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Coffee shop denizens reveal their top pet peeves

Jessica Stillman — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 14:01:27 +0000

You’re a digital nomad, a remote worker, a freelancer around town. Which means you probably spend a fair amount of time toting your laptop to coffee shops. Sure the caffeine is flowing and the seating comfy, but the experience of working out of the local café isn’t without its annoyances.

Which is why WorkSnug, which helps mobile workers find the best available work spaces near them, launched their ‘Coffee Shop Code of Conduct.’ Holding out the prize of 10 new smartphones and headsets for the most popular ideas, WorkSnug solicited coffeehouse denizens to offer up their top coffee shop pet peeves and vote on others’ suggestions. More than 6,000 heeded the call to complain (and hopefully help shape up the behavior of the digital nomad community).

We encouraged you to gripe about your top annoyances, now we’re reporting the results, presented in a handy infographic by WorkSnug:

Which coffee house sin is the worst in your book? The most frequently committed?

Image courtesy of Flickr user LOLren.

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Kvetch about your coffee shop pet peeves, win a smartphone

Jessica Stillman — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 13:00:19 +0000

Half a dozen cutlery options or sticky social situations might not have fazed Emily Post, but it’s likely the old guard of etiquette expertise would be flummoxed by the world of modern technology. With cell phones available everywhere (even the subway as of this week), dozens of means of communication to contend with and our general tendency towards familiarity, avoiding rudeness while not seeming like you’re simply avoiding people seems harder than ever before.

And what about the special plight of the coffee shop-dwelling, laptop-toting, mobile worker? Free range workers who conduct their business out in public face a whole host of new issues, from how many coffees to order to keep the wait staff happy, to how quiet to keep your calls in aid of your fellow workers’ concentration. The rules are under construction, and there’s no consensus on what constitutes good manners.

Sticky conundrums and confusion abound, so WorkSnug, a tool to help mobile workers find work spaces nearby, is crowdsourcing tips and suggestions to keep everyone content and companionable working together in coffee shops.

To participate in their “Coffee Shop Worker Code of Conduct,” just go to their website by the end of October and suggest your own rules of good behavior for remote workers, or vote on which ideas others have submitted you like best. To get you thinking, the current top 10 includes not yelling like you’re on a construction site, not hogging electrical sockets (you know who you are, and you should be ashamed) and helping to promote the coffee shops you frequent.

“The whole company is based on a pet peeve, frankly,” explained coffee shop veteran and WorkSnug founder Richard Leyland. “There wasn’t a central reviews-base of places that are the best to go. It’s not much of an extension to think, well, what are the rules of etiquette?”

So express yourself over on WorkSnug, and we’ll be posting the final results here on WebWorkerDaily once they’re out in early November. If your idea makes it into the top 10, you win a Plantronics Discovery 975 headset and an ultra-compact Nokia E6 QWERTY and touch-screen smartphone. And maybe your fellow coffee shop denizens will even cut out some of their most annoying behavior.

What’s your coffee shop etiquette pet peeve?

Image courtesy of Flickr use CarbonNYC.

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10 Ways to Find Office Space Near You

Simon Mackie — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 19:01:37 +0000

Web work — also known as telecommuting or remote work — has many benefits, not least of which is a reduction in commuting, and the resulting lower fuel consumption and better work/life balance. But not every remote worker or freelancer wants to work from their home office all of the time; many don’t have the space to build a properly equipped home office, and most people will need a meeting room from time to time. Meeting an important client over the dinner table just isn’t going to cut it.

Fortunately, there are now plenty of places where you can find a workspace outside the home office, ranging from coffees shops with Wi-Fi to dedicated coworking centers and office space sublets. However, it’s not always easy to know where to look for them, and having taken the long commute to the office out of the equation, you don’t want to find a workspace that’s miles from your home. In this post I’m going to round up a few of the most useful resources for finding local desk and meeting room space. All of the resources listed below are free to use unless otherwise indicated.

Coworking Wiki

Coworking centers are café-like collaboration spaces for independent professionals (if you’d like to find out more about coworking, Imran put together a good summary). The movement has grown in popularity over the past few years, fueled by the demand of a growing number of freelancers, and there are now coworking centers in cities (and even more rural locations) all over the world. Generally, coworking spaces will offer monthly memberships (either with your own desk, or as a “hotdesking” membership) and a daily “drop in” rate. While they tend to be populated primarily by freelancers and small business owners, remote employees can also enjoy the benefits of a well-equipped office space, camaraderie and the ability to bounce ideas off others.

The coworking wiki is the official repository for all things coworking, and includes a directory of coworking spaces around the world. While its useful for finding out if there is a coworking center in your vicinity, the quality of the entries in the directory itself can be a bit of a mixed bag. As it’s a wiki, and the entries are generally entered by the coworking space owners, the amount of information presented varies — sometimes you’ll just get a list of prices, sometimes you’ll get a description of the space, its facilities and what it’s like to work there. Still, it’s a good resource to draw up a shortlist of potential spaces from.

Jelly Wiki

A Jelly is “a casual work event where everyone’s invited.” It’s an informal coworking-like gathering of professionals at a suitably equipped location — that could be someone’s house (which is how Jelly started), but more commonly at a coffee shop or in an office. A Jelly is a great way to get out of the home office, network and spark some great conversation — and they’re usually free (I wrote more about Jelly here).

Like coworking, Jelly has grown in popularity in the last few years and there are now hundreds of Jellies held regularly — often weekly or monthly — in many locations worldwide, as detailed in the Jelly wiki. There is likely a Jelly group near you (and if there isn’t, you can always start one). Again, as the information is held in an unstructured wiki, some groups have more detailed or up-to-date information about their meetings than others, but it should be enough to tell you about your nearby groups.

Loosecubes

Loosecubes is a useful web app that lets you search for both desk and meeting room space; you can look for space to lease for as short as one day. It’s currently in beta, but it’s a nicely designed site, allowing you to browse a map of your city to find suitable locations. Clicking on one of the spaces on the map brings up a thumbnail image of the space, together with its price — clicking on that takes you to a new page with more photos (if available) and a detailed description of the space, its amenities and the working environment. Loosecubes currently lists over 500 spaces in around 180 cities, primarily in the U.S. It lists space in coworking centers, office space to lease and businesses looking to share their office space with others. It’s free to use.

Deskwanted

Similar to Loosecubes, Deskwanted lists available office space from coworking centers and businesses looking to sublet their own space. You can search by location and lease term (daily, monthly, quarterly and yearly) and it’ll return a listing of results. You can also search on a map view. It has listings from over 600 spaces worldwide, although it has more of a focus on Europe — it has plenty of listings in London, for example, whereas Loosecubes only has one). Deskwanted is also still in beta, which may explain why some features are a bit buggy (map search isn’t working on Firefox for me currently, for example). It’s free to use.

Share Your Office

Run by San Francisco-based coworking outfit pariSoma, Share Your Office is another site with listings advertising available office space. It’s primarily aimed at advertising shared office space (businesses looking to sublet their own space), but also has listings from coworking centers and commercial leases. As with Loosecubes and Deskwanted, you can search by location and budget and also search on a map. Share Your Office doesn’t seem to have quite as many listings as the other two, though.

WorkSnug

WorkSnug is a neat augmented reality mobile app. Go to a supported city (it works in many major cities in Europe and North America), fire up the app and get an augmented reality view of your surroundings that shows suitable work locations in the immediate vicinity, from coffee shops to meeting rooms to coworking centers. You can also view results on a more traditional map view. Each listing provides details of the space, including whether power, Wi-Fi and refreshments are available (together with ratings of their quality), noise level and if formal areas/meeting rooms are available. It’s available as a free app for iPhone and BlackBerry. You can also use WorkSnug via the website.

Laptopfriendlycafes

Similar to Worksnug, Laptopfriendlycafes lists coffee shops suitable for working, including details of whether Wi-Fi and power are available, ratings for the coffee and ambiance, and user reviews. As you might expect given the name, it concentrates on coffee shops, so isn’t the app to use to look for longer office space or meeting room rentals. It’s available via the website and through an iPhone app, which costs $0.99.

Local listings magazines, Craigslist, Gumtree

Although the options listed above are all great ways of finding office space, many potential office space advertisers may not know about them. Local listings magazines, Craigslist and Gumtree (in the U.K.) are all good places to look for shared office advertisements from companies looking to sublet some of their space.

Regus

If you’re just looking to rent a meeting room temporarily, virtual office space provider Regus has them available worldwide, often in convenient locations, such as nearby to transport hubs.

Social Networks

Finally, don’t ignore your networks. A great way to find temporary shared office space is to ask your contacts (and get them to ask their contacts) on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Many businesses may be nervous about subletting their space to complete strangers — a friend of a friend is always going to be a more attractive option.

Photo courtesy Flickr user hyku.

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Find Somewhere to Work With Laptopfriendlycafes

Simon Mackie — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:00:44 +0000

Last year I wrote about WorkSnug, a neat augmented reality app for the iPhone that can help you find good places to work (coffee shops, coworking spaces, libraries, etc) nearby. If you don’t have an iPhone, you might like to try Laptopfriendlycafes.com. It’s an easy-to-use web site that also has a database of cafes; you can search on a location name, zip or postal code to get a listing of places nearby that might make good locations from which to work. Laptopfriendlycafes’ database lists whether each cafe has free or paid Wi-Fi, its address, whether power is available, the availability of 3G reception, as well as user ratings and comments.

Unfortunately, like WorkSnug, Laptopfriendlycafes.com’s database outside of the major cities is fairly limited. Searching in London returns plenty of results, for example, while searching in my home city of Bristol (which does have plenty of laptop-friendly cafes) reveals none. As it’s free, however, if you’re looking for somewhere to work nearby a quick search using the web site won’t cost you anything — just don’t assume that because it’s returned no results that there are no good cafes nearby.

Laptopfriendlycafes also has a companion iPhone app ($0.99, iTunes link), which covers New York, London, Sydney and Melbourne, and can use GPS to get your current location to find nearby places to work.

How do you find places to work when you’re in a new city?

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WorkSnug: Find Places to Work With Your iPhone

Simon Mackie — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:00:42 +0000

WorkSnug is a neat augmented reality iPhone app that enables you to find great places to work nearby, from cafes to coworking spaces, complete with reviews. Here’s a short video showing how it works:

After a few weeks of waiting, WorkSnug has been approved by Apple and is available for free download from the iTunes App Store. The app initially covers London, with coverage for San Francisco, New York, Berlin and Madrid to come.

Has WorkSnug helped you find a great place to work?

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Some Real-time Goodies

Pamela Poole — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:00:31 +0000

It’s that time of year again! Yes, the holidays are right around the corner. But I don’t care. I’m more excited about LeWeb ’09, which will take place in Paris on December 9th and 10th.

And since the theme of LeWeb this year is “The Real-Time Web” (a hot topic that we’ve been covering in depth in the NewNet category over on our subscription research service GigaOM Pro) I thought I’d take this opportunity to stuff your stockings with a few real-time goodies.

First, something I can’t wait to get my hands on: WorkSnug. Boys and girls, this is the sexiest thing I’ve seen in a while. It’s an augmented reality iPhone app designed just for people like us. It will magically reveal the nearest establishments with Wi-Fi, from the donut shop down the street to full-fledged coworking spaces. Not only that, there will be reviews of the spots, even down to whether the coffee’s any good. Watch the video and register on the site to get updates. It’s starting with London, then San Francisco, and soon the world! And it’s free!

Next on the goodie list is SpeakLike, an app that uses a combination of machine and human translators to translate your emails and IMs in real time so you really can communicate with the whole world (or at least those who speak any of 30 languages). It also translates dynamic web content. It’s a pay service, but could be handy for clients and collaborators. Translators can sign up to work for the service here.

I just can’t deal with Google Docs, though I know many swear by it. But there’s another option for real-time document collaboration: EtherPad. They promise “really real-time” collaboration; EtherPad docs refresh every half second, while Google Docs refresh every 15 seconds. I don’t know about you, but I can do a lot of typing in 15 seconds. EtherPad also offers infinite undo capability. Even if you can’t think of a way to apply this app to your work, it occurred to me it would be great for helping the kids with their essays and reports, and there are probably lots of other practical and creative applications for it. So do check it out.

More about LeWeb ’09

LeWeb is Europe’s largest, and the world’s second-largest web conference. As such, it attracts la crème de la crème of the web world. Even though it’s in Paris, it’s held in English, so don’t let that stop you from coming. There’s still plenty of time to sign up, and I can tell you where to get good falafel. Let me know if you’ll be there!

We’d love to hear about real-time web apps you use for work or play, and what you’d like the real-time Web to look like.

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Arrived in Vegas- check out the jkOnTheRun double-wide!

James Kendrick — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:38:56 +0000

I have arrived in Las Vegas to begin bringing you the best of the CES and not to be outdone by those turquoise guys I am happy to show off the jkOnTheRun double-wide. This will be our “blogger central” where we’ll knock out those great stories you’ll be talking about all year. The jkOTR trailer is posh and has every amenity you’d expect for such a big budget operation:

That’s really all I can show you because that’s really all there is. :) Kevin will be here soon and we’ll head out to the Asus press event.

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