This last weekend was an amazing display of what Seattle Community is like. My weekend kicked off Friday night at Office Nomads in Seattle. I’ve been to a few other ON gatherings and always meet some really nice people and always have a great time.
Tara Hunt (@missrogue) was a special guest and talked a little about her new book “The Whuffie Factor“. I got my autographed copy of the book and haven’t been able to put the book down. At the event, Tara says “the book basically takes a look at re-framing the idea of marketing in the sense of instead of approaching marketing as I want to make a sale or transaction, I need to raise social capital like everyone else does in these online communities”. The book covers five different ways to earn social capital:
Shut up and start listening
Be part of a community you serve
Create amazing customer experiences
Embrace the chaos
Find your higher purpose
I’m going to review the book in more detail at another time and am thinking of having a little gathering to discuss this book if people would be interested. Tweet or DM @thinkspace if you would be interested. I think a discussion on earning social capital would be really fun.
The other part of my weekend was going to BarCampSeattle 2009. I find it absolutely incredible that people get together on an adhoc basis to share and learn in an open environment. While I wasn’t able to attend that many sessions but there was still some fun discussions.
Here’s a picture of grid from Saturday: (click the image to see it big)
On May 21st, I gave a presentation on Twitter and Social Media for Business at the Sammamish Chamber of Commerce Luncheon. There was strong interest to have a Twitter 101 Workshop as a followup meeting. I’m now holding a Twitter 101 Workshop on June 16th from 7-9pm where we will go through the basics to get people started as well as some marketing strategies on how to use Twitter for your business. I will also see if I can lineup a special guest speaker from the 140 | The Twitter Conference. On May 26-27, the first Twitter Conference was held by Steve Broback and Jason Preston (The Parnassus Group). Over 300 people attended that event and from what I hear it was a big success.
Here’s a link to my PowerPoint deck from the Sammamish Chamber Luncheon.
If you are interested in attending please contact me at peter [at] thinkspace [dot] com. Also, this is a workshop event, so feel free to bring your laptop — I’ll provide the wifi.
The City of Redmond is updating their Hazard Mitigation Plan, and needs your input to ensure success. Tell the city which strategies they should use to lessen the effects of disasters and other types of hazards before they strike.
Please attend the city’s public meeting and workshop on Thursday, May 14th in the Bytes Cafe at Redmond City Hall. The meeting will begin at 7pm and should run no later than 8:30. Light refreshments will be served.
Back in October, I had a member ask us if we had space in San Francisco. I told them that we did not, but, I did refer them to use Citizen Space. I exchanged an email with Tara Hunt at Citizen Space and she told me that they “have a free drop-in policy…so anyone who comes from thinkspace to SF to hang out for a couple of days is welcome at Citizen Space.”
The Coworking Wiki site has something called a “Coworking Visa“. This allows active members of one space, when traveling, to use another coworking space, gratis. Terms vary from space to space, with regard to hours of operation, reservation requirements, etc. Those currently listed on the Coworking Visa page agree to offer up to 3 complimentary, drop-in days, with guidelines listed about using those days.
After running around Portland the other week, I stopped off at Souk and Cubespace. Those are two other Coworking places in Portland.
We’re hosting the Redmond Chamber of Commerce Business After Hours event on April 9th from 5pm - 7pm. Since it’s the start of the baseball season, we’re going with a baseball theme. Wear your favorite team jersey!
Food will be provided by Top Foods!
thinkspace provides affordable private office suites and telephone answering services allowing businesses to conduct business in a quiet, healthy, professional, and convenient environment, supported by modern technology. thinkspace also provides virtual office and meeting rooms.
We are a community of businesses in: Green Tech, Energy, Tech Startups (software and web 2.0), CPA’s, Attorneys, Office Furniture, Writers, Financial, Real Estate, Aerospace, Psychologists, Marketing, Consultants, Cellular Tech, Entrepreneurs, Staffing, and Microsoft Preferred Vendors.
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Here’s a short video that I took today at Green Festival Seattle. I was trying to pay attention to companies that I hadn’t seen at last year’s Green Festival. Here’s what caught my eye:
Kashless.org - a local Seattle tech company that built a website or online market place where everything is free. I think it pulls in the free section from third party sources. After running around on the website it looks like it pulls in Seattle Craigslist free stuff and postings in freecycle Seattle. It doesn’t appear to pull in other freecycle communities like Bellevue, Kirkland, Redmond. The biggest differences that I can see between freecycle and kashless is the nice user interface that kashless has and the ability to search for things. Let’s face it, freecycle is pretty much a massive email distribution list. The weird thing is that even though freecycle is basically a massive email distribution, it has sort of a community feel to it because you can see the names and email addresses of the people posting free things. Cashless is more of a faceless market place, kind of like a Craigslist. freecyclers see each other’s names repeatedly and I think it means more when you’re sharing with each other in your own local community.
Fair Trade Sports - this company is the first in the US to sell FSC certified and Fair Trade Certified sports balls like soccer balls, footballs, basketballs, and volleyballs. I see a lot of organic clothes and stuff, but I have not see any sports equipment that is eco-friendly. This is a first for me. They are located in Bainbridge Island.
Shirey Contracting - Located in Issaquah, Donna Shirey has a cool project under construction called the Zero Energy Idea House. It’s a house that is under construction and will have a monthly energy bill of less than $40. The house is located Bellevue, right off West Lake Sammamish Parkway, which is not too far away from thinkspace. I’m going to drive over there and check out the house.
Redmond Earth Day Celebration:
9am to Noon | April 11, 2009
The Sammamish River Trail near Leary Way Bridge. Redmond celebrates Earth Day early to avoid a crowded calendar of events throughout the region later in the month. Come celebrate with us by planting native trees and shrubs near the Sammamish River.
• We provide tools, training, gloves, bathrooms, water, light refreshments and lots of gratitude.
• We work rain or shine, so dress for the weather and dress to get dirty.
• All participants are required to sign a volunteer agreement before working.
• Those under 18 must have the signature of their parent or guardian.
Parking is available at Redmond Town Center. The restoration site is about a one-quarter mile walk from the Redmond Town Center Parking Garage. From the lot, cross 164th Avenue NE and continue on NE 74th Street until you reach Bear Creek Parkway. Cross Bear Creek Parkway and continue on the path beneath the large grove of Douglas Fir trees veering left toward the Leary Way Bridge. There will be signs to help guide your way. Cross the Leary Way Bridge to the West side of the river, to the Sammamish River Trail. We will be planting just upstream from the bridge.
For more information, contact Peter Holte at 425-556-2822 or pholte@redmond.gov.
Celebrate Arbor Day with the City of Redmond Parks and Recreation Department.
Participate in ceremonial tree plantings and also help plant young trees in the forested areas of Farrel-McWhirter Park. Please come prepared with work gloves; planting tools will be provided. Prizes and Arbor Day patches will be available.
Wednesday, April 8, 4pm–6pm @ Farrel-McWhirter Park, Hutcheson Shelter, 19545 Redmond Road
Please call Chris Tolonen at 425-556-2369 and let us know if you plan to participate in this event.
Robert Scoble from FastCompany toured our space and posted an article about us. Here’s what he said:
“Want to work with a ton of cool startups like iPhone app developer Shazam? Well, then you’ll want to check out Thinkspace which is run by Peter Chee up in Redmond, WA. Right near Microsoft’s campus. Here Peter gives us a tour and talks about why he has one of the hottest places to work in the Seattle area. Read Peter’s blog too.”
Robert also interviewed Newline Software and wrote an article about them too.
“It’s not every day that you get to see a company before they have their product finished, before they hired PR people, or have everything together. Which is why it’s interesting to see Newline Software, which is a startup located in Redmond, WA and is housed in Thinkspace, which is a green coworking space designed for startups. Here the two founders tell you about their company which is designed to back up your PC in a new way and they also tell you why starting up at Thinkspace is important to them.”
Steve Ihnen is founder of Solar Casters. Solar Casters is the weather forecaster for the solar industry. Steve’s company focuses on providing daily solar forecasts to utility companies. Solar Caster’s clients are worldwide where there are solar installations ranging from 45 kW to 350 mW. Steve’s weather forecasting software model takes into account 25 years of satellite data to make it’s predictions.
Solar Casters provides site assessments, technical and economic feasibility studies, as well as operational forecasting to companies looking to implement large scale solar projects. When Steve was intially touring our space, I was really excited to have him in here as I thought that our appreciation for alternate sources of energy and technology was a good match. I’ve been pretty interested in solar energy, specifically photovoltaic systems for the thinkspace building. At the end of 2008 I had a site assessment done for the thinkspace building, if I implement the solution, our building could possibly generate 42kW.
Some of the things that he appreciates about us is our centralized Redmond location, free parking, location to the transit center, and the green touches (LEED certification) aspects about our space like the no-VOC paints, low-VOC carpet adhesives, but he thinks we’re gone a bit crazy with our wine cork recycling! Steve also worked from home for a number of years and he enjoys the social interaction and community of our space. He told me that he was drawn to the green touches and technology minded businesses inside our space when he was comparing us to places like Regus Carillon Point.
The Scobleizer came into thinkspace today and interviewed me as I gave him a tour of the space. Robert tweeted us as the “coworking / office space mashup”. Robert also had time to interview green tech startup Newline Software, who is pioneering eco-digital preservation software. We stopped by to see Bart McCormick with Shazam, but unfortunately Bart wasn’t in the office. Robert now has a comp virtual office at thinkspace when he comes up to Seattle, we even made him a door plaque when he’s in town.
The next time he comes up here I hope to have Sysgain’s taggle service integration complete and he’ll be able to negotiate for real office space through an iPhone. I’m also hoping that we get a random “Tweet-up” inside here when he comes back into town. The Eastside tech community could use a few more events around here!
Mike Brophy and Sarah Brophy are with Sysgain, a company that has offices in Redmond, Washington DC, and Las Vegas. Sysgain develops software for the iPhone, provides staffing services, consulting services, and process management. Mike and Sarah are the driving force behind the Sales, Strategy, and Marketing for Sysgain. Sysgain places engineers, project managers, designers, marketing experts, and instructional designers.
Sysgain is also a Microsoft Preferred Vendor (MSVP) and provides consulting services to Microsoft. thinkspace is just a few miles away from Microsoft’s campus and is a good base camp for the Microsoft Vendor community. I remember when I first met Mike, he told me that there just isn’t enough room on campus for Microsoft Vendors and it was either hang out at a coffee shop or head home.
Sysgain also builds business critical applications. Sysgain develops websites, web apps, mobile apps, and iPhone applications. One of Sysgain’s strengths is coming up with creative solutions to solve business problems. With many years of business experience, they see the vision where the other rank developers don’t.
Sysgain’s latest iPhone application is called “taggle“. In October 2008, the Consumer Electronics Association named the innovative taggle service as one of 15 finalists in its 2008 i-Stage competition. You will definitely be hearing more about “taggle” on this blog once the service is in beta. I definitely feel that the taggle service is definitely going to make negotiating for products much more fun.
Sarah on thinkspace: “Since we came into the building we noticed a great sense of community and fellowship. We really enjoy working with the people here and it’s great to be a part of it”.
The GSM trade association announced that it has come to terms with the world’s leading handset manufacturers to come up with a standard for charging cell phones!
The initial group of companies include AT&T Inc., Motorola Inc., Nokia Corp., Samsung Electronics Co., Sony Ericsson, Deutsche Telekom AG’s T-Mobile and Vodafone PLC. There’s only one company that is obviously missing from that list and it’s Apple. At least their iPhone charger works interchangeably with their iPod. Perhaps they think by the time this standard comes to fruition in 2012, no one else will be using anything other than an iPhone, thus making them the standard.
The WSJ pointed out that every 20 months about 48-51 million cell phone chargers become obsolete. I hope that purchasing a charger will become an option and not bundled with a cell phone so that way the cost of purchasing a new phone will be less.
According to the Seattle Times, Microsoft has announced that they are providing a free add-on to their ERP software (Microsoft Dynamics AX) that allows companies to track their carbon footprint. Basically, if you’re a company that can’t afford to hire an environmental consultant to help you come up with a plan on how to track your carbon footprint you can use this tool instead. Something doesn’t seem right - doesn’t purchasing and running an ERP system cost more than hiring an environmental engineer to help you identify key performance indicators to track?
The ERP dashboard tracks four different indicators:
Direct energy consumption
Indirect energy consumption
Total direct and indirect green house emissions
Other relevant green house emissions
I searched around and found a link to the demo of the dashboard, you can click this link to MicrosoftDynamicsWorld.com and see it for yourself. For the last year, I’ve been tracking the thinkspace building utility bills and comparing them to the previous three years operating statements. The primary reason I’ve been doing this is to quantify the difference between being LEED certified and before we became LEED certified. I’m still trying to wrap my hands around all the other different metrics to capture like indirect energy consumption. Anyone out there got some suggestions?
Kory Gill and Marius Nita (Newline Software), have been generating a buzz in the tech world as the media gets a peek at what these two Microsoft Veterans are up to. Eric Engleman, with the Puget Sound Business Journal interviewed Kory and Marius on January 26th. Here’s a link to that article. They were also picked up by the PSBJ’s Tech Flash website. I had a conversation with Kory and Marius about the comments posted by the TechFlash readers and we all agreed that the comments were quite amusing. It’s pretty exciting to see this kind of innovation going on inside our building.
It's a mashup of coworking, office space, collaborative work environments. We talk a lot about energy efficient office buildings, green construction, the LEED process, community in the work place, virtual offices, hosted software, business technology solutions, and whatever comes to mind.
Our goal is to provide a great community for SMB's to build sustainable businesses on the Eastside (Bellevue, Redmond, Kirkland, Woodinville, and Sammamish).
We provide space for a business to go from seed to stem to branch and leaves.
Redmond Earth Day Celebration:
Robert Scoble from FastCompany toured our space and posted an article about us. Here’s what he said:
