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 that they share knowledge and collaborate with others in their space and most of them plan to stay where they are in the new year. Everything indicates that more spaces will be started this year, and that those that opened in the last couple of years will get bigger, open new locations, and be more profitable. Good times for coworking.

Collaboration and knowledge sharing are the values that are helping the community of coworking managers to improve their spaces; and the many coworking meet-ups that happened in 2012 all around the world served as a platform to exchange ideas and stories. We made it to GCUC, Coworking Spain and Coworking Europe, where we had a great time and we came back from each of them with a long list of to-dos — from decoration for our space to new features for cobot.

We keep an eye on conferences for this year like the ones planned in Slovenia and Spain, and of course on JellyWeek and look forward to know more about GCUC 2013, Coworking Days and the rest of get-togethers and global activities taking place in 2013. The list will get longer and longer, but this is the fuel that keep us moving.

In between real-life-meetings we like to keep in touch and hear other space managers’ stories. During last year we had the great opportunity to have long talks with Felena from Hera Hub, Ky and Roz from CoInside and Eric from Mutinerie. They shared with us their first challenges as coworking managers and their vision of the future of coworking. Be sure to read the interviews today if you missed our newsletters, and let us know if you want to share your story as well.

We haven’t stopped improving Cobot either. 2012 has been intense: We did a complete redesign, we added features (such as the events calendar, the custom fields, custom tax rates and billing dates, pay for others or the customizable home pages).

We have also translated Cobot to four languages (French, Spanish, Japanese, and Brazilian Portuguese) thanks to your participation in our translation project (where you can, by the way, help us with other languages as Italian or German — contact us), we connected Cobot with more third party services (mainly payment systems like Adyen), launched our network plans for those space that are growing and expanding, like Hera Hub… and since we like to keep moving we keep working in new updates that we will announce and release during the next weeks.

All this wouldn’t be possible without you! Cobot users, space managers, coworkers, contributors using our API; the curators behind Coworking Weekly, CoworkingWiki, all the conferences and events, and all those starting projects that work towards a better coworking community, such as the Coworking Visa Coworking Visa or the CoPass.

You gave us the motivation and feedback we need to do better every day. We want to say a big Thank You and make a wish for 2013: to hear even more from you.

Cheers, and Happy Coworking!

Cristina