At the beginning of this year, Elsevier acquired Newsflo, a unique media monitoring tool to allow academics to get additional “impact” metrics, in additional to the traditional citation metrics, on your Mendeley profiles.

Since then, co-founders Freddie Witherden and Ben Kaube have moved into the Mendeley offices, with all our glory of unlimited coffee and diverse amounts of cereal. Learn more about these two entrepreneurs, who are simultaneously balancing running a start-up while finishing their PhDs.

Freddie Witherden

Freddie studied Physics with Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London between 2008–2012 earning an MSci degree with first class honours. In 2012, he co-founded Newsflo as a means of helping academics track, record, and curate their engagement with the media. Parallel to this, Freddie also started a PhD in computational fluid dynamics, also at Imperial College London, and is hoping to submit his thesis later this year.

How do you describe your role at Newsflo and within the Mendeley Team?

Newsflo will provide Mendeley users with the ability to see the coverage that their own research is generating in the media along with that of their peers. My role is within Newsflo is to ensure that the technology works at the scale of the Mendeley user base.

 What is your favourite part about working for Mendeley?

My favourite part of working for Mendeley is the people. And Beer o’clock!

What do you enjoy doing in your free time?

I’ve heard about this ‘free time’ thing, but am consistently struggling to get my hands on any.

 

Ben Kaube

Ben co-founded Newsflo while working on his PhD in computational quantum mechanics at Imperial College London. His focus is on plasmonic materials which could eventually be applied to futuristic technologies including superlenses and invisibility cloaks. Ben said he and Freddie founded Newsflo because “We wanted to help researchers tell the public about their research and make sure they received recognition for this societally important service.” He is now a Product Manager for Newsflo.

How do you describe your role at Newsflo and within the Mendeley Team?

As a Newsflo founder I ended up doing a little bit of everything from tweaking our algorithms to getting feedback from researchers at our development partner institutions. Being a small team taking on a big problem it often felt like running from one mini-crisis to another.

Now, as part of the Mendeley team, we can share the work with some very talented people, freeing up bandwidth for improving newsflo and managing the integration with Mendeley. Day to day that means working with everyone from the developers to the community team to integrate and grow Newsflo as smoothly as possible.

 What is your favourite part about working for Mendeley?

I’ve been a longstanding Mendeley user, so I relish the opportunity to help make a great tool even better. The productive chaos of the Mendeley offices feels a lot like what we were used to at Newsflo (just a bit bigger and with more types of cereal available!) so I feel right at home.

What do you enjoy doing in your free time?

In my spare time I like enjoy running, reading pretentious books and making the most of living in London.