6/8/08

Press Release

The Office in Media, Inc. Unveils
A Celebration of Independents in July

Media, PA -- June 10, 2008 -- Over 25 Million Americans are now self employed. Many more are self employed each and every day. Recognizing the need for services and amenities specifically tailored to this new population, a brand new workspace will open in early July of 2008.
This is Media, PA's first coworking facility, ready to join other coworking businesses already established around the country based on the coworking concept notably featured on CNN's Work at Home series.

Centrally located just adjacent to the Media Courthouse on Veterans Square, The Office in Media will serve any and all professionals seeking transitional productive work facilities with a strong community flavor. Business service professionals, entrepreneurs and their colleagues from out of town are welcome to start their day in The Office in Media, using it as a home base of operations while conducting business locally. Legal and accounting professionals from out of town may find it extremely helpful to have a place to meet with clients or prepare for their next court appearance as the Courthouse is a mere 200 ft. away.

"The Office was born out of necessity, mainly.' muses Lisa Thompson, President of The Office in Media, Inc.
"Those in business are inundated with social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. These are wonderful tools, but those websites are missing one small very important, very simple thing which was initially the foundation of business; the handshake. That is what I am bringing to Media - workspace built around community. With the focus on the arts and Fair Trade, Media, PA is the perfect location to foster business relationships and productivity through social networking."

The Office in Media operates on a membership basis, so there is no lease involved - even if one decides to occupy the space for regular use. What is extremely attractive is the fact that one can drop in unscheduled to use the wi-fi, copier and fax, schedule meeting time in the conference room, or just simply relax in the 'breakroom' with some Fair Trade coffee preparing for their next appointment.

Expected opening date for The Office in Media, Inc. is July 7, 2008.

Contact:

The Office in Media, Inc.
Contact: Lisa A. Thompson
One Veterans Square, Ste. 105 Media PA 19081
Hours of Operation M - F 7:30 AM - 5:00 PM, Weekend hours by Special Request
website http://www.itstheoffice.com

###

The Office - work in progress

Here are some photos of The Office with paint mostly done - and waiting for carpet and furniture. The last photo was taken sitting on the steps to the entrance and taking a shot of the Media Courthouse. That's how close I am!

If the place looks small to you, that is because it is, kinda. There are 3 rooms - common workspace, the breakroom, and the conference room. The ease of accessibility to the courthouse should bring in the customers and there will be plenty of room for anything coworkers need to accomplish.

Start Small Dream Big!

Photos of The Office in Media

The Entrance to The Office in Media!
Since my temporary sign permit was denied by Media Borough, I went into work to take some photos to show them why I should be granted the permit. They say 'No can do, you are in a multi-tenant Building'. I say Ah yes but I have my own entrance. Here is proof.

4/23/08

Coworking with a Personal Cause

A lot of you know that I am starting a coworking business. What you don't know are some details about my family. How is that relevent? Well, let's just start exploring that and hopefully the relevance will expose itself.

My son Quentin is 18. He was diagnosed when he was 7 years old with Aspergers Syndrome. For those that don't know, Asperger's is nestled under the grand umbrella of childhood Pervasive Developmental Disorders. Asperger's is also referred to as high-functioning Autism as the symptoms (social difficulty, limited eye contact, fixations, etc.) apply. Quentin is socially slow but brilliant and has a memory that beats most elephants, and is happiest alone on his computer or playing video games. Quentin attends a special school miles away but it hasn't proven to be effective.

Now, the parental challenge: How to ready my son for the world.

He doesn't like IT because that would be 'what Mom did'. He thinks he is too distractable to hold a job, but he loves to organize things. He organizes data and knows MS Word better then most.
In other words capability is not the issue, but self esteem is. The school has stated that he is not progressing.

So here is my idea. I hire my son to work for me. This does a number of things.

Teaches him about the working world.
Teaches him how to deal with people; more specifically customers
Teaches him responsibility and accountability
Gives him income
Gives him a boss that understands him and his triggers i.e. 'know when to push'.

The negatives?

Undue Stress on me trying to start a new business while having to push a lazy teen around
Pulling him away from a scheduled additional year of school

I think that having him work for me would allow him to see disciplined individuals working on their projects while pulling him away from his habits would work for both of us.

Thoughts?

4/19/08

SocialWeb

Certainly getting crowded out there.

Social Networking has certainly progressed over the years. Early text based providers like Compuserve (circa 1979) and Delphi (circa 1980) gave us our first taste of connecting with others "like us". Very soon after BBS's rolled onto the scene; making the propeller-headed sort leap with joy that there was someone out there - someone to connect with. Oh, does anyone remember Prodigy? How about manually typing in connection codes for our 14.4's to connect? I thought I was so knowledgeable and geeky to be able to type in Hayes commands manually.)

Anyway, we progressed out of text line send-refresh-read-reply-refresh into something more real time. But you had to pay for it. Hourly. I am not going to even admit what my Compuserve bill was one month back in the very-early 90s. That was when those sick of paying for it discovered all the different IRC networks. Ahhh IRC.. so many hours of wasted time [clickety clickety]... That was when LOL was born. ROFL. All those. And for those that needed to convey emotion - Emoticons!! @}--'-- ;-) |-) <-- look it's Geordie LaForge. Whoops. Geek moment - back to it.

So with IRC for the connection angle and those discovering that they could make their own web pages - we start to get a feel for the social networking gamut. Identity and Connections were sought and given.

One thing we do have to include here is that humanity needs to belong; we must belong to something. A church, a club, an association. With IRC and our individual Angelfire/Geocities pages, we could show what we were doing and talk to our friends, but we couldn't do those things TOGETHER. Even from a virtual standpoint, it became important.

Now, a Social Network is defined as a social structure made up of nodes tied together by various states of interdependency. These can be kinship, association, sex, values, vision, and many more. Now, we bring all this into the online world of today. What sites pop out at you when thinking about Social Networks?

Classmates.com (circa 1995) - Social Networking for all those people you hated in high school.
SixDegrees.com (circa 1997) - Social site out to prove that we are all connected.
Friendster (circa 2002) The beginning of all the social networking sites, they actually hold the patent for A Circle of Friends - a method and apparatus for calculating, displaying and acting upon relationships in a social network.
Myspace (circa 2002) Everyone knows Myspace.

YouTube was initially a MySpace ap and you know what that is today.

Facebook (circa 2004) Allows the user to join networks based on employment, geographic interest, personal interest, etc. Woohoo instant club. Quick search that address book and find out who else is on Facebook! If they aren't, INVITE THEM! What worked for Facebook was that it allowed externally developed applications. Some of these applications charted one's own personal network hence marrying social network and social networking.
LinkedIn (circa late 2002) For professionals linking individuals by employment and/or expertise.
The list goes on.

So, now we are inundated with choices. I believe the current trend has been to maintain a few main social networking sites to update our friends and family with events but to extend our reach, most are turning to blogging. By blogging I mean video, microblogging and the typical post of interest.

Discussion of that history is for another time, but I ask you - from a personal or professional standpoint - how has social networking changed your life? Where do you see it going? I look forward to your answer.....

4/17/08

SocialDevCamp Announced!

Name:	SocialDevCamp East
Tagline:	Charting the Next Course
Host:	Roundhouse Technologies, WhyGoSolo.com
Type:	Meetings - Informational Meeting

Time and Place
Date:	Saturday, May 10, 2008
Time:	8:30am - 5:00pm
Location:	University of Baltimore
Street:	1420 Charles St.
City/Town:	Baltimore, MD

SocialDevCamp East is the Unconference for Thought Leaders of the Future Social Web

Where is the social web going? It's going mobile, to geocentric services, and to open platforms. Join a community of like minded developers, social media gurus and thought leaders for an unconference to discuss the future of the social web.

We're looking for thought leaders from DC to Boston to meet, forge relationships, and envision the future.

SocialDevCamp East is convenient to the entire east coast corridor via Amtrak. Just travel to Baltimore's Penn Station -- University of Baltimore is two blocks south.

NOTE: Please sign up here and on the official BarCamp Wiki.
http://barcamp.pbwiki.com/SocialDevCampEast

The password is 'c4mp'. Thanks!

Please also BLOG this event. You can link to either the PBwiki page or to the Facebook page. We need to spread the word!

4/16/08

The Power of Twitter?

7:00 AM 04/16/2008
So @JasonCalicanis was given a Dash GPS by a vendor. The JasonNation decides tobook in the ama give said GPS away on Ustream.tv. So he announces it on Twitter and asks that the word be spread. Suddenly, there are about 440 users all talking at once with Jason scrambling to lower the video quality. It got pretty crazy in there.

Last night @indiekid tweets: this just in...pick up @garyvee's new book from amazon right now and get him in the amazon top 10! http://tinyurl.com/4qojcb please retweet about 7 hours ago from twitterrific
It would be so cool to see some sort of engine that would sketch out the 'I told 2 friends.' word of mouth marketing. Anyway, I digress.
Then @indiekid tweets again let's do this guys! power of community! get @garyvee 's book in the amazon top 10! ...get two copies.

I check at that time and his book ranking was at 292. Dude! It's not even available yet - this is preorder. Before I went to sleep last night the book was at 192. Out of curiousity I check this morning and its 120. 392 to 120 in seven hours. I think that's Twitter. Of course Twitter fits nicely around human tendency to want to get involved, to make a difference and of course, jump on the bandwagon. And voyeurism, can't forget that.

Heh. What do you think?

Oh.. I forgot to mention. I am a Twitter victim too. I bought 2 copies. That fear of being left out is driving...

*** Update ***
7:54 AM.
Kind of interesting that I come across this news article today:

U.C. Berkeley student's Twitter messages alerted world to his arrest in Egypt

Excerpt:
04/15/2008 BERKELEY _ When Egyptian police scooped up UC Berkeley graduate journalism student James Karl Buck, who was photographing a noisy demonstration, and dumped him in a jail cell last week, they didn't count on Twitter.

Buck, 29, a former Oakland Tribune multimedia intern, used the ubiquitous short messaging service to tap out a single word on his cellular phone: ARRESTED. The message went out to the cell phones and computers of a wide circle of friends in the United States and to the mostly leftist, anti-government bloggers in Egypt who are the subject of his graduate journalism project.

The next day, he walked out a free man with an Egyptian attorney hired by UC Berkeley at his side and the U.S. Embassy on the phone.

-----

Nice. It's quite apparent that the Twitter community gets things done. Sure, people use it for stupid shit - but all in all.. It's starting to take on the wonder of staring up at the stars in upstate NY, You feel so small, yet part of something glorious.

4/14/08

The original Lip Dub

Ok, this absolutely rocks my socks. Lip Dubs are taking off in the corporate world, and this is supposed to be the original. It is a phenomenal fun way to collaborate! Send me links of yours!

Lip Dub - Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger from vimeo widget on Vimeo.

PODCAMPNYC!

About the UnConference:
Podcamp NYC is an “unconference” focused on educating participants on how to use, implement and share any/all new media tools including, podcasts, videocasts, blogs, Second Life, Facebook, and YouTube. The conference is FREE to attend and you’re a “participant” versus an “attendee” at our event. You also make our conference happen since you register to speak. You can talk about anything you want as long as it focuses on new media.

Registration link: here!

4/12/08

SocioGenesis

I decided to research the relationship of Social Networks to the Dune Series by author Frank Herbert. I found an article called Dune Genesis, by Frank Herbert:
He reveals that the scarcity of water is an analogy for the oil shortage and CHOAM is OPEC. Considering he wrote Dune in the 1960's, that is pretty amazing. Although I have read Dune about 10 times, it is time for a re-read. Also, relating to my previous post, Dune illustrates that our instincts (hunter-gatherer, anyone?) shape behavior and society.

But I digress a bit. What is interesting is what he writes here:

Each limiting descriptive step you take drives your vision outward into a larger universe which is contained in still a larger universe ad infinitum, and in the smaller universes ad infinitum. No matter how finely you subdivide time and space, each tiny division contains infinity.

But this could imply that you can cut across linear time, open it like a ripe fruit, and see consequential connections. You could be prescient, predict accurately. Predestination and paradox once more.

The flaw must lie in our methods of description, in languages, in social networks of meaning, in moral structures, and in philosophies and religions-all of which convey implicit limits where no limits exist.

We aren't going to take it anymore!

Wow. Excellent post from the NotanMBA team blog! Not that we would expect anything less but this is a must-read. This is part II of a series called Nomads and Power and discusses how corporate nurturing has led us away from our ancestral origins as hunter-gatherers and in doing so, reminds us how we have been led down a sedentary path called the Social Cage which is leading to our downfall as a species.

I agree; we can no longer follow this path of relentless work. NotanMBA points us toward the work of Nigel Nicholson, a Professor of Organisational Behavior at the London Business School. I love this quote of his: “You can take the humans out of the Stone Age, but you can’t take the Stone Age out of humans.”(n.)

If you want more, follow NotanMBA on Twitter and join their Google Group. Thank you guys for another great post!

4/11/08

My Tagcloud from Tagcrowd.com

created at TagCrowd.com

4/9/08

My fathers work on JPL Nasa's Cassini web site!

A Huge Congratulations to Karl Kofoed who just has had his amazing illustrations officially accepted by NASA as accurate representations of Encedalus, one of Saturn's tiny moons. It is reported that select Cassini research scientists actually gasped when they saw these illustrations, realizing how accurate they were based on existing data.

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image-detai ls.cfm?imageID=3035

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image-details.cfm?imageID=3036

You can see more of Karl's work on http://www.galacticgeographic.com.

All images here as well as on the NASA JPL website along with the usage of 'Galactic Geographic' are copyright 2008 Karl Kofoed.

Progressions from Web 2.0

Image from Marc Cantor http://marc.blogs.it/

The usage of the internet has gone from Web 1.0 - The Single user to Single Website - to Web2.0 - the use of inter-connected social networking blogs, wikis, miniblogs, photoblogs, podcasts and RSS feeds. This illustrates the resurgence and realization that the human need for interaction and cooperative function has never gone away.

We are starting to realize that living life as a single entity wrapped up in the stresses of our miserable little lives with the weight of the world on our shoulders is having hugely negative affect on our mental and physical health.

A lot of you reading this are going to realize where the next stepping stone is. Yep, that’s right, ladies and gentlemen, coworking. We have reached a point where the stopping point of virtually surrounding ourselves with our online buddies has made us even more lonely.

Case in Point:

[geekieboy] yo dude, thx for helping me with this.. sorry it took so long solving that issue, you know how txt is.

[servergod] np dude, was gr8 working w/you

[geekieboy] yeah wow.. that took it out of me.. I need a beer. Catch U l8r!

* geekieboy has left chat

[servergod] wow, beer sounds great. Yeah.. umm l8r.

Ouch.

We have lonely stares and neck strain from cubicles caused by passing visitors to our lonely Cubetown.

We have Tech Entrepreneur Guy on his laptop drinking his 5th uberlatte in the Wedon’tgiveoutnofreewifi BurntCoffee R Us trying to talk on his cell phone to a potential client while shrill toddlers demand a cuppa choc’late milk in the background.

I think you get my point.

So the next step? Coworking. Your own social network within an arms reach. Productivity skyrockets. Your health improves. You have little stress. There are fireworks! Most of your peers now have faces, not Buddy Icons.

Ok, I think I exaggerated with the whole fireworks thing. But this progression is not limited to one town or one city or even one country. This is worldwide and there is a coworking center in most of the major cities. Exciting stuff, don’t you think?

4/5/08

Coworking Challenges

A lot of discussion on the coworking groups are centered lately on business. More specifically the interchange of funds between coworker and co-owner. It’s a fine line we have to draw - but there are a few factors that are in play here.

First of all, we have to consider client needs. Our aim has to provide an environment that serves multiple needs. We have our sales professional. His goal is sales. He needs a local base of operations that serves form and function.

We have our computer professional. He needs the quiet space to focus and preferable people around that compliment and contribute to his projects.

We have a home based worker. She has finally come to the conclusion that working alone has a detrimental affect on her business. Also, she has no ability to leave her job because it is at home. One’s home is their sanctuary; our refuge from the storm of life’s challenges.

There are other markets we must consider and that has to be based on demographics. For instance, my space will be in Media, PA. Media is a very creative pro art, pro fair trade town. One thing they do have due to the proximity of the county courthouse is lawyers. Lots and lots of lawyers. Yet another potential client. Lawyers need conference space, a locking file cabinet, preferable an onsite notary and a legal size copier.

So, as you can see - barring the danger of trying to please too many people - there is a certain amount of flexibility that we must have to successfully run a coworking establishment. The charges for this service must be commensurate with the geographical area and, of course, service provided, but not be so high as to prevent the up and coming small business owner to take full advantage of the services offered and be able to increase their profitability.

I will keep going with this.. email me with comments!

Sat 05 Apr ∞ Permalink

4/3/08

Litany against Fear

“I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.”

— Frank Herbert, ‘Dune’ The Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear