2003, Alvey, along with Jason Calacanis and supported by an angel investment from Mark Cuban, co-founded the publishing company Weblogs, Inc. Weblogs, Inc. was home to such blogs as Engadget, Autoblog, and Joystiq. Time Warner's America Online purchased Weblogs, Inc. [1] in October 2005 for $25–30 million. [2] While at AOL, Alvey was named the chief architect of Netscape and lead the development team which turned it into a social news aggregator. In November 2006, AOL also purchased the blogging platform Blogsmith, which Alvey had built to power Weblogs, Inc., for a reported $5 million. [3] At one time, Blogsmith powered 14 of the top 100 blogs. [4]
After AOL, Alvey founded Crowd Fusion, a cloud-native content management system (CMS) company. [5] In July 2008, Crowd Fusion raised $3 million from Velocity Interactive Group, Greycroft Partners, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. [6] Crowd Fusion's platform customers have included TMZ, The Daily , MySpace, Essence , Tecca and Extra .
In June 2012, Crowd Fusion acquired London-based Ceros. [7] Ceros was spun out of Group FMG, a marketing services company based in London and New York. With that deal Crowd Fusion changed its name to Ceros and appointed Ceros CEO Simon Berg as its CEO. Alvey is currently a board advisor and Chief Scientist of Ceros. [8]
Alvey's startup Recurrency was one of seven companies in the Winter 2014/2015 LAUNCH Incubator. Recurrency debuted at the 2015 LAUNCH Conference on March 2 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco and on March 4 won Best Incubator Company. [9] In 2016, Recurrency again joined the LAUNCH Incubator and began working on [10] Clipisode, an app for hosting a 5-minute daily talk show featuring friends and fans. Clipisode was announced on stage at the 2016 LAUNCH Conference. [11]
Dave Winer is an American software developer, entrepreneur, and writer who resides in New York City. Winer is noted for his contributions to outliners, scripting, content management, and web services, as well as blogging and podcasting. He is the founder of the software companies Living Videotext, Userland Software and Small Picture Inc., a former contributing editor for the Web magazine HotWired, the author of the Scripting News weblog, a former research fellow at Harvard Law School, and current visiting scholar at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.
Richard J. Skrenta Jr. is an American computer programmer and Silicon Valley entrepreneur who created the web search engine blekko.
Matthew Charles Mullenweg is an American entrepreneur and web developer living in Houston. He is known for developing and founding the free and open-source web software WordPress and the Automattic company.
Joystiq was a video gaming blog founded in June 2004 as part of the Weblogs, Inc. family of weblogs, now owned by AOL. It was AOL's primary video game blog, with sister blogs dealing with MMORPG gaming in general and the popular MMORPG World of Warcraft in particular.
Weblogs, Inc. was a blog network that published content on a variety of subjects, including tech news, video games, automobiles, and pop culture. At one point, the network had as many as 90 blogs, although the vast majority of its traffic could be attributed to a smaller number of breakout titles, as was typical of most large-scale successful blog networks of the mid-2000s. Popular blogs included Engadget, Autoblog, TUAW, Joystiq, Luxist, Slashfood, Cinematical, TV Squad, Download Squad, Blogging Baby, Gadling, AdJab, and Blogging Stocks.
Jason McCabe Calacanis is an American Internet entrepreneur, angel investor, author and podcaster.
Xaverian High School is an independent Catholic high school located in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, serving grades 6 through 12. Grades 9-12 offer a college preparatory program and grades 6-8 are middle school.
Michael Jones is an American entrepreneur, investor and CEO of Science Inc. In 2017, Jones was named one of Los Angeles's 500 most influential people by the Los Angeles Business Journal.
J. Michael Arrington is the American founder and former co-editor of TechCrunch, a blog covering the Silicon Valley technology start-up communities and the wider technology field in America and elsewhere. Magazines such as Wired and Forbes have named Arrington one of the most powerful people on the Internet. In 2008, he was selected by TIME Magazine as one of the most influential people in the world.
Propeller was a social news aggregator operated by AOL-Netscape. It was similar to Digg; users could vote for which stories are to be included on the front page and could comment on them as well. As of October 1, 2010, Propeller ceased to be active.
While the term "blog" was not coined until the late 1990s, the history of blogging starts with several digital precursors to it. Before "blogging" became popular, digital communities took many forms, including Usenet, commercial online services such as GEnie, BiX and the early CompuServe, e-mail lists and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). In the 1990s, Internet forum software, such as WebEx, created running conversations with "threads". Threads are topical connections between messages on a metaphorical "corkboard". Some have likened blogging to the Mass-Observation project of the mid-20th century.
Jonathan F. Miller was CEO of Digital Media at News Corp until 2012 and was the chairman and CEO of America Online from 2002 to 2006.
Greycroft is an American venture capital firm. It manages over $2 billion in capital with investments in companies such as Bird, Bumble, HuffPost, Goop, Scopely, The RealReal, and Venmo. Greycroft was founded in 2006 by Alan Patricof, Dana Settle, and Ian Sigalow. The firm is headquartered in New York City and Los Angeles.
Benjamin Abraham Horowitz is an American businessman, investor, blogger, and author. He is a technology entrepreneur and co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz along with Marc Andreessen. He previously co-founded and served as president and chief executive officer of the enterprise software company Opsware, which Hewlett-Packard acquired in 2007. Horowitz is the author of The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, a book about startups, and What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture.
Ceros is a cloud-based platform encompassing a collaborative, real-time digital canvas, upon which designers create animated, interactive content without the need for developers.
The Open Angel Forum is a recurring event designed to aid early stage startup companies seeking funding, via presentations to prospective angel investors.
Scott Weiss is an American venture capitalist at the Silicon Valley firm Andreessen Horowitz, joining in April 2011 as the firm's fourth general partner. A native of Sarasota, Florida, he founded and was CEO of IronPort Systems, which Cisco acquired in 2007 for $830 million.
Jason Harper Shellen is an American internet entrepreneur who was the founding product manager of Google Reader and helped create and launch Brizzly. His most recent software startup is the email app Boxer. He has since 2006 been a member of the RSS Advisory Board, a group that publishes the RSS specification and helps developers with web syndication.
OurCrowd is an online global venture investing platform that empowers institutions and individual accredited investors to invest and engage in emerging technology companies at an early stage while still privately held. Based in Jerusalem, the company launched in February 2013, and has since opened overseas branches in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Spain, Singapore, Brazil, and the UAE.
Martin Troen Moe is an American business executive, and the president of Vox Media. Early in his career, he was an associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and an adviser to Lawrence Summers, United States Secretary of the Treasury. He later worked for AOL before joining SportsBlogs Inc, which rebranded as Vox Media in 2011. He is credited as a co-founder of the technology news website The Verge. He was the site's publisher, then Vox Media's chief content officer, before being promoted to the role of president.
