cobot news

Message Boards for Coworkers

Today we are launching a new feature for the Coworkers app: message boards.

So far Coworkers has provided member directories for coworking spaces. Because it is based on cobot it can take peoples’ basic information and photos from there. In addition members can enter information about their profession, skills etc.
These profiles are then available to other members or can be embedded on the space’s website.

The new message boards now allow coworkers to communicate with each other and their coworking space. An admin of the coworking space has to create at least one message board. After that the corresponding link in the navigation becomes visible for members.

For now members and admin can simply post messages in different boards. For example at our own coworking space co.up we set up a job board, a board for news and events and one for classifieds (Apple hardware is in high demand).

We plan to add more features to Coworkers. If there’s something you want to have added please let us know.

But now: try out the new Coworkers App.

Cobot app directory

In the past months cobot has accumulated a number of applications that use our API to customize/enhance cobot in different ways. In the past it wasn’t always easy to find these apps. To solve this problem we are now launching our own app directory at http://apps.cobot.me.

A few examples apps:

Coworkers

A member directory that shows profiles of all coworkers and can be embedded into your website.

Office Space

An app to assign members to fixed desks or offices and keep track of who is where.

We wrote this app for Mission Fifty and they agreed to open it up for all cobot customers. Thank you.

The source code for most of the apps is available on github, so if you want to customize these further please feel free - and let us know.

Merry Christmas

We would like to wish our customers and everyone in the coworking scene a lovely christmas and holiday time.

2011 was a great year for coworking. The movement gained a lot of traction and public recognition. Events like the unconference in March at SXSW in Austin and the European Coworking Conference in November in Berlin allowed us and many others to exchange ideas, gain new insights and meet new friends.

It was also a great year for us at cobot. We have been able to help manage a growing number of coworking spaces worldwide. We have listened to customers, added new features, but more importantly refrained from adding others. We have made cobot more useful and more usable than ever.

We would like to thank our customers and friends, people who spread the word, gave valuable feedback and helped shape cobot. Have a great time with your family and friends.

We can’t wait to get back to work in 2012 and show you our new ideas. We are quite sure you will love them.

The Cobot Team Aleks, Alex and Thilo

Parisoma’s clever cobot hack

A long long time ago in a not so far away place we wanted to give coworking spaces the ability to store custom information about their coworkers in cobot. We discussed a number of ideas ranging from a simple text field to a system that would allow you to create custom fields with custom data types and do all kinds of fancy things.

In the end the simple text field won. Why? We didn’t know what exactly our customers would need, so spending lots of time on a complex system wouldn’t work. The text field was simple. And people would be able to hack it.

And they did. I just saw it a few days ago when I helped with an issue at Parisoma: They put in check lists into the field, using square brackets to mimic the checkbox at the beginning of each line.

Amber from Parisoma:

I do put checklists in the memo field to try to make sure I am not missing anything when a coworkers starts or leaves. I was always bad about adding them to the coworker mailing list or taking them off, things like that would always fall through the cracks. This helps keep me on track and also makes it easier for my colleagues to see what the process is I go through with a new coworker if I am not here.

What are your hacks? Have anything to share? Let me know at alex [at] cobot.me.

Keeping it simple: Included Time Passes

We just rolled out another major change in cobot: the removal of the days included per week/month option in plans.

A long time ago this was introduced as a means to provide part time plans to members. Later came day passes, which then turned into more flexible time passes. At this point we had a problem, in that we now had time passes that were very flexible (valid during any time of the day) but included days (always a whole day), which were less flexible than time passes, and the two features also duplicated each other’s functionality. Time to clean up.

With the removal of days included we were able to throw away a good amount of code and also a few pages and elements from the website, making things a bit simpler again. At the same time we now allow a plan to include any number of time passes. With this you can now have plans that for example include a certain number half day passes per week or night time passes per month.

For a step by step guide see our updated guides.

One more thing: during the migration we also switched to new, more powerful server hardware (which is very easy for us since we are hosted on Scalarium/Amazon EC2 instances). Cobot now runs on 5 times the CPU power compared to before. You should notice that the site has become much more responsive.

Day Passes are now Time Passes

We just introduced a major new feature: previously cobot already supported day passes, which meant coworkers with limited plans could buy day passes in order to be able to come in more often than their plan would allow.

With the new time passes, coworking spaces can now sell passes that are valid for any part of the day, for example half day passes or evening passes.

For that, as a space admin you can now assign one or multiple time spans to each pass. A time span consists of a start and end time – and you can have more than one.

If you set up a pass with a time span 8:30 - 12:00, 13:00 - 18:00 (12h format works, too), then a member could use it either between 8:30 and 12 or between 1pm and 6pm. If he or she wants to come in in the morning and the afternoon (s)he needs two passes.

For details see our updated help section.

All existing day passes have been changed to time passes that are valid from 4am to 3:59:59am the next day - this is exactly the way day passes behaved, so nothing will change for existing spaces.

Feature: Welcome Messages

We just added a new feature called Welcome Messages. As a coworking space manager you can now enter a message which cobot will show to new coworkers.

This can be useful for a number of things: letting people know where to get help, telling them about a few basic rules, opening times etc.

The message can be set per plan as for example full time residents might be interested in other information than drop ins. To enter the message go to the plans section, click on the edit button and then on the new Welcome Message tab.

New Pricing

We just released our new pricing. We now have a tiered model with 5 plans. Each plan limits the no. of coworkers you can have.

As before there are no extra charges for “premium features” and you won’t be charged for coworkers that only use day passes (no monthly charge).

For most spaces this is a price reduction - the larger the space the lower the per coworker cost. The only exception is that the minimum charge will be $35/month.

The reasons for the changes are as follow:

• We constantly get question on cobot’s pricing - a lot of people expect an overview of the price plans - we have that now. The switch will make it simpler for new customers to understand cobot. Being different is not always a good idea.
• Larger spaces have been hesitant to sign up because if they would grow too big (say > 300 coworkers) they would be paying loads of money. Now they know they will never have to pay more than $300.
• We also have quite a few spaces that hardly pay us anything because they use only day passes. While this is basically fine it means we are giving away our service for free to some spaces where others have to pay. Our minimum charge of $35 will make that a bit more fair.

Please note that for existing customers nothing will change - you can stay on your current plan (price per coworker) for as long as you want, but you will also have the option to switch.

Member directory

At its core cobot is a software for managing coworking spaces. Thanks to its API it can be much more than that, it can be a platform for other service that leverage and extend the data we already have on cobot. One example for that is our new member directory app which we simply call coworkers.

As soon as someone from a space signs into the app it transfers his basic membership data and the space to the member directory. People then have a public directory of the people who work at a coworking space. Here’s our space co.up

In addition to the information from cobot the app also asks for things like profession and skills. Not stopping there space admins can enter additional questions for their coworkers.

To round this up coworking spaces can embed the list into their own website. When you log into coworkers as a space admin you can find instructions on how to do that at the bottom of the list of coworkers.