Brian Alvey (born March 6, 1970, in Falls Church, Virginia) is an American serial entrepreneur, programmer, designer and blogger. He grew up in

Brooklyn Brooklyn is a Boroughs of New York City, borough of New York City located at the westernmost end of Long Island in the New York (state), State of New York. Formerly an independent city, the borough is coextensive with Kings County, one of twelv ...

and now lives in

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

where he is the CTO of Automattic's WordPress VIP Platform. He is best known for co-founding the blog publishing company Weblogs, Inc. with

Jason Calacanis Jason McCabe Calacanis (born November 28, 1970) is a podcaster, American Internet entrepreneur, angel investor, and author. His first company was part of the Dot-com bubble, dot-com era in New York. His second venture, Weblogs, Inc., a publishi ...

Career

Early years

Alvey designed the first

TV Guide TV Guide is an American digital media In mass communication, digital media is any media (communication), communication media that operates in conjunction with various encoded machine-readable data formats. Digital content can be created, vi ...

website in 1995 and was the senior technical member of the in-house team that built the first ''

BusinessWeek ''Bloomberg Businessweek'', previously known as ''BusinessWeek'' (and before that ''Business Week'' and ''The Business Week''), is an American monthly business magazine published 12 times a year. The magazine debuted in New York City in Septembe ...

'' site later that year. He continued designing and developing database-driven Web applications for companies including BusinessWeek,

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

, JD Edwards, Deloitte & Touche and The

McGraw-Hill McGraw Hill is an American education science company that provides educational content, software, and services for students and educators across various levels—from K-12 to higher education and professional settings. They produce textbooks, ...

Companies. His Tech-Engine career center application has powered over 200 online career centers including XML.com,

Computer User A user is a person who uses a computer or Computer network, network Service (systems architecture), service. A user often has a user account and is identified to the system by a username (or user name). Some software products provide serv ...

, 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 Capgemini SE is a French Multinational corporation, multinational information technology (IT) services and consulting company, headquartered in Paris, France. History Capgemini was founded by Serge Kampf in 1967 as an enterprise management and d ...

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

. 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.

Weblogs, Inc./Blogsmith

On September 23, 2003, Alvey, along with

and supported by an angel investment from

Mark Cuban Mark Cuban (born July 31, 1958) is an American businessman and television personality. He is the former principal owner and current minority owner of the Dallas Mavericks of the National Basketball Association (NBA) and co-owner of 2929 Entertain ...

, co-founded the publishing company Weblogs, Inc. Weblogs, Inc. was home to such blogs as

Engadget Engadget ( ) is a technology news, reviews and analysis website offering daily coverage of gadgets, consumer electronics, video games, gaming hardware, apps, social media, streaming, AI, space, robotics, electric vehicles and other potentially ...

Autoblog 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 ...

, and

Joystiq ''Joystiq'' was a video gaming blog which was part of the Weblogs, Inc. family later owned by AOL. It was active from 2004 to 2015, acting as the primary video game blog for the group, and operating alongside ''Engadget'' and sister blogs such ...

. Time Warner's

America Online AOL (formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City, and a brand marketed by Yahoo! Inc. (2017–present), Yahoo! Inc. The service tra ...

purchased Weblogs, Inc. in October 2005 for $25–30 million. 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. At one time, Blogsmith powered 14 of the top 100 blogs.

Crowd Fusion/Ceros

After AOL, Alvey founded Crowd Fusion, a cloud-native

content management system A content management system (CMS) is computer software used to manage the creation and modification of digital content ( content management).''Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy''. Ann Rockley, Pamela Kostur, Steve Manning. New ...

(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 Myspace (formerly stylized as MySpace, currently myspace; and sometimes my␣, with an elongated Whitespace character#Substitute images, open box symbol) is a social networking service based in the United States. Launched on August 1, 2003, it w ...

, ''

Essence Essence () has various meanings and uses for different thinkers and in different contexts. It is used in philosophy and theology as a designation for the property (philosophy), property or set of properties or attributes that make an entity the ...

'', Tecca and '' Extra''. In June 2012, Crowd Fusion acquired London-based Ceros. 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.

Recurrency/Clipisode

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. In 2016, Recurrency again joined the LAUNCH Incubator and began working on 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.

References

External links

Brian Alvey's blogBrian Alvey on This Week in Startups (TWiST)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Alvey, Brian American male bloggers American bloggers Weblogs, Inc. 1970 births Living people People from Falls Church, Virginia American technology company founders Xaverian High School alumni Journalists from Virginia 21st-century American non-fiction writers