Ben Brown

About Ben Brown

I have been building online applications and communities since 1995. My personal domain name was launched in 1996.Some highlights:In I cofounded an early web startup called Deepleap that provided an \"intelligent browser assistant\" delivered as a plugin for Netscape Navigator! We had an epic launch party at SXSW but didn\'t tell anyone what our app was!In 2005, CNET Networks purchased the proto-social network I created as a joke that was called Consumating.com. I learned a lot about running a big online community in the days BEFORE Twitter and Facebook.In 2007, my partner Katie Spence and I founded XOXCO to help companies build \"social apps.\" Over the course of almost a decade, we rode the wave of social, mobile and the ecommercialization of everything, building apps, websites and experiences for customers like Disney, The Grammy\'s, Whole Foods, and Unity. In 2015, XOXCO spun out Howdy.ai, a first of its kind premium chatbot application for Slack. I was on stage for the launch of the Slack platform.In 2018 Howdy was acquired by Microsoft!At Microsoft, I was a senior member of the team that shipped the 1.0 version of Bot Framework Composer, a stand-alone authoring tool for conversational AI software. And the 2.0 version!After that, I was part of the team that architected the AI-powered M365 Frontline integrations in Outlook and Teams.

Experience

1. Microsoft Copilot Studio

   Microsoft

   Jan 2024 — Present

   Back into the bots.

Education

• University of Maryland

  Computer Science and Creative Writing

  1996 — 2000

Skills

• Information Architecture
• Start-Ups
• Content Management
• Wordpress
• Community Management
• Web Development
• Product Design
• Social Networking
• Web Application Design
• Web Applications
• Html5
• Strategy
• E-Commerce
• Digital Media
• Web Analytics
• Javascript
• Entrepreneurship
• Community Sites
• Web 2.0
• Mobile Applications
• User Experience
• Social Media
• Responsive Design
• Product Development