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Coworking news & views.
📰 “Office sharing among strangers” – WSJ, Dec 2009 #
Sammy Rosen and Susan Dorsch shared an article from the WSJ about this crazy idea of sharing offices (and beanbags) with strangers. From 2009.
It featured some of the first coworking spaces in the US (Office Nomads, Souk, New Work City, and The Coop) and although many of those spaces may no longer be running today, many of their members and operators can be found across the industry today leading technology, HR, community, consulting and other coworking-supporting companies.
👉 Read this.
🤷♀️ Flex deals are getting confusing #
Liz Elam highlights how flex deals can get pretty darn confusing pretty damn quick when CRE brokerages, investments, representation, white label providing, flex network providing and coworking brands collide.
👉 Read this.
💡 Co-living brand partners with workspace booking app #
Gravity Co-Living shared that they’ve partnered with Hubble to give their members access to hundreds of coworking spaces via the Hubble Pass offering.
Not sure exactly what the terms are, but seems that members of Gravity get free credits for coworking spaces. For one, I’m excited about booking platforms pushing out and exploring new partnerships and interfaces for driving more demand to coworking spaces.
👉 Read this.
🇮🇪 No. of remote working hubs in Ireland to pass 300 this year #
Blathnaid O’Dea shares some interesting notes from the first National Hubs Summit in Athlone. Namely that the governments network will boast over 300 spaces, that some 5,500 remote workers benefitted from free hotdesks via their voucher scheme and that 10k people would be registered on their remote workspace booking platform by the end of the year.
Minister for Rural and Community Development Heather Humphreys, TD shared that her “department alone has invested over €100m in developing state-of-the-art remote working facilities in every county in Ireland”. Keep an eye on Ireland folks.
👉 Read this.
📜 A look back at investment bank’s Smart Working floorplan #
Phil Kirschner shares the floor plan that made him famous in the flex-space and workspace world. The graphic shows Credit Suisse’s Smart Working floor in NYC that they helped plan, build and run for almost 10 years.
It includes home zones, business gardens, focus zones, project zones and refresh areas, and may be especially useful for folks thinking about the design and planning of their flex workspaces.
👉 Read this.
📆 Flex workspace provider launches event service #
Adam Goldstein and the WorkBistro team have launched FlowSpace to create “beautiful and engaging events spaces”. It’s a fairly new offering, but they bring together space, service and proximity – an interesting move. I think we’ll see more experiments in merged services for niche markets over the next couple of months, and I’ll keep an eye on this one.
👉 Read this.
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💻 Coworking technology.
📦 Space automation gets deeper with mailroom integration #
Syncaroo announced a sneak-peek at PilotoMail’s incoming integration with Nexudus, which goes into pilot testing in December.
The two-way sync is the first public integration announced by Syncaroo within operating ‘core’ of flex spaces, and automates the transfer of member and charge data between the two systems.
👉 Read this.
Coworking data.
Coworking market moves.
🇬🇧 UK flex space brand at 66% of crowdfunding target. #
Co-Space who describe themselves as “a design-led flexible office operator focused on affluent towns and cities outside central London” are raising £500k on crowdfunding platform Envestors. At time of curation they’ve raised £330k of that target.
What’s interesting is to take a look at their metrics since 2018, with two sites operating at over 90% occupied, and 5 more sites planned or being negotiated.
👉 Read this.
🇩🇪 Whitelabel flexspace operator launches in Germany #
infinitSpace have announced their first project in Germany. The firm, who plans, launches and runs flex spaces on behalf of landlords is launching the 5YN3RGY project over 4.5k sqm (approx. 48,437 sqft) with the CODIC Development real estate company.
👉 Read this.
🚚 Co-warehousing co raises $35M #
Saltbox shared the closing of their Series B round, bringing in more capital to scale up and improve logistics for modern small businesses. In the announcement Tyler Scriven confirms that the firms focus is to keep serving SMBs as they grow.
I know a whole lot of spaces in the US, Canada and the UK are exploring adding warehousing and logistics offerings to their offerings to better serve the growing demand from indie ecommerce companies and direct-to-consumer brands.
👉 Read this.
🎙 Coworking conversations.
Jose Antonio Morales, Bernie Mitchell and Maria do Ceu Bastos discuss rural coworking’s new shifts and old values on the Coworking Values podcast.
Andrew Deverell-Smith chats with Jamie Hodari and Alain Brossé from Industrious about their view on the future of flex space on the devcast podcast.
Liz Elam chats with Alex West Steinman and Erinn Farrell from The Coven on the GCUC podcast.
Jamie Russo and Chelsea Siver discuss some of the challenges of the community manager job, handling prospective members that don’t “fit” and scaling a team across locations on the Everything Coworking podcast.
Giovanni Palavicini, Jamie Russo, Mike Daugherty and John Herring discuss FUSE’s extraordinary founding team and how they’re building their dream coworking business on the Flex Uncensored podcast.