My name is Ben Taylor. I live in North London and am the Managing Director of Shape Factory which I founded in late 2005 (after 3 months surfing in Nosara, Costa Rica). Shape Factory specialises in e-commerce consultancy and the design and build of e-commerce websites and systems using Microsoft .NET and Microsoft Commerce Server. Most of our work is for Tier-1 Consultancies.
Prior to starting Shape Factory I was the CTO of Snow Valley. My early years (circa 1995) were spent writing real-time foreign exchange dealing software (my first and favourite baby is still on sale as the Reuters Deal Tracker Server). The Wayback Machine says that I built the first recorded Snow Valley homepage in 1998 (nice colours!). My later years were spent building and then managing the build of Commerce Server based e-commerce solutions. Overall I had 8+ enjoyable years with Snow Valley.
I also support PlayerPal (reflectoring will cause nausea) which I wrote for myself back in the day, so I could control iTunes/WMP from a browser (and learn this new .NET thingy). I have done bits of Open Source and am currently a developer on dasBlog, the software this blog runs on.
Why am I blogging? Because I need somewhere to keep track of things and Jon Udell convinced me that blogging will give me the best bang for my keystrokes.
And yes. I know the Shape Factory site is terrible.