I've joined Royal Bank of Scotland's Bizcrowd

If you’ve been thinking I’ve been light here on the posts recently, I can explain.

I don’t write Mobile Industry Review full time, you see.

Now and again I have had the opportunity to do so. But consulting usually gets in the way. My wife’s curtain habit doesn’t fund itself.

Most recently I was working at Reed Exhibitions in Richmond-upon-Thames (about 20 minutes outside the capital, for anyone international). Two weeks ago, I accepted the role as Head of Bizcrowd at Royal Bank of Scotland (and NatWest).

As you might imagine I’ve been spending untold amounts of time getting stuck into that. Bizcrowd, if you haven’t come across it, is a B2B community for UK-based small-to-medium sized enterprises (“SMEs”). It launched formally in late January this year and it’s going very well. It’s backed by one of the country’s largest banks and it’s prime focus is helping connect businesses to each other. You can certainly use it as an individual too. If you’re looking for a plumber, or an accountant, or if you just want to ask a question to a particular industry, Bizcrowd can help — and it’s free to use.

I strongly recommend trying out the ‘need’ functionality. We’ve been using it regularly to help find suppliers for some of the products we need and it’s been working nicely. You post what you’re looking for (e.g. “I’d like to get some lanyards produced”) and give a bit of detail. That post is then emailed to hundreds (or in many cases, thousands) of businesses who’ve subscribed (free) to get relevant updates. Replies start arriving rather quickly. You don’t actually transact via Bizcrowd, it’s just helping connect the dots.

It’s also rather useful to be able to ask a question — for example, if you’re wondering about a particular issue, you can post up your text and you’ll get qualified replies from businesses. Rather useful when you don’t quite know what you’re looking for. It’s basically fixing the sort of thing that search engines or basic listing sites can’t really help with.

Please do take a look, give it a go at www.bizcrowd.com — and let me know what you think? If you’ve got any suggestions or if you’ve any content or partnership ideas, do let me know. As always I’m ewan@mobileindustryreview.com or you can reach me at Bizcrowd via ewan.macleod (at) rbs.co.uk.