Brian Alvey : Latest News

Pixar Does Marvel

389 days ago

C.K. Sample linked to this gorgeous picture of Tony Stark which showed how the Iron Man movie would look if it had been done by Pixar instead of Marvel. It made me wonder what Marvel movies would be like if Pixar made all of them, so I speculated in a bunch of tweets using the hashtag #PixarDoesMarvel.

Here they all are:

THOR STORY: When Beta Ray Buzz crash lands on earth, Thor and his warrior friends help him defeat evil emperor Grog.
A BUG'S WIFE: When Spider-Man is captured by the Sinister Six, Mary Jane Watson worries that he'll miss their wedding.
MUTANTS, INC.: When Magneto captures Banshee to harness the power of his screams, Professor X's students must save the day.
FINDING BARON NEMO: Captain America and amnesia-stricken Prince Namor search the globe for Baron Nemo during World War 2.
THE INCREDIBLES: It's a movie about the Fantastic Four and this time Pixar doesn't have to pretend that it isn't.
SECRET CARS: Heroes and villains become cars and are forced to race each other on a planet created by the Toyota Beyonder.
GAMMATOUILLE: Chef Bruce Banner has a secret. He can only make his famous soup when he turns into the Hulk.
WOLV-E: He's the best there is at what he does, and what he does is carve Sentinels into scraps in this alternate future.
UP NORTH: Canadian super team Alpha Flight travels to Paradise Falls after Snowbird is kidnapped by a discredited explorer.

Why yes, I do have three young children. How did you know?

Get out of my dreams, get into my car

628 days ago

This morning I turned off my alarm and fell back asleep for about 20 minutes. I snapped awake after a crazy dream and was lucky to make it to a 9am meeting.

First, I'd like to thank my subconscious for waking me up without my alarm.

Second, I'd like to tell my subconscious that this was a bizarre way to wake me up.

In my dream, Jason Calacanis was standing next to me in his usual pink collared dress shirt while I sat in front of a giant media PC and edited audio files. We were working on the latest audio track for one of our customers. Jason and I were back in a startup again and this time our business was making jingles for radio commercials. Our customer was a skin cancer clinic.

Like a rocket

714 days ago

In the past few weeks, Crowd Fusion added optimization specialist Michiko Diby and digital media expert Barry Graubart.

Then we added three more people to our team yesterday.

We are keeping ADP very busy!

Quitting web design

730 days ago

Jeffrey Zeldman posted an interesting reader letter, called Letter of the Month.

The author wrote Jeffrey to explain that his Designing With Web Standards book had changed his entire career.

I remember what I now refer to as a pivotal moment in my web career. I was sitting in bed reading your book. I knew nothing really about CSS (other than for setting fonts/colours and I couldn’t see what was wrong with the old way of doing things). However as I read, it was like a slow realisation. I remember vividly turning to my wife and saying “This book is amazing. I am going to have to relearn everything I know about building websites”. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. On one hand the enormity of what you were suggesting was overwhelming but on the other hand it was just the injection I needed in my own career.

I reached the end of the book and made a decision. I was going to move the whole of Headscape across to standards based design. Not only that was I was going to do it as soon as possible. By 2005 we had made the transition and have never looked back.

The author was Paul Boag, whose Boagworld podcasts I've enjoyed. As the author was revealed it felt like reading some of Brando's fan mail -- signed by a young Al Pacino.

It reminded me that I had the opposite reaction with Jeffrey.

When I've talked to people recently about working on several projects with Jeffrey when Happy Cog was a one-man shop, I've said something like "I was a designer and Zeldman was a designer. But he had a book, so I did the server-side work." That's an oversimplification of course. Front-end web design work in the days of Netscape 4 and the Great Browser Wars was a nightmare. Working in SQL stored procedures and ASP and VB Script was harder than HTML in many ways, but 100 times easier than dealing with browser compatibility. All the code I wrote was guaranteed to run the same way over and over, regardless of the visiting browser.

So thanks in part to working with Jeffrey, I quit doing web design and never looked back.

Surviving Amazon's Cloudpocalypse

754 days ago

Two weeks ago, our Crowd Fusion team was right in the middle of the big cloud outage at Amazon. All of the big brands using our platform run on Amazon servers.

George Reese from O'Reilly had the best early recap and perspective of the dozens of stories I read:

If you think this week exposed weakness in the cloud, you don't get it: it was the cloud's shining moment, exposing the strength of cloud computing.

In short, if your systems failed in the Amazon cloud this week, it wasn't Amazon's fault. You either deemed an outage of this nature an acceptable risk or you failed to design for Amazon's cloud computing model. The strength of cloud computing is that it puts control over application availability in the hands of the application developer and not in the hands of your IT staff, data center limitations, or a managed services provider.

Here are some excerpts from our story in the trenches:

After informing the Amazon representative that we had failed over to the West coast and that we no longer needed this running instance, he urged us to decommission all the US East instances that we were not using in order to free capacity in that region.

He was impressed that we had successfully failed over to the US West region when so many others were still down and said: "You were one of the very few to have a West coast contingency plan and recover quickly. Bravo."

Read our very detailed Crowd Fusion cloudpocalypse story here.

You've got fail

766 days ago

Eric Snider used to work for Cinematical before AOL bought The Huffington Post to improve AOL's leadership position as the place where brands go to die.

I was just going to link to his scathing Leaving in a Huff post on Twitter, but there were too many great quotes for 140 characters:

"Say what you will about AOL, but when you perform work for them, they pay you. They're old-fashioned like that."
"That's how newspapers operate, and goodness knows that industry is running smoothly."
"We were like stewardesses handing out peanuts on the Hindenburg."
"He knows that when space aliens invade, and a weaselly human swears allegiance to them in exchange for not being killed, the weaselly human always winds up getting killed anyway."
"We may be whores, but we are not sluts."
"You will note that, as with most professional communiques regarding the termination of a subcontractor's services, this one begins with the traditional 'Hi there.'"
"You've got fail."

And many, many more. It ends with a recap of the wild email thread where people at AOL were still asking bloggers who were fired or resigned to pitch posts. For pay. I think.

Enjoy.

Note: While I'm against a lot of things that are going on and it's easy to jump on the AOL hating bandwagon, I understand that there is always a logical consolidation of overlapping divisions and brands in a merger. And sometimes companies take the opportunity to trim profitable divisions that don't overlap with newly merged brands under the pretenses of that merger. Which is probably what happened to Download Squad. There is psychic organizational overhead in trying to manage 100+ brands, so sometimes sites get shut down for reasons other than profit and traffic.

I also don't believe the unpaid HuffPo bloggers deserve a financial settlement. "Implied contracts" aren't worth the paper they're printed on. Mathew Ingram said it best in Blogging for HuffPo Is Like Writing Open-Source Code. The only settlement Arianna Huffington will face on this front is with karma.

C.K. Sample isn't living in a post-PC world yet, but I am

808 days ago

There's a great post by C.K. called Dear Apple: You’re not “Post-PC” until you cut the cord.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m loving everything I’ve seen about the iPad 2 and I plan on grabbing one next Friday when they become available, but watching the event from Wednesday,the use of the phrase “post-PC” was just blatantly incorrect.

I agree with C.K. that it's really hard for Apple to declare PCs dead when you have to plug your iPhones and iPads into computers running iTunes to do anything, but I have the feeling that Steve Jobs has already planned all of this stuff out so perfectly that if it isn't true today, it will be true soon.

You know how Apple designs iPhones and iPads with copy and paste, cameras, dozens of ports and 3D laser sensors and then they trim out the features so they can sell you a new iPad every year for the next 3 years?

I have plenty of faith in Apple to carry us into the magical post-PC age. I'm sure we're just a software update or two away from full-on iTunes on my iPad without no PC required. When I close my eyes, I'm already there -- waiting for C.K.

Content farms vs. Felix Salmon's Twitter stream

811 days ago

I'm in the second row of the paidContent 2011 conference at the amazing TheTimesCenter and I just watched a panel called "Quality, Quantity and Mass Content." Larry Dignan from ZDNet hosted a panel that included Jason Rapp from Mahalo, Chris Ahearn from ThompsonReuters, Luke Beatty from Yahoo's Associated Content and Lewis D'Vorkin from Forbes and True/Slant.

The feedback I got from other audience members is that Larry asked a couple of tough questions, but the panel was mostly evasive, especially on the topic of Google's "Farmer" update.

Felix Salmon told the panel that Twitter is his best place to find news and links and asked when these publishers' sites are going to be as good as Twitter. I'm not really paraphrasing. There were no great answers from the panel because the question was flawed. Of course Felix's Twitter stream is full of golden content, he follows really smart people who like many of the same things he likes!

A comparison of Felix Salmon's personalized Twitter stream vs. content farms is apples and oranges. If Felix was forced to spend an hour watching the straight not-signed-in stream of every tweet ever, he'd say it was way worse than *any* content site, especially if he was comparing the generic Twitter firehose to a content site in a vertical he cared about. We all see low quality content on Twitter every day in Twitter's trending topics list. Lady Gaga is not on that list because she's the best content, she's in there because she's liked a little bit by a really wide audience. The top ten of all topics on earth will always be the lowest common denominator content, not the highest quality content. It's not targeted and neither are Google results.

A better question for that panel would be:

When are you going to let me personalize my experience of your content into a format that looks like my Facebook/Myspace/Twitter stream -- filled with the topics I care about and devoid of the content I despise?

I don't think any of those publishers are working on that.

TechMeme comes really close without exposing actual personalization controls because they made topic and source constraints that already matched hardcore tech/investor preferences: TechCrunch, Engadget, Boy Genius Report, The New York Times, ReadWriteWeb and the WSJ's MediaMemo and BoomTown. Oh my god, it's like TechMeme knows me.

It will be a real shame if publishers are waiting on a combined Bing and Facebook to deliver everyone a useful, personalized view into their content. Big publishers are worrying about giving up 30% cuts and all kinds of control to Apple, but they're not looking at content consumption preferences and taking control of their own destiny.

LAUNCH takes off

812 days ago

I was a grand jury judge for my buddy Jason's LAUNCH conference in San Francisco last week. There are two kinds of LAUNCH judges: celebrity judges who spend a half day on stage judging live presentations and the grand jury kind that watch all of the presentations and then pick winners for LAUNCH awards. I was one of the working judges.

There were three groups of presenting startups. 1.0 companies were all companies launching for the first time. 2.0 companies were announcing a new product. LAUNCH Pad companies were not scheduled to present on stage. They rented tables and tried to catch the attention of people passing by for a quick demo. If they caught the attention of a judge, they could be nominated to actually spend three minutes on stage pitching their product.

From the LAUNCH Pad companies, I picked an Amazon cloud-hosted GoToMeeting/Webex competitor called MeetingBurner. Not surprisingly, Joyent CEO David Young told them they were using the wrong cloud. That never gets old, right? LAUNCH Pad winners included GreenGoose, whose wireless sensors can track daily activity, and fluidinfo, an openly writable shared meta data service for everything. GreenGoose closed a $500K angel round that Friday and fluidinfo was voted "most likely to need Crowd Fusion as an interface."

In the 2.0 group, Disconnect won for best technology. It's a browser plugin that monitors how much of your personal data is being shared with third party sites, like what gets sent to Facebook when you're visiting ESPN. I spent some time with Disconnect's genius creator Brian Kennish on Friday and told him I hoped Disconnect would fail so I could hire him. Seriously!

The overall winner in the 2.0 group was Stack Overflow. I sat out on this vote because I was quoted in Joel's Careers 2.0 press release.

Some of the 1.0 winners were Room77 (best overall, see the view from your hotel room before you book it), NeuAer (best tech, automate your digital life) and Cabana (best design, a Photoshop/Pipes-style interface for making apps without coding). The NeuAer example that really stuck with me was how you can script your devices so that every time you turn your car off, your smartphone can drop a map pin so you don't have to remember where you parked. Very slick.

All of the winners are listed on the LAUNCH blog. Between the 1.0, 2.0 and LAUNCH Page companies there were 140 great companies competing for 13 awards. What a fantastic event.

Kojak, bang bang!

814 days ago

A long, long time ago I saw the Chevy Chase and Goldie Hawn's Foul Play in a Virginia movie theater with my sister Jennifer and my cousin Kimberly. To this day I vividly remember the car chase scene over the hills of San Francisco. Chevy had stolen a cab and it turned out there was a Japanese couple in the back. They didn't speak any English, but Goldie explained they were police, you know, like Kojak. Bang bang. Then the tourists went from scared hostages to thrilled participants. I've never seen the movie since that first time, but I can tell you all of those details from that scene.

A cab ride in SF prompted this tweet:

My evening cab ride through SF was insane! Cab left the ground 3 times going over hills and screeched to a stop once. #foulplay

Over on Facebook, my sister sent me the YouTube video for that scene. The first thing I noticed was that they were playing music from The Mikado. Wow! Then they were cutting to scenes of the actual Mikado being performed. It's where they were racing to, to prevent a murder or something.

I was turned on to The Mikado by an issue of The Question I read in high school. Written by Denny O'Neil and edited by my ComicMix partner Mike Gold. In college I bought the double disc musical and many years later Niki and I saw The Mikado live in New York City.

My object all sublime
I shall achieve in time
To let the punishment fit the crime
The punishment fit the crime.
And make each prisoner pent
Unwillingly represent
A source of innocent merriment
Of innocent merriment!