Bedouin – Page 2 – ɔimoɈɒ

Limited Net Access :(

Having a roaming Internet data deal is all very well but is unhelpful when you’re not in range of a transmitter. Mobile telephone calls can be routed through the onboard mobile network (at some pretty outrageous costs) but in truth unless there is an emergency there is little incentive to use your own mobile. Data … Continue reading “Limited Net Access :(“

Having a roaming Internet data deal is all very well but is unhelpful when you’re not in range of a transmitter.

Mobile telephone calls can be routed through the onboard mobile network (at some pretty outrageous costs) but in truth unless there is an emergency there is little incentive to use your own mobile.

Data can also be routed through a WiiFi network limited to the area around the Internet cafÃ© because it uses the same system. At a minimum cost of 16 pence per minute it’s not badly priced though the excessive latency of the satellite data link lengthens any operation which forces you to burn through minutes. Plus – the upload speed of a satellite connection is nowhere near broadband speeds (last time I checked it was 33kbps).

This leaves me with very limited access to email and the like. Some people have said I should take the time off from computers and blogging. Great idea – now how about you go on a holiday and not do some of the things you enjoy the most? Hmm?

Hopefully I’ll get a decent connection when we hit Stockholm.

Going Solar: first steps

A couple of weeks ago I bought a FreeLoader solar battery which is expressly designed to recharge your little tech gadgets. This week, I added a supercharger to it (that’s the large green thing). The whole kit itself costs about Â£50. It’s not terribly sunny here but the freeloader battery charges in about 8 hours … Continue reading “Going Solar: first steps”

It’s not terribly sunny here but the freeloader battery charges in about 8 hours by itself and in about 3 hours with the supercharger. This battery will then (in turn) provide about a half-charge to a Nokia N800 or iPhone 3G.

Having the unit in direct sunshine charges it quicker, having it behind glass in my living room (which is sheltered) makes it recharge much slower. You can also fast-charge it over USB which you would think defeats the purpose but this is about being able to get your gadgets power when you need it.

I think this kit will be very useful during the next few weeks and after that I’ll be looking at a bigger project. Like powering the TV at home.

Oh, it also comes in pink.

Co-Working 2008

Pat Phelan writes about Co-Working in Cork: so if you could get 20 people to invest â‚¬25 per week, co working should be incredibly simple plus â‚¬50 from each to start-up ?? It really requires people who are passionate about it to start to put their money where their mouth is. I’ve spoken a lot … Continue reading “Co-Working 2008”

Pat Phelan writes about Co-Working in Cork:

so if you could get 20 people to invest â‚¬25 per week, co working should be incredibly simple plus â‚¬50 from each to start-up ??

It really requires people who are passionate about it to start to put their money where their mouth is.

I’ve spoken a lot about co-working in the past in conjunction with ‘Bedouin‘ working. Though it’s not something I could really take advantage of right now (due to the day job requirements and my partner working nights), it remains something I would support with my money as well as my mouth.

Looking at the costs though – and assuming Â£20 a week for Belfast:

20 people at Â£20 a week is Â£19200 a year if you assume 48-week occupancy. I did a quick search on Propertynews Commercial this morning targetting the City Centre, Botanic, Stranmillis and the University Area.

For Â£7000 pa (plus same again in Rates), you can get 1000 sq ft in a second floor suite on Shaftesbury Square. For Â£9000 pa (and again about the same in Rates), you can get the ground floor of a house on University Street (with 711 sq ft). For Â£13500 a year (plus a massive cost in rates), you can get about 1800 sq ft in Rosemary Street (just off Royal Avenue). These start to make the costs a lot higher but consider the crush in trying to fit 20 people into even 1800 sq ft when you consider that you are going to want desks, maybe even some sofas, breakout space, maybe even a conference room/meeting room or two. This is meant to be a relaxed place to work – not a sweatshop.

One of the most promising premises in terms of size is one on North Street which has 2300 sq ft already subdivided into offices and meeting rooms. The list price, Â£30 000 annually is high and the rates add another Â£10 000 onto the total. But the shape is wrong (with it divided into a host of one-man offices) and with the cost now hitting Â£40 000 (though a good negotiator could get that rent cut down to half), you’d have to charge people a lot more just to get in the door and that then doesn’t count operational or capital expenditure – desks, chairs, carpets, projectors, internet, telephones.

Nor does anything here take into account the necessity for 5-15 year leases.

I am convinced that running a Co-Working site needs to be a full time job for someone and, as a result, they’d need to get paid for it. Someone to keep the place clean, someone to make sure the bills get paid, to make sure the milk is fresh, to restock the coffee and to scrub the toilet bowl. Sure, this can be done by the co-workers themselves but I remain unconvinced that people will do it unless it is their job. It will always be someone else’s job.

And I also think there needs to be a retail element of it. You need to increase revenue by bringing in people off the street. No sense in buying decent coffee if it’s just going to be drunk by the people who turn up to the co-working space.

[UPDATE: from the comments, Co-working spaces need some definition. This graphic is taken from my 2006 business plan.

The NewWorkSpace aimed to fill in the gap. Coffee shop on the ground floor with normal coffee tables in the middle and ‘work booths’ around the edges. Stairway leading to reception and entry to the co-working floor – large tables, room for 2-5 people at each, sofas, kitchen. Office manager pay-for facilities here too like fax, printer. Door leading to offices on next floor and secure storage for members. There was a lot more visual detail which I’ll lead someone though if they ask.]

Workplaces

I’ve never made secret my love of the concepts of ‘Going Bedouin’ or ‘Co-Working’. The difference between them is simple. Going Bedouin The principle of having your entire business on your back. Today you work in a coffee shop on Royal Avenue, tomorrow a coffee shop in Bradbury Place. And with 3G USB doohickeys being … Continue reading “Workplaces”

I’ve never made secret my love of the concepts of ‘Going Bedouin’ or ‘Co-Working’.

The difference between them is simple.

Going Bedouin

The principle of having your entire business on your back. Today you work in a coffee shop on Royal Avenue, tomorrow a coffee shop in Bradbury Place. And with 3G USB doohickeys being so cheap these days it seems that you don’t even need to find a WiFi-enabled cafe. Going Bedouin is going to be best for someone who has a relatively paper-free business due to the lack of printing facilities and they’d also be likely to stock up on extra batteries just in case their workplace of the day doesn’t have any convenient power points. Your expenses are going to be the amount of food and beverages that the coffee shop owner will expect you to buy in order to retain your seat. Some Bedouin workers have scorned the idea of ‘paying your way’ but it is an important part of the economy. If you don’t like it, shack up in a corner of the bus station or in another public space.

Co-Working

For the most part, this is about hiring a desk in a shared space. This is different to hiring a serviced office and sitting hidden in there knowing that the guy in the next office is working on something different. Shared spaces are all about getting the benefits of being in a busy office with less of the negatives. Candidates for co-working tend to be social people, people not irritated by the presence of others and people who might have worked for a big company before and missed the interaction at the water cooler or the photocopier when they went independent. Most co-workers will only use the shared space part-time due to other pressures in their lives. The Co-Work space should therefore be something of a refuge and it’s not conducive to have stressed-out, under-pressure individuals in your space (unless watching someone slowly implode really relaxes you). Co-Working is about relationships more than anything.

Excellence in workspace

An important point in changing your workstyle to add in Bedouin working or Co-Working is to make sure it provides an improvement.

The space you choose should fit in with the pattern of how you want to work. If you like working early in the morning or late at night, you’ll need to consider this (most half decent cafes in Belfast seem to close at 6). Consider your transport routes and, more importantly, your footwear. Consider that you may need to bring a coat of some sort even when the weather seems fine (and a warm sweater if you’re in Ireland).

For a Co-Working space, look at the other co-workers and make an attempt to be friends with them. Is the space tidy or well-kept? Do they have insurance? Or Alarm systems? What’s to stop someone walking in off the street? Do you feel comfortable leaving your equipment and content unattended? Do they have a lockup for your stuff when you’re out of the office? What ‘virtual office’ facilities do they have? Fax? Telephone? Receptionist? Do they have a kitchen? What about a breakout area for chat? Do the other co-workers have any odious habits? Does it smell fresh? Are the windows open? Is the carpet clean?

And when it’s restroom time – do you pack up your mobile office into your bag and disappear into the restroom to emerge later smelling faintly of cheap liquid soap? Do you leave it all out and hope that someone will look after your stuff?

Co-Working is all about relationships – do you trust these people?

Prerequisites

The first and most important element in considering Bedouin or CoWorking plans is whether or not you can make money – some businesses lend themselves naturally, while some do not. Services like Twitter give you a skewed perspective of work because there’s little visibility of time zones, business models and segregation. While you’re making your decisions, you can see that some people are re-installing their gaming machines or going for a walk, sitting in a coffee house drinking Americanos, giving talks or drumming in the park. You don’t see the work that they do because you’re always being updated by someone.

Another element that people don’t consider is outsourcing work that doesn’t bring direct value. Hire an accountant. Make sure your mail host and file server host are reliable. Make sure you have a reliable communications network with others in your team (if you are part of a team) because your team will need that interaction with you.

Ask yourself why you want to change your workstyle. Coffee is cheaper at home. Peace and quiet probably more achievable (unless there are kids involved). Talk through it with your partner at home as they may resent you changing from being a teleworker-at-home to a teleworker-in-cafe.

If you’re doing it, embrace it. Make the most of it and don’t be a wallflower.

Next Steps

I plan to talk more about possibilities in Co-Working over the next few days. I don’t know how much of my vision concurs with the vision of the individuals who make up the Co-Working Belfast group because I have some very specific ideas of what I want to see. I still have this business plan for ‘the new workspace’ which I wrote in 2006 and I think it deserves another crack of the whip.

Internet everywhere…

On his WiMaxxed blog, Evert Bopp has spoken loudly about his desire to WiFi the train networks in Ireland. In fact his latest post positively screams it out loud. Bravo, Evert! This is something I feel extremely passionately about and paves the way for “do your thing everywhere” where it doesn’t matter what you’re involved … Continue reading “Internet everywhere…”

On his WiMaxxed blog, Evert Bopp has spoken loudly about his desire to WiFi the train networks in Ireland. In fact his latest post positively screams it out loud. Bravo, Evert!

This is something I feel extremely passionately about and paves the way for “do your thing everywhere” where it doesn’t matter what you’re involved in – business/ecommerce, playing games, talking/tweeting – the network should support it by:

being present (this is a biggie and probably a first step)
being affordable (it shouldn’t be an arm and a leg more expensive than anything else. I’m looking at you BTOpenZone)
being available (meaning no time restrictions, multiple routes off the network to the internet)

A few years, Andrew Gallagher and I had a meeting or two with other like-minded individuals and started a little offshoot of the Belfast GNU/Linux User Group which Andrew named ‘cumulus wireless’. Some of the guys reported their line-of-sight to others houses but the things that excited me were ‘cantennas’ and setting up a 802.11b wireless signal over a mile down near the Odyssey in Belfast using two iBooks with their airport cards attached to an omni and a backfire antenna.

Again, I can’t speak for Andrew or the rest but my vision was to create a mesh around Belfast which anyone could tap into. This ‘private’ network would be open to use/abuse by anyone and would provide

medium – just simple IP and name resolution and routing, it would be a signal that anyone could join and using zeroconf (or by swapping IP addresses over more conventional means), they could set up any IP connection – be that video, voice, chat, sending files. As long as the data stayed on the network, there would be no charge.
portal – an advertising supported captive portal that would require sign-in every time you wanted to access a service outside the network. This portal would be common and would be there entirely to provide admin contact, acknowledgement of contributors, a small amount of revenue and lastly….
access – I had hoped to convince ISPs locally to sign up to it and provide access to their internet pipes. By getting their access in there, they would pay to support the maintenance and growth of the network. In return, they would charge access to their internet pipe directly to the consumer using credit card, premium SMS, micropayments or whatever they liked. This would mean the market would level itself. If an ISP wanted to offer a basic pipe to keep costs down, then they could. If an ISP wanted to offer a high speed pipe for premium customers who absolutely needed multi-megabyte speeds then, again, they could. It seemed like a pretty good business model.

To put this in perspective, this was in October 2002.

But as things happen, when this was started I was working for Nortel – I’d got the experience in building resilient networks (using wires mostly as Nortel was still mixed about their wireless strategy). Two months later I was an employee of a Mac repair startup which failed spectacularly in May 2003. By June 2003 I was running my own business and didn’t have time for pie in the sky projects like this.

That said, six years later, it’s still not a bad business model.

Today, I read a post from the NotAnMBA blog:

I am writing this post from my laptop, on a bus, in a tunnel.

More specifically, Iâ€™m writing this post from my laptop on BoltBus, a bus service which offers free wi-fi and travels between several of the larger cities in the Northeast, all for about $12 each way, while traveling through the Lincoln Tunnel.

EVDO and similar cell-driven services have been bringing the Internet to unexpected places for a while now, but at a decently-expensive price. Internet on a $12 bus from New York to Philly is another story.

If you can do your job on the Internet, then you can do your job in a lot of places. Now you can do your job on a bus.

and it gets me thinking about what could still be possible with time ( a lot of time ), money (a middling amount of money) and goodwill (a huge amount). Am I a dreamer? Is municipal WiFi still a bit of a pipe dream in the luddite metropolis of Belfast (Yes).

Would I like a WiFi supported bus or train service? I’d definitely skip taking the car if I thought that I could get decent service and a table on the train.

Muni-WiFi revisited

Evert Bopp writes about municipal wifi: The majority of networks that failed, failed because of either an in-ability to understand the technology used (in regards to performance, signal propagation, interference etc.), a lousy business model (unrealistic revenue forecasts, over reliance on third party content etc.) or a combination of both. The lack of understanding of … Continue reading “Muni-WiFi revisited”

Evert Bopp writes about municipal wifi:

The majority of networks that failed, failed because of either an in-ability to understand the technology used (in regards to performance, signal propagation, interference etc.), a lousy business model (unrealistic revenue forecasts, over reliance on third party content etc.) or a combination of both.
The lack of understanding of the technology quite often lead to the network either using not enough wireless nodes resulting in bad coverage, low throughput, high latency and other performance problems or to too many wireless nodes causing signal interference, “node hopping” etc. also resulting on performance problems. All this results in a dissatisfied user which in turn leads to bad publicity, falling revenue and investors losing confidence.
Lousy business models more often than not contained unrealistic user numbers and inflated revenue forecasts. Combine the two and you have a recipe for disaster.

Absolutely.

I’m enchanted by the idea of muni-wifi even to the point that I almost bought fifty (50, countem) mesh nodes from Meraki for deployment around Belfast.

This hardware was to be funded out of my own pocket.
There were going to be 3-4 network uplinks funded too, out of my own pocket – yes, using cheap-ass broadband links.
This was to cover the city centre as best I could, providing free (sign-up based) access to t’internet.
This was to invite others to assist by providing backup links, sharing bandwidth.
I hoped to entice additional mesh links via Belfast City Council.

I approached Belfast City Council and was told there was no need for something like this because BT was already providing BT OpenZone for Â£6 an hour. Seriously.

My desire for this was based on the number of times I wanted faster access to the Internet when I was in town. At the time I only had my Newt (with WiFi), my laptop (with WiFi), my Nokia N800 (with WiFi) or my iPod touch. I see less of a need for it these days because of my iPhone and the unlimited data plan but speedier access is still welcome. Because of unlimited data plans along with telephone calls and texts, the cost of data has reduced to effectively zero. This is going to make it hard in the future to justify any charge-based networks in the future. I certainly never join BTOpenZone networks these days.

While I love the idea of it, I have no confidence in the ability of councils to deliver. It’ll have to be private companies and then how are they to make money.

Hyperconnected

A stunning piece of advertorial from InfoWorld via Nortel’s sponsored IDC survey. a considerable number of what it calls “hyperconnected” users … those using at least seven devices and nine applications … accounted for 16 percent of the population in the study Behind the hyperconnected were the “increasingly connected,” who use four devices and as … Continue reading “Hyperconnected”

A stunning piece of advertorial from InfoWorld via Nortel’s sponsored IDC survey.

a considerable number of what it calls “hyperconnected” users … those using at least seven devices and nine applications … accounted for 16 percent of the population in the study

Behind the hyperconnected were the “increasingly connected,” who use four devices and as many as six applications and account for 36 percent of the population.

i don’t find this hard to believe considering that at home I have a heap of IP-enabled equipment: three routers, a desktop computer (iMac), three laptops (17″ Pro, Air and Asus eeePC) , a slingbox, a game console (Wii) one Internet tablet (Nokia N800), two iPhones and two other internet-capable phones (Nokia and Sony-Ericsson).

The article continues like an infomercial but points out that your local friendly neighbourhood It department may have to change the way they work to allow for more heterogenous workspaces and include platforms like mobile telephones, FaceBook or even game consoles (those that have web browsers built in). How frustrating is it that I can’t just connect to Facebook or LinkedIn to ask a question or to help me in resourcing a new place in my team. I end up having to go home and do my investigations there. IT departments are still driven by paranoia and fear, not for the loss of data, but for the loss of their job.

Unified communications, which is promoted by companies such as Microsoft and Nortel, will make an impact, according to IDC and Nortel. Networks will need to accommodate identity, presence, location, telephony and data.

And we see two companies uniquely qualified to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by making these solutions expensive, proprietary and failure-prone.

I wouldn’t describe myself as hyper-connected even though I’m sitting at a desktop computer with a laptop in my bag, an internet tablet on my right and an iPhone on my left. We need to establish a platform for the hyperconnected, get ubiquitous network access (is this going to be Wifi, WiMax or 3/4G?) and improve the battery life of these devices. And we should get right to resolving these issues as soon as we’ve defeated poverty.

Co-Working

Andy recently posted that his efforts to build Co-Working Belfast have been bearing fruit as he gets QUB and Belfast City Council on board. For my part, I’ve pledged that Mac-Sys will buy a desk every month and put some loaner kit down there as well to foster mobile types into using it. Co-Working Ireland … Continue reading “Co-Working”

Co-Working Ireland started over a year ago and I was invited to blog about it. I wrote a few articles there

The Closed Door
Working anywhere you pitch a tent.
Coffee shops: spacial logistics

but not long after I changed jobs (long story) and being office based I’ve not really had the time or opportunity to blog more about it on coworking.ie though I have managed to put some stuff together here in my Bedouin and Co-Working categories.

I’ve got an article in the making for coworking.ie, a year after my last one. Woo-and-hoo!

Here and where again?

The title for this blog post derives from the autre-title for “The Hobbit” which was “There and Back Again”. It details an arduous journey, full of frustration and friction, in order to have an adventure and then return home. As the months pass in $BIG_COMPANY, it becomes clearer to me what I want to be … Continue reading “Here and where again?”

As the months pass in $BIG_COMPANY, it becomes clearer to me what I want to be doing with the rest of my life.

Not this. It’s not even that I dislike corporate wage slave culture. I actually have no issues with it. I loved my time in Nortel and only moved on because timing, opportunity and encouragement were right. This is just mind-numbing. And typical, of course, of worst-class pandering to executives while stripping the workers of their pay rises. Not good enough for me.
I’m also not sure about whether I want to get back into IT work. It’s something (I think) I’m good at, having done it for over a decade now and there are new areas of business I’d like to move into, certainly, but the allure of crawling around chasing cables in a dusty footwell under a desk just doesn’t have the same appeal.
There are some things I’m totally enamoured with. Ubiquitous wireless. Co-Working. Bedouin working. The ‘Presence’ aspect of social software. The tricky thing is how to get all of that to pay a mortgage and feed a dog. Yes, I have a plan. I just need the timing to be right (after all I’ve got a full dance card until around September).

At the moment, with someone leaving $BIG_COMPANY every week, it doesn’t surprise me that I feel this way (and that I’m obviously not alone). I do wonder what sort of job you have to be in to get the freedom to attend talks and trips like Paddy’s Valley. I asked to attend a 1 day Open Source event in Belfast and was told it would be annual leave – some companies have such vision!

The answer is therefore to figure out what I really want to do, get paid for doing it, and wander off into the sunset.

It’s the question that drives us.

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Going Bedouin

Co-Working

Excellence in workspace

Prerequisites

Next Steps

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