It was a privilege for the COC to be treated to a live demo of this great product Alex List at MIT at our SEMU Entrepreneurs Meetup on January 4, 2012. Now the power to file share is literally at the touch of your fingertips with Swyp: http://swyp.us/.
Coworking; The space between home and work
When Inc. went virtual last month, reporter Sarah Kessler knew that working from her tiny Brooklyn apartment wasn’t going to facilitate her sanity. Instead, she used the month to sample a variety of New York coworking locations, which offer community and workspace to solo workers. Here are Sarah's eight reasons why a coworking space is better than working from home or the neighborhood café.
1. No Guilt
Resorting to hourly coffee purchases might be the best way to avoid glares from café employees after you plunk yourself down for an eight-hour work day at one of their tables. But you don’t have to feel guilty about working at a coworking space. You can plug in your laptop and take that phone call without the guilt of breaking the vibe.
2. Meet Potential Clients
When an entrepreneur who was working at Hive at 55, a non-profit coworking space in lower Manhattan that is run by the downtown alliance, needed some bookkeeping help, director Daria Siegal matched him with a CPA who had also worked at the Hive. Darrell Silver, the founder of Perpetually.com, met and hired his programmer at New Work City. Coworking spaces are abound with stories of connections that led to business.
3. The Office Set Up
The desk chair can be a seriously under-appreciated piece of office equipment unless you are forced to leave it behind. Coworking allows you to enjoy desk chairs (with wheels and back support!) as well as enough desk room to spread out all of your computer equipment, papers, and work utensils. At Hive at 55, once you stake out a spot on a desk, you’re welcome to leave your things there overnight so that you can pick up right where you left off in the morning. New Work City another coworking space in Manhattan, provides lockers to full-time members in order to facilitate a similar concept. The workspace at In Good Company, a coworking space for female entrepreneurs, is pictured above.
4. Network Without Trying
You could drag yourself to after-work networking events, speakers, and conferences. Or, you could meet dozens of people with interesting projects by simply working alongside them during the day, as pictured here at New Work City. Several spaces even have community organizers, who are responsible for knowing everybody’s business and making introductions between people who might be able to help each other.
5. The Water Cooler Community
After overhearing a discussion about an exceptional sandwich place near Coworking Brooklyn, which resides in The Change You Want to See art gallery (pictured above), I asked where it was. Instead of relating the cross-streets, my coworkers invited me to lunch with them. I not only had the scoop on the best lunch spot in the area, but somebody to eat with. I found similar sanity-preserving chit-chat happening around communal coffee troughs and printers at all of the spaces I visited.
6. Legitimate Meeting Space
Although you might be comfortable working from your tiny apartment kitchen, it’s hardly a place that you’d like to invite clients. Belonging to a coworking space often includes access to conference rooms, which can lend some credibility to your business meetings. The Hive at 55 has a conference room that seats 12 people around a table and has a projector. Try pulling that off in your kitchen.
7. Pick Your Niche
You may be the sole employee of your company, but with coworking, you can still enjoy the benefits of being surrounded by people who are doing similar work. Coworking spaces are developing for just about every niche: The Metropolitan Exchange in Brooklyn caters specifically to architects, urban planners, and industrial designers; Green Space Manhattan hosts sustainable small businesses; Cubes & Crayons in San Francisco combines coworking and childcare; and In Good Company in New York (pictured above) was started by a pair of consultants to serve the needs of female entrepreneurs.
8. Learn Something
Most coworking spaces host events and seminars that appeal to their members. In Good Company, for instance, offers monthly talks with successful female entrepreneurs, four-session classes on case study growth strategies, and expert panels on specific business topics. New Work City has hosted events ranging from “How to Start a Cupcake Business” to a hackathon that developed a new technology to help the recovery effort in Haiti. –Sarah Kessler
Had a great meetup today for SEMU (South End MeetUps) Entrepreneurs. Heard some interesting projects, including a new release on awesome new app that will go open source end of this month. Will provide details soon.
A couple of Photos of the event (before camera died)
Thank you to all the entrepreneurs who braved the cold to attend the meetup. If you wish to sign up for this meetup please follow the link below:
http://www.meetup.com/SEMU-boston-entrepreneurs/
This Friday we will be hosting one for Social Impact Catalysts and one week from next Monday January 16, will be the first SEMU Creative Wizards for 2012! Links for meetups are below:
http://www.meetup.com/SEMU-Social-Impact-Catalysts-The-SIC-Group/
http://www.meetup.com/SEMU-Creative-Wizards-Group/
Connect, communicate and collaborate, at Darryl's Cloud Office & Cafe!
Event will officially start at 12pm, however attendees are free to come into the space from from 8am to 4pm for a free day pass! Complimentary coffee and tea will be provided. The event will start with about 30 minutes of mingling, followed possibly by an informal roundtable discussion/introduction where all attendees can introduce themselves and have the opportunity to give a description of their project, idea or cause they wish to address,s as well as discuss any resource they would recommend to other catalysts. Then we will open the floor to suggestions for topics, events, scheduling, and other details for future meetups. For more details and to sign up, just follow this link: http://www.meetup.com/SEMU-Social-Impact-Catalysts-The-SIC-Group/
We are glad to announce that we are working on a partnership with the Symphony UPS store right on the Huntington Avenue. What does it mean for you as a co-worker? They will waive the mailbox setup fee if you are member of the Cloud Office & Cafe! That's $25 in your pocket! So, the only thing you need to become a free agent or start a business on the side is our $49 Sometime membership and $30 personal box from the UPS and a visit to the townhall for the DBA certificate! Did you know that they have a $99 year package mailbox? To summarize, for $89 a month you can be on the way to personal freedom from corporate servitude, or earn extra dollars for a better living!
New meetup, SEMU Creative Wizards, Monday December 12, at 12pm!
We'll have coffee.
Startup entrepreneurs, your meetup in the South End is calling. At Darryl's Cloud Office & Cafe on 604 Columbus Avenue.
http://www.meetup.com/SEMU-boston-entrepreneurs/
See you there!
Beruk
Come down to the Cloud Office & Cafe on Wednesday November 30 at 12pm for the first SEMU Startup Entrepreneurs Group! Coffee, tea and snacks will be provided. For more details and to RSVP follow this link:
http://www.meetup.com/SEMU-boston-entrepreneurs/
Look forward to seeing you all there!
Beruk
This is a intriguing story provided by Deskmag [http://www.deskmag.com/], in which a member of a coworking space, got elected to the German parliament! The distinguished member of parliament is Simon Kowalewski from the Pirate Party (no seriously, it is an actual party) that rode in on a surge of frustration that German citizens have had with the status quo and the party gained 15 of 152 seats. When asked about the connection between coworking principles and how he approaches politics he summed it rather nicely:
Coworking is a liquid system. I do not have a fixed desk, but work where it suits me. I can sit with the people, or work with the infrastructure that I need for just one project. This is the same way we work in the Pirate Party up to the European level.
Simon is in fact looking to utilize the elements of coworking that were part of his experience at Yorck52 (the coworking space he operated out of) to change how his government operates:
We have already set down targets in that direction. These include, for example, the right of every member to have a laptop. Not just a computer for a desk, but specifically a laptop they can bring with them everywhere, so they can work outside of parliament.
Additionally, we are aiming at a more flexible seating arrangements in parliament. As a member, you often work on different topics with different people across party lines. It would obviously be more useful if the parliamentary seating arrangement could be composed by topic or project, and not a rigid seating order according to party.
Furthermore, each member is entitled to use a small office. We are currently trying to pool our space allocation into one large room which mulitple people can use, and not small offices for just two or three people. Unfortunately the building isn’t yet aligned for this use, except for the meeting rooms.
To read the full interview, just follow this link:http://www.deskmag.com/en/coworking-gets-political-power-163
Beware Germany, there be pirates in the parliament! Avast!
When trying to explain the value and benefits of coworking to those who are unfamiliar with the general concept, it can be challenging to boil it down into short concise points. This post on the website for Cohere http://coherecommunity.com/ a coworking space in Fort Collins Colorado focuses on the potential impact these spaces have on the local economy.
The article focuse on 3 ways that coworking helps a local economy:
To view the whole post simply follow the link here: http://coherecommunity.com/blog/why-a-coworking-space-is-important-to-the-local-economy
Beruk
This is an interview of two editors for Night Owls Press [http://www.nightowlspress.com/], Genevieve DeGuzman and Andrew Tang regarding their upcoming book, Working in the UnOffice: A Guide to Coworking for Indie Workers, Small Businesses, and Nonprofits [http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/09/26/working-in-the-unoffice-the-lonely-planet-of-coworking-guidebooks/].
It appears to be one of the few official guide books that documents the coworking movement in the US. The article is a great read, of particular interest was this statement below:
The growth of coworking spaces around the globe and in the U.S. alone has been phenomenal. Coworking spaces since 2005 have mushroomed in more than 50 countries around the world, numbering more than 64 in the Western U.S. alone. Deskwanted, a coworking marketplace and directory, listed 820 spaces globally as of May 2011, a 17% increase between February and May alone.Deskmag’s latest findings show that coworking’s 380 spaces in North America are thriving— experiencing a 12% growth spurt in the same period. By the end of 2011, experts predict that the number of spaces will increase by 50 percent worldwide, a veritable coworking boom.
It is our hope that the COC will do its part to contribute to that trend.
We have a new cloudcart! It is faster, stronger, better...and it looks nice. It of course enables cloud based peripheral services, and is mobile.
Cloud Office & Cafe, workspace on demand.
