GigaOM » LiquidSpace

Opportunities and risks in the share economy

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 06:55:27 +0000

Owning physical items — cars, apartments, office space — has both lost some of its luster and will be increasingly inefficient for a global market. It is shifts like these, combined with catalysts like mobile technology, that are driving a greater interest in the share economy, which can broadly be defined as a marketplace where business models are built around consumers choosing access rather than ownership. Key sectors in the share economy include car sharing, vacation sharing, office sharing, and ride sharing. Each has its own set of companies to watch, as well as its own opportunities and risks.

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How emerging technologies will influence collaboration

David Coleman — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 06:55:35 +0000

Workplaces are changing because of trends like BYOD and gamification. But other emerging technologies are also altering not only what our work and space look like but also how we collaborate on that work. This piece delves into the different types of collaboration to provide a baseline of concepts. It then examines how emerging technologies like driverless cars, brain science, and 3D printers are being used to further collaboration in the near and far future. These advancements will not only support more and better types of collaboration in the workplace but will also impact where we work, what a workspace is, what we work on (literally), and how we share our work.

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Design stores doubling as coworking spaces

Jessica Stillman — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 13:03:58 +0000

The web, one observer recently argued, is transforming all our public spaces into coffee shops. Fast internet connections mean fewer of us need to go to the office, for example. Where do we end up instead? Coffee shop type environments. Online shopping, likewise, may transform retail stores into relaxing spaces to ogle products, pick up goods and, of course, down some caffeine. Universities? Online education is pushing them the same way.

If you buy this argument that many types of public spaces are converging on this coffee-shop-like future, then perhaps the latest development in the evolution of coworking won’t surprise you. If both work spaces and shopping spaces are becoming more like coffee shops, why not have them occupy the same space?

That’s what a handful of design and home furnishing stores are doing, inviting coworkers into their tastefully designed showrooms to work. Konzepp, a concept store in Hong Kong, combines the functions of boutique, events space, cafe and coworking space, while in Texas District Workplace coworking has set up shop in Austin Business Furniture. In Hawaii, The Box Jelly coworking makes its home in furnishings store fishcake.

The concept, as Shareable’s Beth Buczynski points out, is clearly an effort by furniture sellers to understand and market themselves to the growing coworking movement. Buczynski writes:

Every work space, whether it’s a large coworking facility or a home office, needs chairs, desks, tables, lamps, file cabinets, and various other tools of the trade. Office furniture companies want to meet those needs, and several have discovered that coworking is a great way to gain exposure among the independent workforce.

“Over the past several years I’ve had the opportunity to meet with most of the major furniture providers: Haworth, Herman Miller and Steelcase,” said Mark Gilbreath, founder and CEO of LiquidSpace. “They are all quite aware of the coworking movement, so no surprise to see them dipping their toes into the water. It’s a natural thing for them to do as they observe changes in the work behaviors of their major corporate clients (eg steady shift toward mobility) and seek to apply their knowledge of what makes for a great/productive/healthy/high performance space to the new places where work happens.”

Steelcase has taken a number of experimental steps to understand this new world. They’ve operated Workspring in Chicago for 2+ years (not a coworking space, but an incredibly cool collaborative workspace that can be booked for off-site collaborative meetings) and also operate the 654 Crowswell coworking space in Grand Rapids Michigan

Unsurprisingly given the communitarian leanings of Shareable (the hint is in the title), Buzcsynski advocates welcoming retailers to the coworking fold. “Are businesses advancing their own agenda by offering space to coworkers at no charge? Absolutely. But the onus is on the coworking movement to respond in the spirit of collaboration and community. These values minimize competition and nurture the health of small businesses and local economies. If non-coworking businesses understand those goals and want to lend a hand in their own unique way, why exclude them?” she concludes.

But others in the movement are more skeptical about the interest from retailers, suggesting that their participation in the scene could dilute the spirit of community support that coworking strives for. “It is pretty clear that coworking is the afterthought not the focus,” Liz Elam, founder of Link Coworking in Austin and producer of the Global Coworking Unconference Conference, says of these retailers-slash-space providers. “It’s like people working in hotel lobbies. It’s not the primary business and I think you would always feel like a squatter,” she says.

Should coworking fans welcome retailers with open arms or regard them with suspicion?

Image courtesy of Flickr user yutaka-f.

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Bay Area cities using coworking to cut carbon, boost growth

Jessica Stillman — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 13:05:56 +0000

Coworking can provide independent pros with great spaces in which to work and network, but shared work spaces are also good for the local communities surrounding them. NextSpace, for instance, has leveraged this fact to win the backing of the local governments for its spaces , while rural communities in Appalachia are looking to coworking to spur local economic development. Now workspace locating app LiquidSpace is getting involved in the trend, partnering with three Bay Area cities to connect underutilized public spaces with laptop-toting independent workers.

LiquidSpace has partnered with Santa Cruz, Palo Alto and San Francisco to list 27 workspaces in 16 government buildings (mostly libraries), including previously and independently listed Bay Area government spaces from Sonoma to San Mateo. The aims of the partnership are twofold. Firstly, the city governments believe that keeping more commuters closer to home will mean more dollars spent in the local community.

“Over 30 percent of our local work force commutes to Silicon Valley on a daily basis, and so we’ve recognized the tremendous opportunity to create more opportunities for our citizens to work closer to home. Supporting mobile working is absolutely vital to the economic health and well being of the community,” said former mayor of Santa Cruz, Ryan Coonerty. And Sid Espinosa, the former mayor of Palo Alto agreed:

Here in Palo Alto we’re specifically engaging in a number of public and private partnerships with local tech companies like LiquidSpace. We not only want to support the companies that keep the Bay Area at the forefront of the technology industry, but want to use their unique products and services to support other entrepreneurs and the community as a whole.

The second goal of the program is environmental. “City governments are recognizing the opportunity to make taxpayer purchased real estate assets work smarter and harder,” said Mark Gilbreath, CEO and co-founder of LiquidSpace, who noted, “we have enough built-out office space on the planet to meet all of our collective needs for the next fifty years.” By putting what’s already out there to better use, the partners aim to reduce waste and the carbon footprint of their communities. The director of the City of San Francisco’s Department of the Environment Melanie Nutter explains:

We, as government entities, must lead by example in the area of sustainable economic development policies and practices. Commercial real estate accounts for 55 percent of our carbon footprint, and when mobile workers can leverage spaces nearby, we can optimize that building use and shorten commutes.

Do you see more collaborations between the coworking movement and government planners coming in the future?

Image courtesy of Flickr user San Jose Library.

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The conversion to coworking 2.0 continues

Jessica Stillman — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 13:05:17 +0000

Coworking may have started among idealists and the community-minded as a way to band together to make work better and more ecologically friendly, but as Steve King, a partner at Emergent Research, told GigaOM earlier this year, it’s a movement in the midst of a major transition. Coworking is shifting (in fits and starts and with many owners determined to hold to its initial ideals) toward greater professionalization and is increasingly run by the more traditionally business- and profit-minded, King said.

Is he right? Evidence from the Global Coworking Unconference Conference, which was held last week in Austin, Texas, to take advantage of the SXSW influx, suggests he is. Coworking magazine DeskMag attended the annual get-together of space owners and those interested in the movement, and it reported that, among those in attendance, “everyone agreed that the movement is undergoing intense growth and change.” What sort of change? DeskMag describes shifts that sound very much aligned with what King outlined.

GCUC director Liz Elam opened the event yesterday, standing in front of a ballroom full of participants who looked surprised by their surroundings. For the coworking “veterans” (those who have been around the scene for two, three or more years), the surprise was due to the professionalization of the movement and the influx of new businesses.

Or as Mark Gilbreath, the CEO of LiquidSpace, said at the conference, “Today we legitimized a movement,” a fact that was reflected in the organizations that attended. Big business “dropped in to see what all the fuss was about,” according to DeskMag. The increasing interest of corporate America in coworking reinforces the notion that it is moving from an outsiders’ movement to a recognized phenomenon even slow-moving organizations are hoping to exploit. King mentioned that bigger firms were exploring developing “internal collaboration spaces” in the coworking mold to spark creativity and collaboration, and this is something other commentators are starting to catch on to as well.

HR exec and blogger Jason Lauritsen, for instance, recently posted on coworking, noting that the folks using coworking spaces are exactly the sort of corporate runaways big business would like to lure back. “These are the people who we covet in corporate recruiting circles, but who have opted out of the corporate hamster wheel because they don’t like being told how to work — and they are talented enough to dictate their own terms,” he writes. Forget tempting them back to cage-like cubicles. Instead, he suggests:

If we want to attract the next generation of highly talented rock star employees (read innovators) into our workforce, we may need to completely rethink how we organize our workplaces. Instead of assigning desks or offices, we create spaces and places where people can choose to work based on what kind of work they need to do that day or how many people they are working with. We may need to rethink the idea of housing departments together and instead mix it up. Coworking spaces bring together people doing completely different work in completely different industries and they benefit greatly from the collision of ideas and perspectives. What would happen if we mixed up the product people with the business development folks and (dare I say it) the HR folks. One thing you generally won’t find in a coworking space, cubicle walls. Cubicles are miniature silos. They kill creativity and openness. They make us think and behave smaller than we are.

Depending on your business, why not build a network with some other non-competing businesses to create a network of coworking spaces for employees to share and use. These spaces don’t need to be anywhere near your brick and mortar corporate palaces. They just need to have the basics that employees need to work and be designed to feel like a place you’d want to go to do work.

Coworking, it seems, is growing up and moving out of its original geographic and industry-specific enclaves, penetrating the consciousness of more mainstream institutions. That suggests a movement with a wider reach, which slowly but perceptibly, is fulfilling the aim of changing the way work gets done. Or, like hip-hop and graffiti in fast-food and car commercials, corporate use of the original movement might also signal that it has been co-opted, its message of change to the status quo of work lost with only the shell of style (No cubes! Funky interior design!) remaining.

Is corporate interest in coworking a good thing, the first peal of its death knell or something in between?

Image courtesy of Nick Simonite

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Next-generation sharing economies: why real-time matters most

Mark Gilbreath, Liquidspace — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 17:00:06 +0000

As it matures, the driving force of the sharing economy will become time, and the companies that can do business in real-time will occupy a more strategic, and profitable, place in the ecosystem.

Fresh off its $1 billion valuation, Airbnb is the most common reference point for all manner of “this for that” pitches bouncing around the Valley right now, with many new ventures proposing to be the “the Airbnb of X.”

But Airbnb is only one species of the sharing economy genus — a genus that will stratify over the next few quarters.

Real-time makes your brand a hero

Hotel Tonight is a great example of the flip side of the Airbnb coin. It focuses on real-time reservations, and the real-time use of latent capacity.

Airbnb’s transactions typically take place five or more days in advance of a stay, and any requests inside that window are put on a standby list. In contrast, Hotel Tonight only offers rooms for the current night, with a cutoff of 2 a.m. local time. It’s a fascinating constraint, and one that has propelled their business forward. When people need a room immediately and you’re able to provide them one, they will remember you.

Real-time can command premiums, not just discounts

Of course, different markets and different kinds of capacity have unique sensitivities to time.

Uber’s car service business is incredibly time-sensitive. One of its most common use cases is trips to and from the airport, which usually involves a high-stakes deadline on at least one end of the journey.

Other popular uses are travel on a busy holiday (think Halloween or New Year’s Eve in New York City during a public transportation strike).

The more time-sensitive a market becomes for buyers and sellers, the more lucrative the corresponding business opportunity.

This is an old lesson — price and revenue optimization wizards hold time in the highest regard. And as the time-sensitivity of a situation increases, the number of parties we’re willing to entrust with our affairs dwindles to a small handful.

Real-time puts coveted data in your pocket

What Hotel Tonight, Uber and my company LiquidSpace have in common is that we all know a lot about our customers’ travel patterns.

Additionally, we can extrapolate a ton of information about preferences — from who customers are likely to collaborate with to where they like to work or hang out.

With this real-time data, we’re primed to find other ways to make your stay, ride or meeting that much more enjoyable. We can quickly provide add-ons that customers need, such as snacks or printing, or partner with other vendors who can.

Whether by offering new services or opening up this powerful real-time data, we are exposing new revenue streams that the sharing economy enables.

With enough time, any latent capacity can be utilized. Each year at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, we see twelve month’s worth of planning make use of every nook and cranny.

On short notice, sharing economies are harder to organize, and they involve more risk. Real-time capabilities mean that you sit closer to purchasing decisions, closer to strategic imperatives, closer to profit and loss, closer to sealed deals and averted crises.

Real-time is difficult, and precisely because it is so challenging to do real-time well, and safely, the market will reward those who invest in making the “here and now” a priority. In short, you’re closer to risk, and closer to reward.

Consumers want real-time access, and businesses demand it. The sharing economy is not only online, it’s also picking up speed.

Mark Gilbreath is co-founder and CEO of LiquidSpace, a mobile application that helps people find and share available workspaces.

Image courtesy of Flickr user psd.

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Coworking: A window into the future of work

Janko Roettgers — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 23:56:32 +0000

First there was bring your own device, now there’s find your own office — and both trends could be equally revolutionary for the enterprise. That’s the gist of a coworking panel at GigaOM’s Net:Work conference that had operators, designers and consultants of coworking facilities talking about the increasing impact coworking is having on large corporations.

Don Ball, co-founder of the CoCo coworking and collaborative space said that many of the early corporate users of his facilities were “going rogue,” with supervisors not actually knowing that employees were working in a shared office space.

But these days, more and more corporations are leveraging coworking spaces, with motivations ranging all the way from real estate downsizing to perks to increased productivity. “When I worked in an office, I spent an awful lot of time to fool around,” said Emergent Research Partner Steve King. Offices tend to be social spaces with lots of parties and other non-work activities, something that doesn’t happen as much in coworking facilities.

At coworking spaces, people tend to be more focused, agreed Herman Miller Advanced R&D Projects Lead Consultant Jennifer Magnolfi. “These spaces simply feel more appropriate for the way we work today,” she said, simply because they reflect the tools we use to work today. She added than many coworking spaces follow different design paradigms than your plain old office, inviting people to learn as well as work.

So how big is the impact this new wave of corporate coworking is having? King said that nine percent of the people who attend coworking spaces in the U.S. now come from corporations that employ more than 100 people. That may not sound much, but LiquidSpace Founder and CEO Mark Gilbreath reminded the Net:Work audience that coworking is already influencing how big corporations design their offices. It might be that the coworking space of the future doesn’t even look like today’s coworking facility, where people rent desk space by time slot. “Hotels have spent 3 billion dollars to redesign their lobbies to feel like coworking spaces,” he said.

Regardless of what coworking spaces will eventually look like, all of the participants agreed that the trend will play a huge role for big companies in the years to come. “Coworking is a window into the future of work,” said King.

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Photo by Pinar Ozger.

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