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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."
It's called data encryption, in the form of a VPN. Look into it.
Really -- this problem has been solved for a long, long time. Create your own virtual network within the network by implementing an encryption and authentication system so that only those systems and users belonging to the company can connect and intercommunicate, and your work just looks like garbage to anyone wishing to snoop in on you.
Yaz.
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
That and their software is probably infinitely cooler than yours was. Have you ever used or seen Delicious Library?
Not everybody *enjoys* working from home.
;)
Personally, I like to separate my work from my life. It's not that I like one and not the other, it's that I like them to be different.
I do work in an office, but when I work on my own projects ( robotics & AI ) I do it in a coffee shop. It works for some mindsets. For me it gives me the comfort of *not* being cooped up in my apartment. I get to be surrounded by humanity, and in the chaos of noise, people and music, somehow my mind focuses like a needle.
When I work at home, I end up just being distracted and watch a movie, or spend time with my GF.
E.g., not productive
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
0xDECAFBAD
http://siokaos.org/
Not everybody *enjoys* working from home.
Very true. I thought I would; I'm a fairly introverted guy and able to focus pretty well on things, so when I had the opportunity to work remotely for my company, I did for about a year and a half. It was great at first, but after a while I found myself longing for more of a division between work. Working from home, for me at least, led to a feeling that I was never not at work; if I had some spare time, there was a small feeling prodding me to spend it finishing up some project for my job.
I finally had enough, so I found a new job, in which I work for a relatively large company in a large room with 10 or so other developers in it. It's actually quite refreshing to have those other folks around. Just having some other ideas floating around me has greatly increased my motivation. Plus, when I get home, I'm now only at home, not at work.
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.
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.
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!