A few things about me...
My name is Alex Hawkinson and I'm the GM of Digital Presence at ReachLocal. In February 2010, ReachLocal acquired SMBLive where I was co-founder and CEO and worked with a fabulous team to develop CloudProfile. We're taking the platform forwards in a big way and I'm currently heads down working on a new version that will thrill our customers and help small businesses from around the world to get online, get found, and engage with their customers over the web. You can read a bit more about the ReachLocal acquisition of SMBLive here - http://www.reachlocal.com/press/reachlocal-acquires-smblive.
I've started and helped to build a few companies and I've learned a lot of lessons along the way. Of all of the things that I've experienced, what sticks out most for me is that small businesses need help in embracing the web. The opportunity for small businesses to leverage the web to be found by and engage prospects and customers has been largely missed so far. We founded SMBLive and created CloudProfile to address this problem and are now expanding that vision and mission at ReachLocal. We hope that you'll try it and tell us what you think!
A few of the businesses and teams I've had fun building and working with:
- CloudProfile is an awesome tool to help businesses and people to Be Found and Engage online. Developing it is the culmination of a career's worth of hard learning. Constantly evolving it to make it super valuable to its users is the most fun I've ever had. CloudProfile is now in the process of evolving into the Digital Presence platform at ReachLocal, so stay tuned for many updates in the coming months.
- Until the February 2010 acquisition by ReachLocal, SMBLive was the software company behind CloudProfile and also things like BT Tradespace with products that have been used by more than 400 thousand businesses around the world.
- Mural Consulting helps service providers and large businesses to be successful with their online products and services.
- Mural Ventures is the umbrella entity with the dream team behind all of the above.
- Apptix is a company that I co-founded and ran from 2002-2005 that became the world's largest provider of hosted Exchange and SharePoint for smbs, primarily selling/delivering in a private-label model through channel partners.
- TeleComputing is a leading provider of hosted and online application services to smbs in northern Europe. I have TeleComputing and it's shareholders to thank for more experiences in Norway than I care to mention but enjoyed every minute of.
- USWeb where I had the privilege to have fun learning and evolving corporate use of the web. The company is gone, but an incredible network of early and smart web entrepreneurs remains.
- Gensym where I got to enter the working world and geek out helping to build large scale machine learning and control systems.
In the rare moments when I'm not heads down working with small businesses and the channels who serve them, I'm usually either playing with my 5 year old daughter, kayaking, or reading some sci-fi.
You can find out more about my work history by going to my LinkedIn profile or follow me individually on Facebook or Twitter.
Or, easiest of all, just follow me here using the "Follow" button up above.
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