“Ben Finkel is my co-founder here at Jelly. Ben and I have been friends and collaborators for many years. During one of our frequent walk-and-talks around San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Park, we accidentally came up with the idea for Jelly. It was one of those ideas that we couldn’t get out of our heads,” Stone wrote in a blog post on Monday.

Finkel will join Stone at Jelly as CTO of the company, but there is still no word on when Jelly will open its doors. The company is backed by the Obvious Corp., the parent company created by Twitter co-founders and early employees including Stone to incubate a couple of content-related startups like Medium, Branch, and now Jelly.

Finkel originally founded Fluther, a question and answer site that was seed funded by a group of angels including Ron Conway and Marc Andreessen. Stone served as an advisor to the company, and in December 2010, Twitter went ahead and acquired the startup, primarily for the engineering talent behind the company. Finkel then served as a senior software engineer and then engineering manager for Twitter, where he was in charge of user growth.

“Ben managed New User Experience on the Growth Team at Twitter, helping grow an active user base from fifty million to more than two hundred million people,” Stone wrote. That’s certainly no small job, and according to his LinkedIn page, Finkel just departed Twitter last month.

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People are basically good—when provided a tool that helps them do good in the world, they prove it. jellyhq.com/post/466234974…—
Biz Stone (@biz) April 01, 2013

In a blog post titled, “What is Jelly?” Stone didn’t actually explain much what Jelly is, but did hint at a mobile-oriented startup. And yes, the company is based in San Francisco and it’s hiring.

“People are basically good—when provided a tool that helps them do good in the world, they prove it.

Jelly is a new company and product named after the jellyfish. We are inspired by this particular animal because neurologically, its brain is more “we” than “me.” Also, for the past 700 million years, this decentralized structure has been wildly successful.

News of Jelly emerged unexpectedly early so I’ll wait a bit to share more about the team. In the meantime, I’ll say this. Jelly will be for everybody, it will be developed first and foremost for mobile devices, and it will be free. But, it won’t be ready for a while.”

Based on Stone’s past ventures with Twitter and Blogger, it seems likely that Jelly will end up with a social bent. Stone noted that he’ll be focusing mainly on Jelly right now.

He re-launched the Obvious Corp with Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and early Twitter employee Jason Goldman back in June 2011, and so far the umbrella company has launched a few startups, including Medium and Branch, which presumably will be overseen by Stone’s co-founders now.

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A JELLY is a casual working event. People are coming together (in a person’s home, a coffee shop, a public space or an office) to work for the day. Bring a laptop (or whatever you need to get your work done) and a friendly disposition. And you are free to create an interesting program (barcamps, exhibitions, workshops, networking events, exchange programs with other coworking communities etc.) during the jelly week.

Or as the Cohere coworking space blog puts it: “A ‘Jelly’ is like coworking, only without a dedicated space, time or set of attendees.” These meet-ups have obvious networking advantages, as well as reducing loneliness for remote workers usually slaving away in their home offices of at coffee shops, but are also a good way to get the feel of your local coworking community or to discuss setting up a new space if the idea hasn’t yet come to your area.

Organizers are encouraging participants to discuss the purpose and future of the coworking movement when they meet, suggesting questions to discuss such as: What important needs can be fulfilled by coworking? What local and global problems can coworking help solve? How can coworkers use the global coworking infrastructure to foster their businesses and projects? Which people and networks aren’t yet connected to the idea of coworking and should be involved? Organizer Anni Roolf explained in an email: “We are creating a new global work movement at the moment. #JELLYWEEK 2012 will be one milestone. There will be for sure a sustainable outcome of new common projects and structures. And #JELLYWEEK 2013 (again the third week in January) will be another, more developed milestone in the process.”

Primarily a European event last year, the idea has now spread to include 120 jelly hosts in 28 countries. Joining is totally free and more information is available through the Jellyweek website, as well as all the usual social channels as well, including a Twitter feed (complete with hashtag: #JELLYWEEK ) and Facebook group. Hat tip to the Cohere blog for highlighting the event.

Image courtesy of Flickr user philcampbell.

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How are the founders you spoke to doing financially? Is the economic model of coworking tricky to get right or relatively easy to figure out?

Andrew: Before even opening a coworking space, a potential owner needs to find out what the actual local demand is. One of the best ways is to hold a “Jelly.” Find out who is interested. What are they looking for? Facilities, location, mix of businesses in the space, pricing, ratio of full-time to part-time members, open desks vs. dedicated desks vs. private offices? It’s not an exact science. It’s not, “Build it and they will come.” Often, to the dismay of a number of owners who have had to close down their spaces, people are not flocking to their spaces automatically. Owners have to adapt to the local conditions.

Take a look at membership turnover rates. On one hand, high turnover rates can be seen as a sign of instability or that the community is in flux; on the other hand, it can signal that a space attracts and cultivates superstars that are steadily expanding and find they have little choice but to “graduate” and leave for bigger, greener pastures.

Many founders see coworking as a space where businesses get an extra boost and then move on. Brian DiFeo of Hive at 55 told us, “I think inherently there will be a high turnover since successful businesses should grow out of a coworking space.”

Affinity Lab in D.C. has been in operation since 2001, even before coworking was a coined term). Those that leave the Lab go somewhere else because of space constraints. Co-founder Berit Oskey told us, “The businesses that have left and gotten larger office space have done so because they are either tech companies that are taking on more employees, or they are nonprofits that need more space for interns.”

Many businesses and organizations see coworking as an intermediate step in their life cycle. If they are looking for a temporary place test the waters of their business model and viability as companies, coworking can provide the accessible desk space and office facilities with minimal risks.

Genevieve: One of the biggest reasons for a space to close is that it can’t meet the membership threshold to cover the rent and keep the lights on. As a result, one in every five coworking spaces has closed its doors, according to studies done by Emergent Research. So that puts pressure on coworking spaces to decide “what” they want to be and “whom” they target.

For many spaces, it created a tension between wanting to promote the community but also being ruthlessly business-minded so that you can keep your doors open. Spaces try to balance the two.

There are certainly those who advocate for community first; many first-generation coworking spaces focus on that as their primary objective. They want to push a movement, not turn profits. But it’s absolutely essential to espouse good business practices. Jim Graham, co-founder of Satellite Telework Centers told us, “One of the challenges I’ve seen with some coworking spaces is the founders do it for the passion but haven’t developed a solid business plan… This is a business for us, albeit one that we hope helps local residents, local business owners, and the community in general.”

What are some ‘best business practices’ for coworking spaces?

Genevieve: Some ideas touted around include everything from experimenting with membership models (testing the optimum ratio of open desks to private offices) as well as exploring more unconventional practices like private and public sponsorships and franchising.

Gangplank in Arizona is doing interesting things. They are a no-fee model, meaning they don’t charge people to use the space. Instead they rely on “anchor companies” that take on operational responsibility — managing the space and making sure it keeps its doors open. They shoulder the responsibility and the space doesn’t have to hire staff.

They also get sponsorships for Internet access and work out contracts with local government for deals on real estate and electricity. At their two new locations in Avondale and Tucson the local government donated the use of buildings where the space will be housed.

Hive at 55, a space in New York City, is part of the city’s overall urban economic development program to promote its media and technology industries. It received a city grant from the New York City Economic Development Corporation, and partners with Pace University, the Freelancers Union, GuruLoft, Girls in Tech, the Hatchery, and others.

After conducting your research, where do you see coworking going next?

Genevieve: The conversation on coworking is shifting to spreading coworking as a movement to areas outside the usual urban innovation centers like San Francisco and New York City. Once we start talking about coworking as not only a development engine for individuals and startups, and as an engine of growth for local economies, that’s when coworking starts turning heads. Just from my background working on economic development projects overseas, I think what’s exciting about the future of coworking is its enormous potential to spark growth in depressed areas.

Digital technology is leveling the playing field. When I worked in development, microfinance was touted as strategy to get small businesses access to finance to grow their microenterprises. Growth was associated with access to capital. Well, what about access to information and know-how? We should start talking about creativity and innovation as catalysts for economic growth. It counts just as much in expanding any enterprise. Collaborative knowledge sharing is what coworking is about, so in that way coworking is a great way for startups and small companies to access ideas, tips and strategies to get their businesses up to scale and more competitive.

We also see the trend of employees exploring coworking spaces as place to work. As telecommuting and flex work options get more popular among big companies, coworking spaces will start to see an influx of remote workers. That will certainly change the dynamic. Hopefully, the openness and collaboration you see in coworking spaces may start to filter through to corporate culture.

Andrew: Another trend we see is existing spaces expanding to multiple locations. A lot of spaces are expanding as franchises to other locations, rather than creating a giant single space. The Hub, NextSpace, Gangplank, pariSoma Innovation Loft are a few spaces that are rolling out multiple sites. Just like Starbucks, you can’t have a few big Starbucks locations. Coworking spaces need to stay relatively small and localized. People don’t want to travel across the city to go to a big coworking space.

Part of it is to meet the increasing demand for coworking spaces. Faced with a depressed economy, many people are taking the opportunity to start their own businesses. The Atlantic published an article last month on how freelancing is the next ‘Industrial Revolution’. Coworking provides the structure to really make freelancing and startups a preferred work option.

Image courtesy of Flickr user khawkins04.

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I always find that a change of scenery does me good, but considering that I was working in a room with 10 other people, sitting around a conference table, and occasionally getting stuck into conversation, I was surprised at the amount of work I got through (and that’s despite the speed of the Wi-Fi connection getting a little slow with 10 people working away).

If you’re feeling a bit isolated at home (or perhaps you just want to brainstorm some ideas) and would like to try out the coworking experience, but perhaps aren’t quite ready to commit to membership of a coworking space, attending a Jelly would be a good first step.

The first Jelly was started in New York back in 2006 by roommates Amit Gupta and Luke Crawford, who originally wanted to recreate some of the benefits of working from an office (without having to work from an office): brainstorming, sharing and camaraderie. So they started inviting people over to work from their house occasionally, and thus Jelly was born. It’s an idea that has spread worldwide.

The Jelly I attended was organized by CoWorkingWest and held in the nice office space of The Office, Bristol, UK, but Jellies are held in over 100 cities all over the world. (Some of them are even held weekly.) If there isn’t one near you, you can always start your own — you just need to pick a venue and get some people involved. They are often held in people’s houses, but also take place in other locations, like coffee shops and offices. As long as there is space for everyone, power and Wi-Fi, you can have a Jelly.

Have you tried working at Jelly?

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Like many changes in computer science, the rapid shift toward parallel computing is a function of technology trends in hardware. Most technology watchers are familiar with Moore’s Law, and the more general notion that computing performance doubles about every 18-24 months. This continues to hold for disk and RAM storage sizes, but a very different story has unfolded for CPUs in recent years, and it is changing the balance of power in computing — probably for good.

What Moore’s Law predicts, specifically, is the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit. Until recently, these extra transistors had been used to increase CPU speed. But, in recent years, limits on heat and power dissipation have prevented computer architects from continuing this trend. Basically, CPUs are not getting much faster. Instead, the extra transistors from Moore’s Law are being used to pack more CPUs into each chip.

Most computers being sold today have a single chip containing between two and eight processor “cores.” In the short term, this still seems to make our existing software go faster: one core can run operating systems utilities, another can run the currently active application, another can drive the display, and so on. But remember, Moore’s Law continues doubling every 18 months. That means your laptop in nine years will have 128 processors, and a typical corporate rack of 40-odd computers will have something in the neighborhood of 20,000 cores.

Parallel software should, in principle, take advantage not only of the hundreds of processors per machine, but of the entire rack — even an entire data center of machines. Since individual cores will not get appreciably faster, we need massively parallel software that can scale up with the increasing number of cores, or we will effectively drop off of the exponential growth curve of Moore’s Law. Unfortunately, the large majority of today’s software is written for a single processor, and there is no technique known to “auto-parallelize” these programs.

Worse yet, this is not just a legacy software problem. Programmers still find it notoriously difficult to reason about multiple, simultaneous tasks in the parallel model, which is much harder for the human brain to grasp than writing “plain old” algorithms. So this is a problem that threatens to plague even new, greenfield software projects.

There are some precedents for how to overcome this problem. Over the past 20 years, the main bright spot in parallel software development has been in high-volume data analysis. SQL has been a successful massively parallel programming language since the late 1980′s. Many legacy SQL programs parallelize naturally, and every SQL programmer continues to write inherently parallel code.

Unfortunately, SQL represents a tightly scoped (albeit critical) corner of the software industry. But in recent years, a new ecosystem of data-intensive parallel development has been growing around the MapReduce parallel programming framework, which allows programmers to write data-parallel code in familiar languages like C, Java, Python and Perl. In my next post, I’ll talk about how the lessons of SQL and the growing excitement about MapReduce may bring parallelism to a larger swath of the software market.

Joe Hellerstein is a professor of Computer Science at the University of California Berkeley and has written a white paper with more detail on this topic.

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I’ve been fascinated by businesses popping up around major metropolitan areas that create a shared workspace for independent workers. Imran Ali wrote about the trend of co-working spaces back in April, and I’ll be exploring the trend further as I look to set up a co-working space in my town.

Office Nomads in the Seattle area, for example, is a co-working space where workers can leave their homes to work in a shared environment. The company provides:

• Spacious desks
• High-speed internet access, both wifi and ethernet
• Conference rooms
• A kitchen
• Unlimited network printing and faxing
• Couches and lounging area
• The requisite water cooler

They are also dog-friendly.

They target everyone from web designers, writers, consultants and anyone else who has portable work. Pricing ranges from $25 per day for drop-ins to a Regular membership at $375 per month or a Resident membership at $475 per month plus a deposit for a more permanent space.

Imran mentioned a co-working space in his piece called Jelly which is more like a co-working event. The concept is that you can start your own Jelly by opening up your home to other indy workers in your town. You need to provide seating and wireless internet either at your home, a wired cafe or someone’s place of business.

The Jelly wiki now has a page explaining how to hold your own Jelly event. Current Jellies take place around the globe, from Australia, Africa, and Israel to Mexico, China, Canada and the Philippines to random cities across the United States.

For ongoing information about the co-working trend as well as a list of co-working spaces, check out the Coworking Community Blog and keep your eye on WWD as I explore setting up my own Jelly in Anchorage, Alaska.

Details and photos to come.

Have you worked in a co-working space? In your mind, what are the pros and cons?

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Carl’s Jr. Getting Into Original Web Series; burger joint pulling a bud.tv and exploring the notion of launching a branded web comedy series. (The Hollywood Reporter)

Canadian Fight for Net Neutrality; up in arms over Bell Canada’s traffic shaping, Canadians are organizing a rally backed by Google, two political parties and others. (Slashdot)

R.I.P. Broadcast TV? With an abysmal May sweeps, traditional networks could be facing a tipping point in viewer departure. (The LA Times)

Kadokawa Partnering With (Some) YouTube Posters; before sending a takedown notice, Japanese media company will see who posted it and potentially share ad revenue with them. (Variety)

Comcast Adds AnyRoom to On Demand in New England; service lets you start watching VOD program on one TV and finish watching it on another in the same house. (release)

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• Coworking is becoming unhooked from physical places as developments such as Jelly – a monthly 24-hour workathon – enable coworking communities to spring up wherever they’re needed; indeed encouraging gracious hosts to offer their facilities for one-off coworking days.

• Messenger bag gods Timbuk2 were recently persuaded to create some coworking desks that outside workers could use, helping to stimulate the company’s creativity

• Coworkers in Manchester – lacking a dedicated physical space – have been mashing up OpenCoffee networking events with an afternoon of coworking in a borrowed space, such as local company or coffee house. Interestingly, this particular community has somewhat of an agenda in furthering the city’s role as a hub for the digital industries, thought collaborating on startup and technology ideas.

• Still in the UK – Just across the Pennine Mountains in Leeds, that city’s coworking community is running free, ‘open coworking‘ days to attract people into signing up for their plans and encouraging local university students to use the facilities to launch startups as part of a push to create more entrepreneurs in the region.

It’s interesting to see coworking snowballing as a phenomenon, but like many trends originating in dotcom culture, what’ll be most interesting is how these shifts begin to affect larger companies and more traditional employers.

As enterprises belatedly adopted social media and communication as part of their IT infrastructures, how will human resources and more rigid line management begin to accomodate coworkers in their corporate culture?

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Kevin and I are happy to announce the winner of the contest prize package- Ron Pendleton!  Ron was randomly selected from all the entries with the correct answers to the 10 questions we posed for the contest.  Ron will receive his uber-cool prize package as soon as he sends us his shipping information via email (click our contest heads in the right sidebar) including name, address, and phone number for the shipper.  Congratulations Ron and thanks to all who entered!  We love you guys.  :)  Stay tuned for Geekapalooza #6 which will be coming soon.

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