About Ben Lucier

Hey, thanks for visiting! My name is Ben Lucier, a self-proclaimed “Community Guy”, who takes his responsibilities seriously.

I’m Toronto-based and have invested more than 18 years of my professional career working mostly in a startup capacity for leading edge Internet Access, hosting and telecommunications companies.

Currently, I’m the guy in charge of social media and community engagement for Tucows, one of the oldest and most recognized Internet companies. In the early days of the world wide web, Tucows has become famous thanks to its extremely large software download mirrors and today, through its OpenSRS brand, Tucows has established itself as the 3rd largest domain name registrar globally with more than 10 million domains under management and 10 thousand reseller partners that include high profile webhosts, design agencies and other online service providers.

In addition to my professional career, I’m an active member of the Toronto tech community. Until recently, I was the Board Chair of the Little Geeks Foundation started by my friend Andy Walker. Little Geeks is a federally registered charitable foundation that has changed the lives of more than a thousand great Toronto area families by providing them refurbished computers, software and Internet access.

In 2008, I served on the Board of Directors for the Toronto Internet Exchange (TorIX), Canada’s largest peering centre located at 151 Front Street West, serving a sustained 13 gigabits of traffic per second to TorIX network peers located at 151 Front Street, Canada’s largest telecommunications carrier hotel.

Professionally, I’ve invested 18 years of my career knee deep with Canadian CLECs, Broadband ISPs and Webhosting startups in nearly every capacity. From Technical Support and Customer Service, Network Administration, Sales Engineering, Marketing and Product Development and Project Management and Business Process Design.

In addition to my role at Tucows, Point of Presence Technologies, HIP Communications, Accelerated Connections, Managed Network Systems, Optel (aka Pathway/Axxent Corp), InQuent Technologies (aka Webhosting.com), and Radiant Communications are some of the organizations that have all benefited from my entrepreneurial drive and executive management experience.

Over the past few years, I’ve also turned into a bit of a photography nut, with a quickly growing collection of photos on my Flickr page.

The hobby obsession began with the photo (above), taken by Ashley Hutcheson for a Globe and Mail article I was featured in about Hosted PBX technologies. The closer was during the Mesh Conference in May 2007, as I watched with envy as Rannie Turingan, Rob Hyndman, Mark McKay and a slew of others snapping pics in less than perfect lighting with their digital SLRs. I couldn’t resist the temptation; that evening I found myself at Henry’s picking up a brand new Canon 30D. I’ve since purchased the new 40D and Heather is the proud owner of the most expensive hand-me-down ever.

This is my personal blog, a journal of my observations about technology, customer engagement in the world of social media.

You can e-mail me at BL[at]benlucier[dot]ca, call me at 416.418.4601 or come find me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/benlucier.