Brian Alvey
Brian Alvey (born March 6, 1970 in Falls Church, Virginia) is an American entrepreneur, programmer, web designer and blogger. He is best known for co-founding, with Jason Calacanis, the publishing company Weblogs, Inc.
Early career
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 formerly an investor and chairman of the comic book publishing company ComicMix which he still advises.
Weblogs, Inc.
In September 2003, Alvey, along with Jason Calacanis, co-founded the publishing company Weblogs, Inc., home to such blogs as Engadget, Autoblog, Joystiq, TV Squad, Cinematical and Slashfood. Time Warner's America Online purchased Weblogs, Inc. in October 2005. In November 2006, AOL also purchased the blogging platform Blogsmith, which Alvey had built to power Weblogs, Inc.
Crowd Fusion/Ceros
After AOL, Alvey and Craig Wood started Crowd Fusion, a cloud-native content management system (CMS) company. In July 2008, Crowd Fusion raised $3 million from Velocity Interactive Group, Greycroft Partners, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Crowd Fusion's platform customers have included TMZ, The Daily, MySpace, Essence, Tecca and Extra.
In June 2012, Crowd Fusion acquired London-based Ceros.[1] Ceros was spun out of Group FMG, an 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's current role is chairman, founder and Chief Scientist of Ceros.
References
- ↑ Swisher, Kara (14 June 2012). "Crowd Fusion Buys Ceros — And Changes Its Name and Business Model". AllThingsD. Retrieved 2012-06-14.
External links
- Brian Alvey's blog
- Brian Alvey on Twitter
- Brian Alvey on LinkedIn
- Ceros
- Brian Alvey on This Week in Startups (TWiST)