Last week, I joined Crowd Fusion, in the newly created role of Vice President, Customer Development. (The official press release is posted here).
Crowd Fusion offers a cloud-based content management system. But, really, it’s much more than that. One client described Crowd Fusion as the “glue” that holds all of their existing content management system together. Another described it as a platform for “collaboration on topics”. Yet a third I spoke with called Crowd Fusion a “platform for creating the next generation news room”.
I’m quickly finding out that Crowd Fusion solves many different, yet related problems for its clients. But there are a handful of common elements that cut across each of them:
- Publish everywhere: it’s not enough to have a web and tablet strategy; today’s publishers need to publish to n places – the web, iPad, Android, iPhone and whatever comes next.
- Scale and flexibility: built in the cloud, Crowd Fusion can easily scale to meet the demands of even the most heavily trafficked sites
- Multi-title: Crowd Fusion lets multi-title publishers share a single platform without giving up the unique brand-specific features of each title.
- Collaboration and community: Crowd Fusion enables collaboration around topics, driving community and creating high-traffic evergreen pages.
So, why join Crowd Fusion?
First, it’s an amazing time for early stage companies in the New York area. I’ve spent the past weeks meeting with entrepreneurs and venture investors and it’s probably the most exciting time I’ve seen in the NYC tech community in over a decade. People may debate whether we’re in a bubble, but regardless, there’s a huge amount of innovation going on and people are building some great companies. But in choosing the right opportunity, I looked at three key areas:
- The space: Crowd Fusion brings together (“fuses”?) a number of key themes that have been important to me throughout my career: big data, the cloud, mobile.
- The product: as above, Crowd Fusion is solving real problems and has some fantastic customers. Early clients include TMZ.com, News Corp’s dedicated tablet service The Daily, Myspace, Essence and Best Buy. Sites powered by Crowd Fusion serve more than 50 million uniques per month.
- Most important, however, is the quality of the team. Ideas are great, but execution is what matters. Crowd Fusion has an amazing team, led by CEO Brian Alvey (co-founder of Weblogs, Inc, sold to AOL), COO Craig Wood (technical experience at AOL, Netscape and Did-it.com), CK Sample (Weblogs, Inc, AOL and Mahalo), Chris Swenson (Noble Systems, ChoicePoint, etc) and others. The company has great energy and focus, and I am thrilled to have the opportunity to join this amazing team.
If you want to learn more about Crowd Fusion, drop me a note at barry-at-crowdfusion-dot-com.
