About The Blogger
Internet engineer, turned business exec and developing psychologist Benjamin Ellis is passionate about technology that solves human problems, and humans that solve technology problems. Benjamin blogs about productivity, communication and technology in the context of business.
The Social Side of Search – WolframAlpha Wikis Google and Twitter
You can’t so much as sneeze on the web at the moment without hearing about Wolfram Alpha - it is a veritable Swine Flu of the Interwebs – lots of noise, but very hard to sift out real facts. Wolfram Alpha describes its long-term goal as “[making] all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone.” Smells like [...]
Replying Via Twitter
Today’s Twitter rage prompts me to write about @Replies. The habit of putting an “@” symbol in front of a Twitter message, to ‘direct’ it towards another user – has a curious history. They weren’t part of the original design of Twitter, which started as a micro-blogging platform, not an instant messaging system. As early [...]
More on the Death of Free – Marketing
The post on Three Reasons Free Will Eat Itself drew a fair bit of attention. To be clear, I’m not anti-free by any means – I think it can be a great marketing tool – it’s just that it is a very slippery one. For your business (or even yourself) to stand out, you need to be noticeably different [...]
The New Business of Business
In 20 years of working in industry I’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly, as well as the amazingly brilliant when it comes to business operating models. I have worked in organisations that have practised new models, to different degrees. The results were some of the fastest growing, and most successful, businesses in history. [...]
Geeknrolla – Start Ups Marketing and Money
In some senses, this post is a part II to raising finance for your business. Tuesday’s TechCrunch Geek n Rolla event brought together business start up hopefuls and experienced old hands from around Europe. The passion and enthusiasm of TechCrunch’s Mike Butcher in supporting the European start up scene is a joy to see. The scene [...]
Financing Your Business in a Credit Crunch
It’s a big week in London this week, and it’s not just me saying that, it’s a quote from TechCrunch’s Mike Butcher. Yesterday was SeedCamp, today is Geek’n’Rolla and last night I chaired the Mobile Monday London session on “Financing Your Mobile Business in a Credit Crunch.” Raising Finance Raising finance is an almost inevitable part of running any [...]
Dominos Pizza – Why Everyone is in PR Now and Employee Engagement Matters
I wouldn’t normally blog about a Pizza chain, but this week Dominos have turned themselves into an example of why businesses need to get to grips with social media, and why employee engagement really matters. The best place to start, if you’ve missed the story so far, is with the blog post on The Consumerist [...]
