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🎉 Coworking celebrations.
🏆 Flexible Space Association 2023 awards announced #
The Flexible Space Association hosted their 2023 Awards Gala, bestowing awards on a number of coworking and flex space brands.
Winners were: Huckletree Oxford Circuse (Workspace Design), Wizu Workspace, Sheffield (Service Innovation), NCG (Tech Innovation), DeskLodge (Environmental, Social & Governance Initiative). Clockwise Edinburgh Leith, Hope Park Workspaces, Nene Business Centre, Inigo Cheltenham and Clockwise Wood Green won regional awards for Excellence in Customer Service.
👉 Read this.
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✊ Coworking impact.
👏 Firm switches from discounts to donations for BF #
Spacemade switched away from "the typical discount hustle" for Black Friday this year, instead donating £50 (~$63) for each new member who signs up before Christmas to the charity In Kind Direct, who facilitate the redistribution of surplus goods from companies to charities, promoting sustainability and community well-being. Nice.
👉 Read this.
🇦🇺 Hub Australia also run free membership program #
John Preece reminds purpose-driven businesses that Hub Australia’s Flexi-impact Program provides a set number of free memberships each year. We saw something similar from Workbar in the US last week.
👉 Read this.
Coworking news & views.
✅ How to get the keys to underutilized buildings around you #
Platform Places put together a pretty thorough guide for placemakers who’d like to go about getting access to managing underutilized space or buildings around their neighborhoods.
A good starting point for any operators who walked past an empty building and though "what if?".
👉 Read this.
🇬🇧 Do you know the one about a policeman, lawyer, church and coworking? #
Karen Tait reshared Eddie Whittingham’s coworking-story so far. In short it includes being a police officer for almost a decade, qualifying as a lawyer, realizing he hated it, starting a cyber-security firm, experiencing a coworking space, selling that business, buying an 1891 chapel in Salford (near Manchester) and building a local coworking community from within their walls.
👉 Read this.
🤳 Are “instagrammable offices” the next big design trend? #
Amol Sarva shares a piece in the NYTimes that digs into how ‘office envy’ may be a tool in luring young workers back, noting that this was part of what Knotel was driving for years before the pandemic.
I talk often about creating spaces and services for local niches like Etsy sellers, podcasters, jewelry-makers, artists and others. But have you started/been adding ‘instagrammable elements’ that may be shared online when people pop in to the office?
TBH, folks would probably post to TikTok these days, but "TikTokable" doesn’t have the same ring does it?
👉 Read this.
💡 3 ways to create a Virtual Office client-community #
I’ve heard often that corporate and virtual office clients don’t always contribute to the community of local coworking spaces. Rose Rivera from PilotoMail shares 3 tips for bringing Virtual Office clients into your wider coworking community.
As for corporate workers? That’s an interesting topic I’ll try find some resources on. Written one? Share it with us here.
👉 Read this.
🤔 Who could land up owning WeWork? #
CoStar digs into how WeWork’s proposed new post-bankruptcy ownership is shaping up. Spoiler: a bunch of US investment firms may sit aside SoftBank. Referred to as the "ad hoc" group, 7 firms own about $1.14B in WeWork secured ‘notes’ and have agreed to let go of their debt in exchange for equity in the company (a deal that still needs to be formally approved by the bankruptcy court).
According to the story, only SoftBank and one third-party investor have abstained from agreeing to such ‘swap’ terms.
👉 Read this.
📝 Some thoughts on where tech and humans overlap in coworking #
Jessica Samson shares thoughts from the Humans + Tech Panel at GCUC UK earlier in November.
In short? "Tech is magnificently powerful, it doesn’t need to be as in your face as an advertising hologram, it can be operationally effective, cost-saving in the long run and nobody needs to know it’s being used."
Yes. Exactly.
👉 Read this.
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💻 Coworking technology.
👍 Still playing catching up after every day out of the office? #
Syncaroo dropped a quick video teasing how Assistant turns catching up with new bookings, description or price changes into 1 click – and not scrolling through 10+ browser tabs or web apps.
Full Disclosure: I write a lot of the code that goes right into Syncaroo Assistant, and I cannot contain how excited I am about the ways in which operators in the beta are leveraging live data and alerts to be able to spend more human-time on tours, chatting with members and exploring new opportunities.
👉 Read this.
🇬🇧 Office-sharing platform launches in UK #
Jasper Squier introduces OfficeShare(.io) a marketplace for fractional office space, ie where businesses can rent out their spare desk space to other businesses. They’re currently sourcing hosts, but this sits quite firmly within two growing markets (part-time offices and subleased space) that overlap heavily with ‘traditional’ coworking space offerings.
Opportunity? Threat? Time will tell.
👉 Read this.
🤓 Easily the geekiest video I’ve EVER shared. #
I’ve been a web developer for far longer than I’ve been involved with coworking, and sometimes I see developers building super creative things that I just have to share.
In this screen recording, we see a demo built by Bjørn Staal that shows how what’s on a browser tab can be affected by where it sits on a screen and most interestingly what other tabs sit near it.
What has this got to do with coworking? Probably nothing. Or it could maybe inspire whole new interfaces, interactions and ways of using web apps. Maybe?
👉 Read this.
🆕 One Coworking shares 4 new updates #
Christoph Fahle shares that November has been great for One Coworking. From onboarding Prezi as a new customer, to hitting a new record in number of day passes sold, and a new partnership with the creators of Polkadot to create a new peer-to-peer workspace network. The fourth? A new marketplace product for connecting teams with their ideal permanent coworking spaces.
👉 Read this.
📲 Coworking conference launches “roaming” service #
Helga shares slides from Coworking Europe’s introduction of "Space Roamer" – a kind of secondary network to let operators sell their members access to other participating spaces.
The slides feature some information, but others raise more questions (at least for me who connects space tech as a living) that they answer.
👉 Read this.
Coworking data.
🏴 Group maps out Scottish coworking hubs #
The Melting Pot built a Google Map of coworking hubs across Scotland. Designed to answer a question they get often, ""Where can I find something like The Melting Pot Edinburgh in xyz?", it’s always fascinating to see the spread of national coworking spaces – both geographically but also by type and/or sector they serve.
👉 Read this.
🧩 What put flex on the map anyways? #
The Instant Group shares data around what makes "flexible workspace more appealing than other types of office space".
In short? It’s all about your people and the way they make working from your spaces feel great. 50% of survey respondents claim that ‘friendly staff’ was the reason they prefer working from a flex space, with clean/modern environments and multiple types of space coming in tied for second with 36%. Cost only got 19% of the vote, with "Trusted Brand (29%) and sense of community (33%) both scoring higher.
👉 Read this.
🤑 Which lead gen tools are essential? #
Helga Moreno shared poll results from a Coworking Europe session where attendees were asked "which 3 lead gen tools are most essential to your coworking space?"
Not surprising, website/seo topped the results with 35% of the votes. What’s interesting is that this was followed by paid ads (20%), PR & Reviews (15%) and events (14%).
👉 Read this.
Coworking market moves.
🇩🇪 German WeWork subsidiary files for bankruptcy #
Although it was mentioned that only WeWork’s US network would be affected by their recent Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, it seems that one of the subsidiaries of WeWork Germany has also filed for bankruptcy. The firm’s spokeswoman did mention that this insolvency was "an exception" for the German market, and as part negotiations with landlords, the decision was made not to pursue the Turmstrasse 25 project any further.
Documents show that WeWork Germany boss Katharina von Schacky tapped insolvency lawyer Carlos Mack as MD for the Turmstrasse subsidiary in October. It’s worth noting that Mack also manages 5 other subsidiaries owned by WeWork Germany.
👉 Read this.
🏅 Ever hear about the free innovation community in East London? #
Timothy Barnes shares info about one of East London’s best kept secrets, SHiFT. An ecosystem of innovators, opportunities and partnerships launched in 2022 to leverage the Olympic Park built for the London 2012 Games to regenerate the area.
With a free, but highly vetted, application process, it’s an interesting model that we may soon start seeing other cities or regional governments implementing.
👉 Read this.
📱 On-demand booking app Flow gets acquired by Brave #
Flow have announced to their members and partner spaces that Brave have acquired their business.
The network and tech is expected to become part of the stack powering Brave’s community and pay-as-you-go app, probably lined up alongside or merged with the tech provided by PONT (which we explored a little last week).
👉 Read this.
🇬🇧 Blackstone’s flex brand becomes largest in London & gets a rebrand #
ICYMI: The Office Group (TOG) was mostly acquired by Blackstone at a valuation of $640M in 2017. In 2022 TOG merged with with Brockton Capital’s Fora, which was valued at £1.5 billion ($1.9 billion) at the time of the merger.
Together the brands run 70 locations, 61 of which are in central London – making them by their own accounts the largest flex operator in the UK capital. A recent press release also announced that they would rebrand all the workspaces under the "Fora" brand.
👉 Read this.
🎙 Coworking conversations.
Hattie Walker-Arnott explores Custom GPTs, what are they, why do we need them and how can we use them in real estate on the Property 3.0 podcast.
Shai Fogel joins Jamie and Gio on the Flex Uncensored podcast, sharing about how Mindspace expand profitably into new markets, integrating hospitality into sales processes, the differences in F&B prefs between Europe and the US and more.
📆 Coworking events.
🗽 Proptech + flex space roundtable in NYC #
Dec 15: Caleb Parker and Hector Kolonas (me) are back with another NYC IRL roundtable meetup for 20-or-so technology and coworking space leaders. Join us for a casual discussion about what our businesses could look and feel like in 2024 and beyond.
👉 Read this.