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We Pay Our Rent By Buying Coffee
Wired is running a story on Delicious Monster, a startup Mac software company whose main office is a Seattle coffee shop. Hope they're drinking decaf.
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As long as it's not Java.
> it generated $250,000 worth of sales in its first month
Wow, I must have contributed to some of that.
Delicious Library is cool, if a little bit slow. But it's still new, so that's not surprising. The attention to detail is really amazing. When you add artwork to a catalog item, the application adds a screen to the item image to make it look like it's in a DVD case, or the cover of a book. If you say it's a hard cover or soft cover book, the size of the book changes, too. I wrote a nearly pointless review of it for Gadget Madness.
Scanning in your books, DVDs, games, or whatever into the system is actually a kind of fun. It's one of those Mac OS X applications that when you show someone who doesn't have a Mac, they get that comically jealous look on their face.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Why-ever not? A start up has to start up somewhere, and if the company does not require a fixed premises as such, these guys are free to meet in the park, in the high street, in coffee shops. It's really just an extreme example of how decentralised business is becoming these days.
Quoth the server, "404."
Wouldn't it be easier to work from home? That's what I do.
I'd wonder about security though. These guys are working on wireless internet on a public network while developing proprietary software. What's to stop one guy with a snooper and a latte-wielding disguise from stealing all their work? Yes, it's quirky. And I'll be damned if I wouldn't love to pay my rent in coffee... but I'm just not sure it's good business. Of course, this is all speculation on my part. We only have a Starbucks here.
its really a shame they don't have Wi-Fi at my local bar. Paying rent in beer sounds like a much better option.
Here I thought that mac developers would be drinking hot cocoa
Sean.OutaHere()
Co-founder of OmniGroup in Seattle.
http://www.omnigroup.com
I had no idea Wil left his baby, OmniWeb to do a start-up. With his almost 15 years of Cocoa programming experience I'm sure they'll make it.
Especially in the financial centres of big cities it seems that Starbucks et al are not really a "coffee company", but are in fact selling very on-demand temporary office space ("Regus Lite") with free coffee as an incentive and informal time-billing system.
Anyone who's worked for a large investment bank and has tried to book an office for a quick meeting will know this is true (especially if the meeting rooms operate as a "profit centre" and so you have be recharged the costs). It's amazing how much you can find out about the state of the IT dept of a large company just by hanging out in the nearest coffee shop - are they hiring or firing, are the staff excited or bitching, what new projects are they working on.... industrial espionage was rarely so cheap.
Similarly, airports are now in the business of selling multi-day car parking and short term entertainment for an hour or two.
I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. - George Best
I started a company with a friend of mine three years ago. We each worked out of own homes, and met twice a week in person (at a coffee shop, natch') to be sure we were synched up. But after a while it started to become difficult for me to stay in the same damned room all day, then move over a few feet into the kitchen for dinner, a few feet over to the living room to watch a movie, and then a few feet again to go to sleep. I felt like a freakin' hamster.
When we got the chance to share office space with a couple of other guys who ran their own small companies, we jumped at the chance. Splitting the money three ways makes rent much cheaper, and we get human contact. Sometimes you don't need to have specific interaction. You just need to be around people.
That's part of the appeal of working in a coffee shop. You can focus on what you're doing, but there's enough human activity that you can also get that feeling of connectedness. When you work alone at home by yourself it's easy to feel disconnected from the rest of humanity, no matter how many IMs you get from your buddies.
But maybe it's just me. I haven't yet transcended meatspace.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I run four companies from my local coffee shop. Sit in the back with my powerbook and always look like I'm waiting for someone to show up. But the downside is that you can easily be tempted into vanilla lattes every hour, which costs as much as a 15th-floor corner office, and will likely get me a kidney transplant in five years.
Now if only I had products I sold that earned money, I'd be breaking even...
The world's only surviving livewriter.
That and their software is probably infinitely cooler than yours was. Have you ever used or seen Delicious Library?
The famous Lloyd's of London insurance group started out in Lloyd's coffee house in the late 1600s. This bodes well for Delicious Monster. :)
Excerpts from the book "Against the Gods" by Peter Bernstein:
"One afternoon in 1637 * a Cretan scholar named Canopius sat down in his chambers at Balliol College, Oxford, and made himself a cup of strong coffee. Canopius's brew is believed to mark the first time coffee was drunk in England; it proved so popular when it was offered to the public that hundreds of coffee houses were soon in operation all over London.
What does Canopius's coffee have to do with * the concept of risk? Simply that a coffee house was the birthplace of Lloyd's of London, which for more than two centuries was the most famous of all insurance company's. *
The second half of the seventeenth century was also an era of burgeoning trade. The Dutch were the predominant commercial power of the time, and England was their main rival. Ships arrived daily from colonies and suppliers around the globe to unload a profusion of products that had once been scarce or unknown luxuries-sugar and spice, coffee and tea, raw cotton and fine porcelain. * Information from remote areas of the world was now of crucial importance to the domestic economy. With the volume of shipping constantly expanding, there was a lively demand for current information with which to estimate sailing times between destinations, weather patterns, and the risks lurking in unfamiliar seas.
In the absence of mass media, the coffee houses emerged as the primary source of news and rumour. In 1675, Charles II,
suspicious as many rulers are of places where the public trades information, shut the coffee houses down, but the uproar was so great that he had to reverse himself sixteen days later. Samuel Pepys frequented a coffee house to get news of the arrival of ships he was interested in; he deemed the news he received there to be more reliable than what he learned at his job at the Admiralty.
The coffee house that Edward Lloyd opened in 1687 near the Thames on Tower Street was a favourite haunt of men from the ships that moored at London's docks. The house was "spacious, well built and inhabited by able tradesmen" according to a contemporary publication. It grew so popular that in 1691 Lloyd moved it to much larger and more luxurious quarters on Lombard Street. Nat Ward, a publican whom Alexander Pope accused of trading vile rhymes for tobacco, reported that the tables in the new house were "very neat and shined with rubbing." A staff of five served tea and sherbet as well as coffee.
Lloyd had grown up under Oliver Cromwell and he had lived through plague, fire, the Dutch invasion up the Thames in 1667, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. He was a lot more than a skilled coffeehouse host. Recognizing the value of his customer base and responding to the insistent demand for information, he launched "Lloyd's List" in 1696 and filled it with information on the arrivals and departures of ships and intelligence on conditions abroad and at sea. That information was provided by a network of correspondents in major ports on the Continent and in England. Ship auctions took place regularly on the premises, and Lloyd obligingly furnished the paper and ink needed to record the transactions. One corner was reserved for ships' captains where they could compare notes on the hazards of all the new routes that were opening up - routes that led them farther east, farther south, and farther west than ever before. Lloyd's establishment was open almost around the clock and was always crowded.
Then as now, anyone who was seeking insurance would go to a broker, who would then hawk the risk to the individual risk-takers who gathered in the coffee houses or in the precincts of the Royal Exchange. When a deal was closed, the risk-taker would confirm his agreement to cover the loss in return for a specified premium by writing his name
insufferably precious Mac-Seattle-GraphicDesginer disease.
Somebody's jealous...
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
0xDECAFBAD
http://siokaos.org/
The Apple developer site has an interesting article on how Delicious Library's use of the Cocoa bindings framework.
It's funny, because most people's reaction to our software when they first see it is, "Wow, how useful! Here's my credit card," but for some it is, "Wow, how useless... here's my credit card."
I don't actually want to argue with your point, although it's worth mentioning, as other people have, that you can print out your list of stuff and tuck it in a safety deposit box, so if you lose your collection to fire or theft it'll all be replaced exactly. Or you can print your collection and take the list to the video/book store and make sure you don't duplicate items. Or you can track your loans and make sure you don't lose items.
Or you can use the smart recommendations and find items you never knew you'd like, and buy with more confidence that you aren't wasting money. Or you can sell items you're no longer using in just a couple clicks, and make some extra money AND tidy up your life.
All of these things potentially make and/or save you money.
But, you may not want to do any of that. What I'd like to point out is, our real goal in writing software is to make you smile.
Did we succeed at that? Because, for instance, "The Incredibles" probably didn't make you better, stronger, faster (etc), but I'm betting you don't regret the $9 you spent on it. And if every company's goal was to make products that made people smile, I don't think the world would be a bad place at all.
Our whole company is predicated on doing things differently, so when we're meeting with clients it's sort of our badge of courage to tell them to meet us at the Zoka.
I don't think it's ruffled anyone's feathers. We've done press interviews and met insurance guys and interviewed employees. Everyone seems to feel very at home. I guess it's not much different from meeting a client when you're on the road.
[The hilarious part is that our Zoka happens to be RIGHT next door to The Omni Group. I mean, literally the next building over. So, for people I've done business with before, it's like, "Uh, remember where I used to be? Well..."]
I've spent an inordinate amount of the last decade sitting around in coffee houses of varying degrees of corporateness (Starbucks obviously being on one end of the scale). Quite frankly, one of the reasons that I've stopped spending time at coffee houses are people using coffee houses in exactly this way.
I don't mind people working in coffee houses. I don't mind people meeting in coffee houses. What I do mind is when people start doing things like presentations to enough other people that they have to raise their voices, talk loudly and endlessly on their damn cell phones (not to mention taking endless calls), and blather away like they own the whole place. Guess what - it's not your office, guys. It's really not.
Tech nerds are usually fairly good about this. Some of the local business types are just complete pricks about this, though. It's like they've never considered the idea that the whole place isn't interested in the unique, dynamic work environment that their chain restaurant is going to provide.
I'm not under the delusion that coffee houses should be some sort of library-like atmosphere, or that no-one should ever conduct business there, or anything like that. I'd just like (for a change) for people who are doing business in a coffeehouse to recognize that they aren't in their own office.
We will absolutely have sharing your collection be "opt-in," on several levels. We aren't Safeway.
Amazon already has 1,000,000x the data on people's buying habits and their relations to each other than we'll ever collect, so I suspect that if marketers were going to have a field day, they'd be calling Amazon long before us.
It's true that it'd be _possible_ for us to do less-than-good things with the data we collect, but we're not going to. We're going to use the data to create new virtual communities of people with common interests, and bring our fragmented society closer together. If you don't want to join in those communities, don't check the preference box.
Mike has always been against us making the "buy similar items" aspect of our product too prominent, because he didn't want us to seem like a front-end to Amazon. And when we were looking for a way to help the world with our money, It was his idea to give all of our Amazon associates' money to charity, so it's clear to our customers we are NOT trying to encourage them to BUY BUY BUY.
Any new technology can be used for good or evil. I would expect people on this forum would recognize this truism isn't an argument against progress; it's a caution against recklessness.
The two La Marzoccos at Zoka cost, no kidding, something over $20,000 each. (They are re-tuned by hand once they come in the United States to be even more frou-frou.) Their entire water supply is run through an enormous Cuno water filter. They roast their own beans (which they sell as far away as Japan) and train baristas from all over the country. Their baristas consistently place tops in the national tournaments.
Seriously, you have to try an extra-foamy mocha here. Imagine drinking coffee-meringue-pie!
We use my house as a base of operations -- extra scanners are stored there, along with our MacWorld booth, and, if I have my way, that giant TV we had at MacWorld.
All these assets are guarded by two fierce attack-cats, so don't try looking up our address of incorporation and breaking into my house! You will emerge fuzzy, my friend. FUZZY!