Startupify.Me is hosting a gathering of folks in town who are already, or thinking about, implementing Lean Startup methods. To kick that off, we’re hosting a casual get together of anyone curious about Lean Startup. Please join us Monday December 19th, 8pm at ThreeFortyNine Coworking.
If you’re able to come, please register now.
We BBQ a lot on Friday’s here at 349. As the season for BBQ’ing is stretching thin, we wanted to host one last BBQ that was opened up to the public. If you’re coworking-curious, this is a great chance to see what we’re doing. If you’re not, well just come by, meet us and have a casual lunch. We’ll emphasize casual as we’re not caterers or cooks but we can fire up a grill.
If you’re able to make it, please sign up so we have an idea of numbers. As well, we’re cover the costs of the food, please bring a non-perishable food donation.
We’re thinking about hosting an event here at ThreeFortyNine and wanted to get your 2 cents. As members here, we certainly support each other, and our projects, as best we can but we’re always looking for workable ways to collaborate on projects together. Enough preamble…to the idea…
We want to host an event that’s like speed dating for staffing your project. By project think more hack than formal company. The target audience is people with fun side projects they’re working on and people looking to get involved in projects. If you’ve been to a DemoCampGuelph, this is like taking the announcement portion and making an event around it.
These details are fictional just to illustrate what we’re thinking….
We’ll have 5 spots for people to pitch their project. You can either pitch your project or pitch your skills that are looking for a project. You are not pitching in order to get feedback, you’re pitching to find co-conspirators. Each pitch spot is 3 minutes. The goal of the event is to ‘staff’ these cool projects by connecting people together who will help make it happen.
Some made up pitch examples…
“I want to make an app that hooks in the google map api and freshbooks api to allow you to steal money from people based on the location you’re at. I have a working prototype but can’t figure out the google api. I’m looking for someone to write that code. I’m working on this Wed nights for 3 hours at this point. Ideally someone can work with me for those 3 hours each week until we get through the prototype.”
“I don’t have a project but I want to help with one. I’m a graphic designer primarily but I can write a bit of content as well. I’ve dabbled with html and some php.”
After the ‘pitches’, the rest of the night is social. Hopefully the person or project you’re looking for is in the room or someone in the room can connect you what you need. What do you think?? An event we need here in Guelph? Would you be interested?
It’s official, HackDays are coming to town!
A few months back I was lucky enough to be a judge at HackWaterloo. Since getting a front row seat there and seeing the amount of apps created in a single day, I’ve been conspiring with Leila and Corey to bring them to Guelph.
The event registration page is up so sign up, spread the word and join us here at ThreeFortyNine on August 27th. We need hackers, api’s, and sponsors.
We’re hosting a very cool event this weekend that we’re calling UX Tuneup. We’re hosting 4 or 5 user experience guru’s here in an informal event that will be based around reviewing our own applications. Attendees will be invited to offer up their projects and apps for us all to review. The intent is to get some specific feedback on your app from experts as well as gain insight into UX in general.
This was initially open to our members only but we have a few seats left so sign up if you’re interested in joining us. We’ll make sure there is hot coffee and some snacks as this is a morning (10am) event.
CTV published a story a week or two ago about companies trying to ease commutes. It would have been great to see coworking mentioned in this mix. Coworking represents a great middle ground between full time commuting and working from home. Several of our full time members have jobs in other cities as far away as Toronto. For them, we’re their office away from the office.
Guelph is like any other city in that a decent chunk of our population commutes out of our city to work, specifically to Kitchener-Waterloo and Toronto. A company in Waterloo with even as little as 10 employees living here in Guelph could buy 3 or 4 full time desks at a coworking space and provide a place for their employees to ease their commute several days per week. If you have more than 10 employees living here then you may as well start your own coworking place. Or call us and we’ll start one for you?
Using coworking to ease the commute provides your people a productive office with proper facilities and coworkers. As well, putting them into a functioning coworking space allows them to meet and learn from people outside their company, getting them first hand exposure to new technologies and new influences.
You could take this a step further and take a 20% project approach with it. Assemble all of your Guelph based employees together here at ThreeFortyNine to work on a project for one of two days a week. Assign them a specific task or just give them some basic boundaries and let them self organize. Or let us organize the project with you and put some basic structure and format around it? It would be part hack day, part Guelph Seven, part retreat.
While trying to ‘ease’ commuting seems noble, it seems there are some options available today to stop commuting altogether, at least for a few days a week.
Just a head’s up that we’re working on hosting a user experience event here at ThreeFortyNine Coworking. We’re scheming with the braintrust behind uxWaterloo to get something started shortly. What I do know is that we’ll sponsor and host it here. It will be some sort of peer review where we get together with some ux folks and review some of our own projects and applications, not unlike the usability fix events being hosted in Montreal.
As we’re still mapping out what the event will be, I thought I’d post something about our plans so you can tell us what you want? In the ux space, what do you need in a Guelph based event? Please comment on this post or email us directly.
Chris shared a few articles recently about working, or more specifically where we work and how that’s changing over time.
A lot of what they discuss relates to coworking and how we work here at ThreeFortyNine Coworking. As Chris pointed out, you can almost just swap out “coffee shop” for “coworking space”. The difference being that our members get to know each other over time. Our conversations evolve and deepen as we learn about each other’s lives and projects. The benefit we have is that few of us are actually “coworkers”, which means we don’t carry the burden of shared deadlines, bosses, projects, etc.
I’m curious to hear how others are working, or not working, and if that’s changing with increased access to mobile, wifi etc? Closer to our hearts, is coworking something you’ve tried or considered trying?
We’re trying out placing a small print ad in the local Bookshelf paper. Yesterday I leaned pretty heavily on our friends on twitter to help design our ad. I’m sure it’s quite obvious that we’re not print, marketing, or advertising people. Thanks for everyone who chimed in to give us feedback. You can see the list of options we played on twitpic. It was more difficult to choose than I expected, in the end the ad we went with is the one below. Now we wait for the press and the resulting stampede of coworkers…
We now offer voip services here at ThreeFortyNine Coworking. We’re still hammering out the specifics so don’t quote us on the details as they may change. What this means is our members who have dedicated desks can have a voip phone line at their desk. The cost will be about $30/month, all in. If you don’t have a voip phone, we’ll have some that members can lease on a monthly basis.
For those of you who already have your own voip line, we can rig that up to ring at your desk as well.
We can do all of this because we have lovely members like ts2 who work here everyday with us.
