May 2013
2 posts
Getting Paid - Payment Methods
A while ago Tom, from the about-to-open Coworking Bath, suggested we integrate Cobot with GoCardLess. They are a popular payment gateway in the UK, and since they worked well and offered competitive rates, we decided that the integration was worth it.
A couple of days ago we finished coding and testing, and sent an email to the spaces using Cobot in the UK. Even if you’re not UK based, and...
3 tags
Gocardless integration
We are happy to announce that Cobot now integrates with Gocardless. Gocardless is able to charge extremely low fees (1% transaction value, max £2) by using direct debit instead of credit cards.
At the moment Gocardless is only available in the U.K. but we’ve heard they will be expanding to Europe soon.
To start using Gocardless go to Setup -> Payment Methods -> Add Payment Method...
Custom booking calendar prices per plan
You can now charge members different rates for booking resources. To set it up add/edit a plan, click on the booking credits tab and enter a price per hour for the resource.
April 2013
1 post
A few smaller improvements
While we are all waiting for the next big new feature (it is in the works) here are some smaller improvements we recently added:
Payment methods can be hidden from the public now just like plans.
You can enter multiple billing addresses per member
The name of the tax displayed on invoices can be customized
When using apps the Confirm/Reject page now appear only once instead of every time you...
March 2013
5 posts
GCUC 2013 - A juicy conference
At the beginning of the month I flew to Austin to attend the Global Coworking Unconference Conference, GCUC. This year’s event was my first and it was a great week during I got to learn a lot and meet many of people.
Liz Elam is the magician behind GCUC. She runs Link Coworking in Austin, organizes GCUC, and even drives a coworking car. She is really into it, and GCUC is filled with all of...
3 tags
Invoicing Current Charges
Cobot usually generates an invoice for each coworker once a month, collecting fees for booking conference rooms, day passes and any extra charges. In addition you can create a free-form invoice any time.
Starting today you can create an invoice based on the current charges of a member. For example, if someone booked a meeting room today you can send an invoice for that at any time instead of...
4 tags
Stripe and Adyen Payment Processing
We are happy to announce that Cobot now integrates with two more payment processors:
Stripe is available in the U.S. and Canada and is well known for its easy and fast sign-up process. Definitely recommended if you are lucky enough to be located in the right place.
Adyen is available almost worldwide and supports numerous payment methods depending on the country you are in, which allows them...
2 tags
RFID integration: member check-in using swipe...
Adding to the recent deployment of our new wifi integration we are happy to release our RFID check-in system.
This system allows a coworking space to give each member a card and when they come into the space have them check in by swiping it. This gives the space the same benefits as the wifi integration such as automatically using the day passes of members with a limited plan and getting...
Space of the Month - co.up
Did you know that we run a coworking space? Well, we do! Actually, the space existed before Cobot.
Our coworking space is called co.up and we have 55 full-, part-time, and basic members, aside from the many others who just drop in once in a while. We started on the 5th floor of an old industrial building in Kreuzberg, a popular district of Berlin, and expanded to the 3rd floor last summer. Most...
February 2013
2 posts
4 tags
New wifi integration replaces RADIUS
We recently released the next generation of our wifi integration. The feature formerly known as RADIUS allows coworking spaces to restrict access to their wifi by requiring members to log in in order to get internet access. In addition it automatically checks people in on Cobot which generates statics about attendance and uses up day passes.
While our old RADIUS implementation worked okay we...
2 tags
Expiring guest accounts
For space using our wifi integration feature, you can now set an expiry date for guest accounts.
This allows you for example to give the organizers of an event a guest account that they can use during the event. After that it expires automatically and you don’t have to worry about it anymore.
January 2013
2 posts
Here comes 2013
Dear Friends,
Never too late to say Happy New Year! 2012 has been good for coworking. Let 2013 be great.
During the last year, with more than 2000 coworking spaces around the world, the movement started to take the next level. The results from the last Global Coworking Survey, conducted by the people at Deskmag, showed that coworkers are also feeling the benefits of coworking - many report...
Event Management
We are happy to relase our latest feature: the event calendar.
All event management happens in a calendar similar to the booking calendar you already know. As the admin of a space you can add events. Your members can then see these on Cobot and RSVP with a click of a button.
Optionally you can charge for an event - the amount will be added to the member’s next invoice on Cobot.
This...
November 2012
2 posts
3 tags
Resources with capacity
Resources with capacity
We just added a feature to the booking calendar: resources now have a capacity field. If the capacity is greater than one multiple people can book a resource at the same time.
The main use case is for coworking spaces who want to have their members book a desk before they come in: instead of having to add every desk in the space as a separate resource they can now add...
Custom fields
We just added another feature: custom fields. Until now Cobot could store basic details like address and email for each member. In addition we provided questionnaires to ask coworkers for additional information.
Now admins can define custom fields to store any member data. This can be phone numbers, websites, twitter handles or whatever is interesting to the space.
To set up custom fields go...
September 2012
2 posts
Space of the Month: Interview with Eric van den...
Location: Paris, France |
Size: 400 sqm |
Desk Seats: 70 |
Event Capacity: Up to 120 guests
What is your vision of coworking?
We believe in a very simple model. Our motto is “Libres Ensemble” (“free together”). We think that independent workers can be divided into three main subcategories: The Creators (designers, developers…), the Communicators (bloggers,...
Coworking Days
Our friend Jaime Aranda, from WorkInCompany — the first coworking space in Sevilla, Spain — shared with us this amazing idea they had to give visibility to coworking.
CoworkingDays is a two-day event during which you just have to open the doors of your space or bring it to the streets.
Coworking is here to stay. The number of spaces grows every day as an answer to a growing demand....
August 2012
7 posts
2 tags
Finally: Change a member's invoice day
This has probably been the most and longest requested feature but today we are finally rolling it out. Admins can now change the date when the invoices for their members are sent.
We have an entry to the Invoices dropdown on the member page:
Which leads you to this form:
Introducing Services
Today we are releasing an addition to our one time charges called services. Services let you create a list of things you often want to charge for. This way you don’t have to remember the price and put in a description every time yo want to charge somone, but can just select it from the list.
You can find services on the Add Charge page for a member.
5 tags
Pay for other members
We just rolled out a new feature that we call Pay for other members. It pretty much does what it says: you can assign a member John to pay for another member Max. From then on John will pay for everything we would normally charge Max, which means all one time charges, bookings and other fees will appear on John’s invoice instead of on Max’.
One use case is that a coworking space has...
4 tags
Custom Tax Rates
Many countries use different tax rates depending on wether something is a service or a product and other factors. We are happy to announce that cobot now supports custom tax rates on one time charges and resources/bookings.
To enable this feature go to Setup, Basic and check the Enable custom tax rates box.
From then on when you add or edit a resource or you add a one time charge for a...
Coworking Day
August 9th, 2005 is considered the day coworking was born. In his blog, Coding in Paradise, Brad Neuberg asked:
Do you work for yourself from home? Do you miss community and structure? Join Spiral Muse and Brad Neuberg in creating a new kind of work environment for free spirits!
Brad offered a place where independent workers could share a space and work independently on their own...
3 tags
Space of the Month: Interview with Ky Willson and...
Ky Willson and Rosalind Wyatt are the founders of the space CoInside in Houston (USA).
Both women keep themselves very busy: Ky has been an event planner for the past 11 years, and Rosalind started a non-profit organization, teaches marketing at the University of Houston, and shares her expertise with other business owners through her marketing consultancy.
They operate their businesses...
cobot pro tips: build your community using cobot
Did you ever notice the link bar at the bottom of every page on cobot?
There you can find links to our social network profiles, API documentation, and to applications that have been built for cobot, whether by us or by the community.
The Coworkers App is a members’ directory and a message board based in cobot that can be embedded in your website and used as a communication platform...
July 2012
2 posts
Space of the Month: Interview with Felena Hanson...
Location: San Diego, CA, USA Open since: 15/08/2011 Size: 5000 sq feet Desk Seats: 20 Meeting Rooms: 2 Event Capacity: Up to 200 guests
Cobot: How did the idea of opening a coworking space take shape in your mind? Felena: It really grew out of my need. I worked from home for eight years, and while it’s great for the convenience, and is of course cost effective as a small service...
Coworking agreements: service or lease?
When planning to open a coworking space, there is no way to avoid red tape and paperwork. Finding a space, choosing and buying furniture, designing your website or planning your marketing strategy, all pretty fun so far. But a coworking space is a business, and running a business means dealing with bureaucracy.
[[MORE]]
The paperwork required by the state and the tax authorities is standard, and...
May 2012
3 posts
New Captive Portal Pages
Cobot allows coworking spaces to hook up their wifi to the cobot servers. This enables them to control who gets access to their wifi and it automatically uses time passes for members with a part time or drop in plan. The way it works is that when a coworker connects to the space’s wifi she sees a login page (called a captive portal) where she has to enter her cobot credentials.
Spaces can...
3 tags
New feature: Billing Email
We just added a new attribute to members called billing email. When you enter a billing email address cobot will send invoices to that address instead of the normal one – this has been an often-requested feature during the past months and now we finally offer it.
A nice side effect is that when the admin of a space adds a member and enters the billing address, cobot is now able to send invoices...
Post Mortem: Payment Processing Incident
Between April 24 and 26 cobot processed some payments twice. This resulted in the same invoice being emailed twice for all affected payments. For coworkers with credit card processing enabled it sometimes resulted in ‘duplicate transaction’ error emails, in other cases cards were charged twice.
We have notified all coworking spaces whose members are affected and provided instructions...
April 2012
4 posts
Recent additions: Booking Calendar, API
With all the big news about our redesign and the subsequent addition of customizable home pages a few other additions have gone unnoticed.
First we have finally upgraded our booking calendar to support bookings shorter than one hour. Before the upgrade a booking had to start and end at the full hour - now you can select any 5 minute interval. Of course the bookings are billied accordingly, so if...
1 tag
New space home pages, branding
We just pushed another new feature: Your space’s home page now looks as beautiful as it always should have. Here’s an example:
As you can see we have added the ability to upload a banner that spans the entire width of the page. In addition we have removed all sorts of clutter: the auto-generated welcome to headline, the link to your website and the list of plans.
Instead you...
Email improvements
Email is cobot’s main communication tool. We use it to send invoices, to notify you of important events, and to facilitate communication between spaces and their members. Email is important for cobot.
Because of this, we get quite a few support requests regarding email. Either an email address has been misspelled on signup, or an overly sensitive spam filter bounces our emails (in which...
Biggest Release Evar: New Look, New Features
After what feels like an eternity we just pushed our latest release to our live servers. It includes a number of improvements and new features many people have been waiting for. Sorry you had to wait, but here they are:
New Look & Navigation
The first thing you will notice when browsing cobot is the new look. We overhauled the navigation completely, enhancing the old navigation bar that had...
March 2012
2 posts
Announcing the new cobot
A little bit over two years ago we started cobot in order to use it for our own coworking space co.up. Our original use case was to automate invoicing and collecting payments. In the meantime we have expanded cobot to do a host of other things like booking conference rooms, tracking attendance and analytics, but payments have always been at its core. Over time we added support for different...
No more tricks
I just got an email from a potential customer. He was not very happy, but instead of just leaving took the time to write down what had made him unhappy. I’m very grateful for that.
What happened? His free trial was just over and so he was presented with our usual signup screen:
So, what’s wrong with this?
I’ll tell you: his space has less than 15 members, but we...
February 2012
4 posts
Welcome to the team, Cristina
Last week we were looking for a sales intern – just one week later we’ve found one: welcome Cristina.
Cristina is from Valencia, Spain and found us while she was looking for a coworking management system for her friends’ coworking space workether. She saw the job ad, jumped on a flight to Berlin yesterday and started working today. How awesome is that?
She will be working in...
3 tags
We are hiring a Sales Intern
No, it won’t be like in the video. No cowboys wanted. We’re looking for people to help our customers, to solve real problems.
Take a look at our new Jobs page for details.
Vive la France – Cobot in French
Photo: wikipedia
Our translation project is bearing fruit. We set this up a few months ago as a community effort to translate cobot into any language that coworking spaces wanted. The problem was that Cobot is quite a complex piece of software with over 1500 text snippets to translate – which was a bit too discouraging for potential translators, so not too much progress was made.
Most of our...
4 tags
Coming to Coworking Conference Austin
We are happy to announce that we will be sponsoring and coming to the Global Coworking Unconference Conference (GCUC) in Austin. The event takes place on March 8th, and if you don’t have a ticket yet you should get one now. There will be a conference and an unconference/barcamp style track featuring the who is who of the coworking scene.
If you are interested in learning about cobot or...
January 2012
3 posts
Downtime on Jan 31
Today between midnight and 11am UTC cobot experienced a major downtime of all services. We are awefully sorry that this happened and are working at this very moment on several improvements to prevent future incidents.
What happened
Around midnight UTC on Jan 31 2012 our database crashed and was not automatically restarted as it should have been. We use CouchDB, which uses a system called...
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...
2 tags
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...
December 2011
1 post
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...
October 2011
2 posts
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...
3 tags
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)...
September 2011
1 post
2 tags
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...
August 2011
2 posts
1 tag
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...
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...
July 2011
3 posts
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...
