Cooltown Studios
The official blog for crowdsourced placemaking

Thursday, May 05, 2011

General Assembly, Flatiron Neighborhood, Manhattan, New York City

When coworking meets serious (and fun) economic development

When a 20,000 s.f. coworking space receives a $200,000 grant from New York City’s Economic Development Corporation to offer design, technology and business classes to the public, it’s going to need a new adjective, like coworking accelerated, sponsored coworking or gazelle coworking. In fact, it’s an ideal solution to a need we previously stated a crying need for regarding job creation, a startup coworking space.

What makes General Assembly so significant is that it represents how coworking

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • Coworking | (0) Comments | Link |

Tuesday, July 06, 2010

Cahoots coworking, Phoenix, Arizona

Coworking 2010

Like anything in business, coworking is evolving. Here’s where coworking stands today, and it’s looking good:

Definition. Wikipedia’s definition has gone from a cafe-like community/collaboration space for developers, writers and independents to
a style of work which involves a shared working environment; the social gathering of a group of people, who are still working independently, but who share values, and who are interested in the synergy that can happen from working with talented people

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • Coworking | (3) Comments | Link |

Friday, May 28, 2010

Mission Social, San Francisco

Start-up coworking with a social mission

First there was coworking without a space, aka coffeehouses with wi-fi. Then there were coworking spaces. Then came coworking spaces with general themes, like Green Spaces in Brookyln, NY. Next up in that evolution? Coworking with a specific social purpose.

One of the best grassroots examples is mission*social (pictured above) in San Francisco’s SoMa district, a large loft renting ‘social enterprise space’ at $2/s.f. and ‘cowork space’ at $300/mo. What’s unique is that a tech company,

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • Coworking | (0) Comments | Link |

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

The CoZone, Artisphere, Rosslyn, Arlington County, Virginia

In progress: Creative coworking space

Today’s ‘Crowdsourced placemaking in progress’: Creative coworking space is brought to you by the people behind the Artisphere, a 55,000 s.f. ‘arts space for everyone’ located in Rosslyn, Arlington County, Virginia. Think ‘arts center on steroids.‘

Within the Artisphere, the CoZone (future crowdsourcing website coming soon) will be a smallish but rather prolific coworking space that will be crowdsourced. The opening, along with the Artisphere, is scheduled for 10/10/10 (clever marketing …

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • Coworking | (0) Comments | Link |

Friday, January 29, 2010

Startup coworking graph

Solution for job creation? ‘Startup coworking’

We all know the economy needs jobs. Not industrial economy jobs, which we’re transitioning away from, but knowledge economy jobs. But where did the Apples, Microsofts and HPs that fuel today’s economy come from? That’s right, startups.

Our entry Gazelles + Economic Gardening = Prosperity highlighted this very trend back in 2003. In 2007, we posted how every neighborhood needs a coworking space. Today we’re in a jobs crisis. The time is right to converge these two trends.

First, Blake

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • CoworkingEconomic Gardening | (9) Comments | Link |

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Entrepreneur's Row, the Icehouse, Entergy Innovation Center, New Orleans

New Orleans attracting entrepreneurs in droves

New Orleans is attracting scores of entrepreneurs and small businesses, and there hasn’t been a better time to be a creative. “There has never been a better time in Louisiana for the creative class to thrive,” says state lieutenant governor, Mitchell J. Landrieu. Why such a bold statement?

First of all, the evidence.
- New Orleans’ metro area gained 100,000 nonfarm, post-Katrina jobs from October 2005 to June 2009, and by 2016 is expected to grow 24% from 2006 levels to 98.8% of

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • CoworkingEconomic Gardening | (0) Comments | Link |

Friday, June 05, 2009

Coworking, jelly in New York City

A modern look at coworking

Coworkingis the social gathering of a group of people, who are still working independently, but who share values and who are interested in the synergy that can happen from working with talented people in the same space.“ This Urban Omnibus article Work and the Open Source City takes a contemporary look at coworking today. The two main types that are emerging…

The permanent coworking space - You can find a list here of the hundreds of permanent coworking sites around the world, typically run

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • Coworking | (0) Comments | Link |

Friday, May 08, 2009

The Hub coworking space in Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Crowdsourcing a coworking story in Virginia…

So here’s a scene… five fellow entrepreneurs having a spontaneous coworking session at someone’s home, and I decide to use the group to crowdsource the blog entry for today - here’s the result…

How crowdsourcing created a coworking opportunity in Arlington, Virginia.

Back in November 2008, I gave a presentation of the content on this site to a group of government and business leaders in Arlington (Leadership Arlington), which motivated an initiative to launch a crowdsourcing community of

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • Coworking | (0) Comments | Link |

Monday, April 06, 2009

Coworking at Independents Hall in Philadelphia and the Hat Factory in San Francisco

Can coworking spaces be profitable?

There’s no question coworking spaces are the place to work for independent creatives, but can it be a profitable business? The question isn’t raised in terms of how to make money off of independent creatives, but rather how to sustain a viable supply for the demand. As it stands, there still seems to be more free agents who are dissatisfied with working at home than there are coworking spaces to accommodate them, thus the popularity of coffeehouses during the day.

The general consensus among

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • Coworking | (7) Comments | Link |

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Green Spaces, Brooklyn, New York

The first coworking space for green biz?

There’s no question what the first green business incubator is - it’s the Environmental Business Cluster in San Jose in 1994, christened by then Vice President Al Gore and still going strong. However, as you can see by its website (and the fact it started in a suburban office park with cubicles, though now located downtown), it’s not a coworking site. Btw, check out its graduate list of companies - I helped found the firm called Global Opportunity Villages in that incubator - a bit too

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Posted by Neil Takemoto in • CoworkingGreen Development | (0) Comments | Link | Comment/Vote (2)
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