Cisco, that behemoth of global networking, is hardly the first big corporation to jump on the teleworking bandwagon. And, in fact, offering workers a chance to telecommute isn’t new to the company — of their 60,000 workers, a whopping 20% (12,000) telecommute some of the time.
What is new, though, is the Cisco Virtual Office, a [...]

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We recently got our hands on a copy of the 30 minute DVD, Café Monteverde: Hacia un Comercio Justo, which profiles Cooperative Santa Elena, Costa Rica’s first sustainable coffee project, started in 1989. We’ve got a special interest in the coop, since we’re serving their coffee, Café Monteverde, in our café. That coffee is coming [...]

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Time for another profile in our ongoing series of chatting with folks who are spreading the coworking word and movement around the country (and the world). This time out, I did an email interview with Cody Marx Bailey, who was the catalyst for The Creative Space, a coworking space in Bryan, TX. Cody is also [...]

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It seems like a lifetime ago that we posted the first set of drawings for LaunchPad Coworking at the 800 Brazos location. Everything has evolved, of course, as everything does. We made some decisions to save money. We made other decisions to be green, or based on market research. Sometimes we made choices based on [...]

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There’s a fun new book out, Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes by Mark J. Penn, written with E. Kinney Zalesne.
Penn is the guy who “identified Soccer Moms as a crucial constituency in President Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign.” He is “known for his ability to detect relatively small patterns of behavior in our [...]

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Cyndy Aleo-Carreira has a good piece over at the Industry Standard wondering about a teleworking stat recently released by WorldatWork. The survey reports “a nearly 40% increase in the number of employers offering telework as a benefit.”
But as Aleo-Carreira points out, there’s no breakdown as to which companies are offering this. Nor is there information [...]

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My boyfriend, Warren, is — unapologetically — a geek. He loves spreadsheets so much that I tell him I’m considering launching a line of Excel-based lingerie and sleepwear for myself and other partners of data junkies. Because maybe, in the end, the quickest way to a geek’s heart is via a pie chart or bar [...]

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Never mind Google’s new Chrome browser — that’s getting plenty of coverage elsewhere. But what’s a smaller-than-Google company to do when it comes to differentiating its wares at a big convention?
Coffeemaker manufacturer Nespresso, in addition to having an auto-play, vaguely porno soundtrack on their home page, came up with a gimmick for the recent IFA [...]

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The kosher gadget industry — that’s how reporter Dan Levin sums up a niche but growing market aimed at helping Orthodox Jews follow halacha (Jewish legal code) while still staying connected to modern conveniences. In his New York Times piece, Entrepreneurs Find Ways to Make Technology Work With Jewish Sabbath, Levin offers examples of inventions [...]

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During a recent weekly meeting, our team was considering what peripherals we could offer to coworkers. There’s the obvious list — monitors, chargers, that sort of thing. But when the question was put to me — What is it I’d most like — I said silence. To which Julie immediately responded noise canceling headphones.
I mention [...]

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