At $90, it is not too expensive as a personal charging station for all sorts of phones and devices, and it can charge up to three devices at the same time. In addition to Refresh, Cablebox, a $30 device that hides the mess of wires near your desk, appeals to my aesthetic. If you have used it, share your feedback. Any other recommendations? Keep me posted.

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As I’ve interviewed owners of newly established co-working spaces recently, the answer appears to be: not really. Craig Baute, who opened Creative Density in Denver just a few months ago, for example, told us that for his fledgling space, “awareness is the biggest problem.”

Several coworking spaces already exist in Denver and while some of them might be skeptical of the new competition, Baute insisted that it’s ignorance — not each other — that they should be worried about. “Coworking spaces in cities can work together because they’re not in competition with each other. The biggest competition is concept awareness,” he said.

And if you think Baute has it bad when it comes to getting the word out in Denver, spare a thought for Noelle Stary, co-founder of Launchpad Creatives in suburban New Jersey. She recently visited an event put on by her local Small Business Administration and spoke to the group’s president after the event. Here’s what happened:

I’m talking to him about, hey, we’re big believers in what entrepreneurs are doing, and we start talking about coworking spaces, and the president of the Small Business Administration is like, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I have never even heard of the word.

“Clearly coworking is very big in London. It’s really big in New York,” says Stary, but you mention “co-working spaces in New Jersey and people in suburbia are like, what is this? I don’t get it.”

All for one and one for all

So what are these newly founded spaces doing to raise their profile. Both Baute and Stary are banding together with other local spaces to pool their powers and attract attention. Before moving to Denver, Baute was involved in the coworking movement in Toronto where, as he says:

We were planning a coworking week where all of our members could move between the spaces — we thought that might get some media attention — then also banding together to create a Toronto coworking pass where you can just buy a ten-day punch card and go to all the other spaces.

Now he hopes to bring something similar to Colorado. And Stary has similar plans in the works for New Jersey’s coworking spaces, including a regional coworking alliance to raise awareness. “We’re actually going to try and set up a coworking visa that you could purchase from the coworking alliance,” she explained. With the visa, members could use their choice of spaces within a 40-mile radius.

Matchmaking for entrepreneurs

Stary and her business partner Eric Duchin have also come up with another creative way to raise the profile of the movement — they’re offering to match entrepreneurs who use their space with a local college student willing to serve as an eager intern. It’s a win for everyone involved, explained Stary, as harried entrepreneurs get some extra help (and a place to work with the intern that isn’t their living room), young people get a hands-on learning opportunity and coworking gets some new converts. “We’ve gotten a huge response,” Stary told us.

They’re even thinking of scaling up the service by offering to pair entrepreneurs and interns at other coworking spaces through the wonders of technology. Stary explains: “It basically would be almost like a Match.com. Here are the interns. Here are the entrepreneurs. You pick who you want and you can set that up through the different types of coworking spaces.”

Coworking is one form of the changing concept of the “office” from an 8-to-5 day at corporate HQ to a more fluid and dynamic workspace. We’ll discuss this in-depth at our upcoming event Net:Work on December 8.

Image courtesy of Flickr user {Guerrilla Futures | Jason Tester}, CC 2.0.

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As we’ve covered before, when more workers spend more time away from company headquarters, the size of offices may shrink. But will campuses change in any other ways?

It’s a question that the MIT Technology Review tackled recently via a photo gallery of innovative offices built to serve a more mobile and collaborative workforce. The photos are worth checking out at the magazine’s site, but what general lessons can be gleaned from taking a look?

Giant conference rooms give way to smaller collaboration spaces. MIT cites Microsoft’s newly renovated offices in Redmond, Washington as an example of this trend. “Pods” helps small teams there come together for short bursts of creative collaboration. “In these temporary work spaces, teams of two to five employees can collaborate on projects for weeks at a time.” MIT writes.

Small but not cramped. With more workers out of the office, companies may need less space but that doesn’t mean they want things to feel cramped – or for team members to worry about finding space to work at the office when they need it. To solve these issues, “Steelcase, an office design company based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is designed to use minimal space but create an open feeling through strategic placement of drawers and privacy panels.”

Privacy amidst collaboration. People may now be coming to the office more for collaboration than to buckle down on individual tasks, but even in the midst of group work, team members still occasionally need privacy to make a call or hammer out a conflict. A “pod-like installation with adjustable privacy screens allows for semi-private meetings in communal areas,” is the answer at Steelcase.

Bringing the outside in. Research shows simply seeing nature is good for your brain and your productivity. Some offices, like Rackspace, an IT hosting company, are taking advantage by bringing the outside in, with spaces that “mimic a garden, complete with decking, swings, and fake grass.”

Is your physical office space ready for the workstyle of the future?

Image courtesy of Flickr user :mrMark:.

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The company recently announced some new features and a shift in overall direction. I had the chance to speak with Wayne Pope, founder of Glasscubes, to get some insight into what’s happening.

The feature changes included:

1. Document approvals. Your team can now approve documents — or any file uploaded into Glasscubes — to ensure the correct version is used with everyone’s sign off. You can specify who on the team needs to be part of the approval process, and they are notified by email to review and approve the document or file.
2. Quick links. Click the “Share This File” button once you’ve uploaded a file to a Glasscubes workspace, and you’ll get a link to the file that you can copy and paste into any message or email. You can also use this feature to share a specific file on Glasscubes with people outside your team including via a tweet or status update. Anyone who has the link can view the file without having to sign into Glasscubes or have an account, but they can’t access anything else in your workspace, and you have the benefit of being able to revoke access whenever you want.
3. Unlimited users. Glasscubes now allows unlimited users across all its accounts, also provides caccess to all of its features across all the accounts. Now the only differentiator between the different package levels for Glasscubes accounts is the number of workspaces used and the amount of storage used.
4. Three packages. The company has reduced its multiple paid offerings down to three, all with a 28-day free trial: Max at $199/month; Professional at $125/month and Standard at $49/month. Pope believes its Free package is also now much more useful, with two free workspaces and access for unlimited users, with up to one gigabyte of storage.

A Shift in Direction

According to Pope, Glasscubes is moving away from the idea of being an “online intranet,”  complete with files, workspaces, a CRM system, and even a “coffee break” area.

“We watched over time how people were using the accounts, and we found that the accounts the made the most of the product were based around the workspaces rather than other elements in Glasscubes,” explains Pope. “From a startup perspective, it’s hard to deliver a clear marketing message when doing ‘intranet.’ It’s easier for people to grasp collaboration and ‘to simplify.’”

To avoid spreading its own team too thin, the company decided to focus on being the best at one thing: online collaboration. It also wanted to continue offering a free version of the product, but not a stripped down, feature-poor version meant to encourage upgrades. Instead, it now includes all the functionality, only with fewer workspaces and less storage space.

Pope says that while the company is concentrating all of its efforts around the Workspace and upcoming communication and social features, it still supports the CRM/Connect feature, but is no longer actively developing it. He did suggest that the company may spin that feature off into a completely separate free product at some point, time permitting.

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According to Martin, a manspace is a custom-built hangout where a man can work, play and generally be himself. In his brief talk, he describes how he built a home office at the bottom of his garden for around $3,000, as well as name-checks Superman, Batman, Elvis and Hemingway as legendary owners of manspaces.

Surprisingly, in investigating over 50 contemporary manspacers, Martin discovers that manspaces are largely about articulating a passion — everything from Japanese tearooms to full-size boxing rings — concluding that each space was intricately designed to reflect its owner.

In a related piece, The New York Times recently ran a fascinating photo slideshow on the “Decline and Fall of the Bachelor Pad,” noting that the recession has curtailed the more excessive tendencies of the manspace.

One industrious architect has purchased a 900-square-foot loft space, which he’s refitted into a live/work space, where private “pod” bedrooms sit alongside large shared workspaces in a kind of “coworking plus” configuration.

Though I divide my time between coworking and working from home, I’m fascinated by the home working environments of web workers. My own workspace at home is a spartan $100 IKEA table and a Macbook, but I know others with much more elaborately personalized spaces.

Of course, “manspace” is an unnecessarily gender-biased term. I don’t believe there’s any fundamental difference here in the underlying motivations of women or men.

I would love to run a series of posts on people’s various home working environments and, more importantly, how they’ve gone about personalizing and customizing them to reflect their passions. Leave your stories and thoughts in the comments, and I’ll see if I can follow up with some more in-depth posts.

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That change left me with one problem I hadn’t anticipated, though. My office wouldn’t function as well with a laptop as my primary computer. I had to rethink the whole layout. How did just changing from a desktop PC to a smaller MacBook manage to make my office totally dysfunctional?

Utilizing a keyboard tray and a small tower (especially one not stored on the desk), a desktop computer has a relatively small footprint on a desk compared to a laptop computer. In my case, I kept the monitor to use as an external monitor for my new MacBook, so that still used space. The only desktop space I cleared out was the footprint of the slimline CPU tower. The back of my narrow desk was cluttered with items like an external hard drive and my phone. Even with the CPU gone, I could barely wedge my MacBook onto the desk’s surface.

Having a laptop as my primary computer also left me wanting something I’d never wanted in my office before: a sitting area. I like using my laptop as, well, a laptop, when I don’t feel the need for the second monitor or other desk functions. I find it is more ergonomically comfortable, and I concentrate better. A comfy chair and ottoman in my office would mean that I wouldn’t have to use the living room couch with its attendant distractions to work laptop-style.

It took some creativity but I figured out how to relieve the desktop congestion and fit a sitting area in the room.

The first key was angling my desk into a corner and filling the “dead space” that was created behind it with the printer cart to create more desk surface area. (The wireless printer itself moved into my husband’s office.) This let me push the backup hard drive back off of the main desktop, and I can also push the phone and other external devices back there when I need the desk space.

The middle shelf of the cart holds two plastic containers that function as “drawers”, for computer cleaning supplies and office supplies. The bottom shelf holds my power strip and battery back-up unit, keeping them off of the dusty carpet.

Moving the printer cart, along with archiving files and retiring a file cabinet, created enough open space to create my sitting area. A hand-me-down chair along with an Ikea ottoman and lamp created my second, more casual, work area. As I sit there, I have a power strip and my file cabinet to my right. On my left is my reference bookcase.

Some other nice features that the new layout added:

• The second monitor can be turned to be visible from the scrapbook table next to my work desk.
• Switching my desk to the other side of the room’s window improved my view.
• My scrapbook supplies are in my line of vision more often, reminding this workaholic to take a break and relax more often.

Still on my wishlist for my new space is a second MacBook power cord that can be left permanently at my desk while I have the other one for mobile use.

Have you switched to a laptop as your primary computer? What workspace adjustments did you have to make?

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Darrell has written previously about the steps he took to prepare for a move, and then followed up with what actually happened during the move. I thought I would create a checklist, distilling some of Darrel’s advice and adding some other tips, to use for my move and share it with you in this post. These steps can make moving your home and your work at the same time a little easier:

1. Start with the utilities: If you don’t have the electricity and Internet connected, it’s pretty hard to be a web worker. It doesn’t help that it’s rare to transition your utilities smoothly. I already know that there’s at least one work day that I’ll be without Internet access and that’s assuming everything goes exactly as planned. Knowing that in advance, however, allowed me to make an alternative plan for that day’s work.
2. Plan out the new workspace before you pack: Take a look around your current workspace. What absolutely must be within reach while you’re working? What would you really love to have? You may not be able to move your work area as is to your new home, but knowing what is a priority for placing in your new workspace makes it easier to be sure that you’ll still be able to work comfortably. Write down your plan, draw a map or take pictures — it’s hard to remember these details when you’re actually moving.
3. Box your office first: After many moves, I’ve learned that the first room to be packed is always the room I pack the best. I remember to label every box, I wrap every delicate item perfectly and everything makes it in one piece to the new house. Rooms I pack later don’t fare so well. Since the home office has to be a priority for a web worker, put it at the top of the list.
4. Double check cords: Electronics can be frustrating to move, if only because it seems impossible to make sure that every last cord winds up back with the computer or peripheral it came with. I’m willing to do whatever it takes to make sure that the cords and other pieces go where they need to, even if that means rubber banding or taping cords to their electronics.
5. Box your files in plastic: A lesson that I’ve learned the hard way is to use plastic file boxes when moving my paper files. The list of things that can happen to files in cardboard boxes is too long for this post, but it’s worth the cost of picking up a couple of plastic file boxes. You can always use them for storage later on.
6. Move your computer yourself: Even if you have the best movers in the world, it’s a good idea to be a little paranoid about your computer. Because your computer belongs to you, and you know how important it is, you’ll simply take better care of it than any mover ever can.

Share your moving tips below.

Image by Flickr user Katie Dureault.

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More Than Just Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi is crucial to a web worker’s ability to work on the road, but just knowing a that your local library branch offers free Wi-Fi isn’t enough to tell you that it’s a great workspace. Knowing how good the Wi-Fi is will tell you how much work you’ll be able to get done, especially if you’re working on something that requires a lot of bandwidth. If you’re working in a coffee shop when someone has to reboot the router every hour or in a co-working space where everyone is a heavy Internet user, you may not be able to get the kind of access you need for your work. Unfortunately, it can be hard to figure out the status of the Wi-Fi until you sit down and turn on your computer. It may be worth booting up and trying it out before you settle in for the long haul.

Depending on how long you plan to work, you may also need an electrical outlet to plug your laptop into. You’ll find different policies on just outlet usage, depending on where you go to work: at most chain coffee shops, there are at least a few outlets that customers can use. In some independent coffee shops, though, it’s becoming more common to find outlets taped over, unavailable for your use. Keep an eye out for accessible power on your way in — if you look around and there are no outlets you can use, it may be time to move on to the next place on your list.

Think Ergonomically

When you’re choosing a place to work, it’s important to make sure that you can sit comfortably for a long period of time. If you wind up hunched over your laptop, sitting in an uncomfortable chair, it’s much harder to get work done than if you find a comfortable chair that allows you to easily reach your laptop. Being able to use a table can make a big difference in how comfortable a workspace is, but other factors can be more personal. Look for chairs and arrangements that match your own preferences for comfort.

Coworking spaces can often provide a step above other options when it comes to comfort. Coworking spaces are usually designed from the ground up to provide guests with a place to get their work done, as opposed to a restaurant that may want to encourage customers to move along so new customers can sit down.

The Cost of the Workspace

Despite the fact that some people view being mobile as a way to avoid paying for office space, there are still costs associated with going into a coffee shop and sitting down. You’ll order at least a cup of coffee, and most people consider it polite to keep ordering food and drinks as long as they are taking up a table. A library may have no cost associated with using it as a workspace, but the library staff may ask you to limit your time if there’s a lot of demand at a given time. A coworking space will have an upfront fee.

It’s important to consider the cost of working at a particular location. Even if such expenses are tax deductible (remember to keep receipts!) they can quickly add up.

What do you look for in your mobile workspaces?

Photo credit: Flickr user theregeneration

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With that in mind, I’ve been collecting some great workspaces from the web to use as inspiration for when I build mine, and I thought I would share some of them.

7301 Ava Ln’s Minimal Desk and Storage

7301 Ava Ln Workspace

This loft workspace has been put together using some Ikea components,  but the end result is nothing like a common Ikea desk. I especially like the large desk, clean lines and the little under-desk storage shelf. The style really suits the loft, too. This probably doesn’t have enough storage for me, though.

Erin Doland’s Workspace

Erin Doland's Workspace

Erin Doland is the editor-in-chief of the excellent organization blog, Unclutterer. I really like the amount of shelf storage here, but I think I would prefer a bit more desk space. I also would like a space that’s a little more aesthetically pleasing.

Rambling Renovators’ Office Space

Rambling Renovators' office space

I think this space is just about perfect. This is another custom desk built from Ikea components. I love the amount of storage space here and the interior design is great. There’s a huge amount of working desk area, too. The problem with this kind of office, with a corner desk, is that it requires a reasonably big room to house it all in.

(via Ikeahacker)

Adam Pash’s Cordless Workspace

Adam Pash's Cordless Workspace

While there’s nothing particularly outstanding about this space (I even have that same Ikea desk in storage), the effort to reduce the amount of disturbing clutter by hiding the cables out of sight has resulted in a much tidier space, which is very pleasing to the eye. I will invest considerable effort in making sure that cables are hidden away in my new office.

Espace Mobile Austrian Home Office

Espace Mobile office

Finally, I think if I could pick any space for my home office this would be it! According to Weburbanist, this is a prefabricated house located in the Austrian countryside. It would be great to have a huge office like that, with light and views out over the mountains.  Unfortunately, that kind of property is not available here in Bristol; I would still like to get an office with lots of natural light, though.

Have you seen an inspirational workspace? What do you think makes a great ofiice?

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At Leeds’ The Round Foundry in the UK, entrepreneurs in the creative and digital industries can opt for traditional serviced office space or a hot-desking plan in a large shared space. Each hot-desker gets a cute lockable ‘pod’, that includes…

• Six large shelves (with file holder tabs!)
• Six power outlets.
• Two Cat-5 sockets.
• A coat/bag hook.
• A motorized, adjustable desk area.
• Um, wheels.

The pods (the model is know as a Macro-1)  are actually quite cool, designed by local company Volume Products as part of a range of modular office furniture. Though they appear to be designed for traditional office spaces, they seem to have been adapted well to the Round Foundry’s coworking area.

However is raises some interesting questions about the nature of work environments that coworkers are interested in inhabiting.

Communal environments such as San Francisco’s Citizen Space provide much of what is valuable about coworking – a sense of camaraderie, community and collaboration that remote workers lack when working from their homes. However, some privacy is desirable when conducting sensitive negotiations or discussions (though Citizen Space does have a kinda unwritten NDA between residents).

Traditional cubicled spaces are exactly the soulless prisons that most freelancers and web workers seek to avoid when they make the choice to escape cubicle farms.

Perhaps products such as Macro-1 provide a useful middle ground, enabling a semi-private environment for each worker, but portable and mobile enough to reconfigure into collaborative spaces when needed. Yes, it’s really all about those wheels :)

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