All Manhattan Coworking activities are now going on at:

New Work City

Go there.

Come to the CooperBricolage Grand Opening Party

Wednesday, Septermber 5th, 4pm
CooperBricolage — 9 St. Marks Place

Expected and invited guests are:

* Venture Capitalists from NYC
* Angel Investors from NYC and the Tri-State Area
* Entrepreneurs like you
* Designers, developers and interactive people looking to build the community
Here’s the full invite from Sanford:

All -

I (and the CooBric team) wanted to invite you to the Grand Opening event for cooperBricolage - the first shared coworking space for entrepreneurial start-ups in the East Village. Building on the model of coworking made fashionable in the West Coast, cooperBricolage is building upon Peter Cooper’s vision of education for all New Yorkers and the energy of collaboration and innovation that makes New York City one of the most vibrant communities in the world.

cooperBricolage is a community effort by like-minded entrepreneurs who sought an alternative to their home offices and rent-a-spaces within this bustling metropolis. Working with other local businesses to create the start of an entrepreneurial ecosystem, cooperBricolage is a model of a community members club giving New York the step forward in supporting technology and creative businesses.

What is at CooBric?
CooBric, as others have come to call it, is a combination of a café, private members club and a workspace for designers, developers and entrepreneurs. Instead of being slotted into a small, busy Starbucks(tm), CooBric offers a different third-space but without the noise, expense and constraints found within these standard “third-spaces” Additionally, the ability to find like-minded people trying to build companies, code software or design graphics is sorely lacking in New York City - which CooBric presents itself as a space to be “found in”.

Spurred on by various concepts like coworking (coined by Citizen Agency) and cafeBricolage (coined by Nate Westheimer), cooperBricolage is a fusion of the history of Cooper Union and its history of creating innovation and entrepreneurship with the entrepreneurial energy found within New York City, but had few options to engage.
We invite you to come to our event - September 5th, 4pm at Cafe Fuego (9 St Marks Place)

But this effort will only succeed with support from the community - you included. This is why we would ask for you to come and meet some of our entrepreneurs and other supporters of the concept (including some venture capitalists and angel investors) to create something that is uniquely New York.

We look forward to seeing you - and feel free to read more about us in our blog (www.coobric.com) or other places on the web.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

The CooBric Comm (Tony, Sanford, Jennifer, Alex and Nate)

Are you a solo entreprenuer, freelancer, or member of a small team? If so, what are you doing next week?

… heading to cooperBricolage, I hope.

Sanford is throwing open the doors to cooperBricolage early next week, and it would be great to see you there.

What’s cooperBricolage? Well, you’ve heard me talk about cafeBricolage a whole lot, but Sanford has actually gone and done.

According to its site,

cooperBricolage is a private cafe space for entrepreneurs, interactive designers, programmers and technologists leveraging the concept of the “Inventors Institute” originated in the late 1870s by inventor Peter Cooper.

cooperBircolage is where you can use “free” wifi and get a coffee and/or sandwich for your entry fee. Only people allowed in the cafe workspace are people working to build businesses or doing software or artisic design - no off-the-street coffee drinkers or students are allowed in the workspace.

The goal is to create a community of entrepreneurs to work together instead of at our homes and alone - sharing (when others are receptive) and respecting (when others ask for their space). While sounding utopian, the goal is to spaun new ideas and create a fertile environment for startups to migrate to more professional spaces for their corporate growth.

Pricing will end up somewhere between $10 - $20 per day with discounts to folks who buy multi-day passes. While that may seem like a lot at first glance, you get so much out of it: a great work environment around fellow netrepreneurs, wifi and cafe amenities, a hip and easy to get to location, and access to the growing phenomenon of coworking.

• For directions to Cafe Fuego, at 9 St. Marks Place (near the 6 train at Astor Place), click here.
• To get on the cooperBricolage email list, click here.
• To contact Sanford for more information, email sdickert at Google’s email service.
• And again, the cooperBricolage wiki is found here.

See you there!

(photo credit: coworking brooklyn)

Congrats to Coworking Brooklyn, Jelly NYC, 3rdward, and cafeBricolage for getting this story in the NY Post today.

This is great news for folks interested in the coworking movement, coworking spaces, and parallel projects such as cafeBricoalge and Jelly: the more people who are aware of these options and these types of working conditions, the more demand will exist and the more resources we can throw at these projects.

Here are a few key quotes from the article:

After a little research, Winard found Coworking Brooklyn, a group that meets in a Williamsburg gallery and events space called The Change You Want To See. He hit it off with the other workers, and found he could get more done there than at home. He started coming in two days a week; then after a month, his employer agreed to pay the $200 monthly fee so he could work at Coworking Brooklyn full-time.

and

The Coworking New York City wiki links to three spaces that are up and running - Coworking Brooklyn and 3rdward in Williamsburg and Jelly in Manhattan - and several more that are in the works. Among the latter is Café Bricolage, a café-cum-coworking space which will serve as an “incubator for start-ups.” While it’s not up and running yet, it already has its own Web site, blog, and Google group, where interested parties are debating the best ways to get the space off the ground.

This article asks if Starbucks is turning into the “2nd place” for mobile workers, rather than the “3rd place,” which its founders initially intended for.

cafeBricolage, because of it’s varied layout — ranging from pure cafe in the front to pure coworking in the back — would be the “2nd to 3rd place,” organically addressing the issue.

For everyone at Web2Expo (or if you know anyone there), we would like to invite you to a special session on Wednesday, from 5:00 - 5:50pm in the “Zeta” room of Web2Open, located on the third (3rd) floor of the Moscone West Conference Center.

The event, called Silicon Alley 2.0: State of The City, will be part presentation, part roundtable, and our beloved New York City’ s future as an entrepreneurial hub will be at the center of conversation.

The goal is to bring New Yorkers together, here in Silicon Alley, out of our collective comfort zone, and talk shop. What drives innovation in the Big Apple? What are our challenges? What exciting projects are occurring right under our noses to foster innovation?

This is a time to learn and share about the world’s media, financial, diplomatic, artistic, civic, and, increasingly, technological center.

We’re excited to offer this free and open opportunity for folks to gather on such a relevant and pressing issue, and we look forward to seeing you at our Web2Open session.

nextNY — cafeBricolage
http://cafeBricolage.com

Today, NYC-based entrepreneur/celeb Darren Herman unveiled his plans to put a coworking space in the ultra-cheap and accessible Financial District. He has good company in those parts, as he’s joining the NYSIA’s Incubator and projecting competitive rates.

To cut to the chase, questions have been raised about whether this is in competition with cafeBricolage… and I wanted to emphatically say “hell no! We’re excited!”

Also, we’re hoping our coworking movement loyalist friends welcome Darren’s move with equally open arms.

We see Darren’s move as one which will ultimately stimulate the NYC new-media/start-up/entrepreneurial community, and we unreservedly believe that his vision for a coworking-only space is an important one in this equation.

Moving forward we’re glad to have another community member standing up for small start-ups, and we look forward to seeing the results! (We also look forward to seeing what he ultimately calls he space, with DarrenCamp and DarrenSalon already is the books, perhaps we can count on another entity bearing his mark.)

Hey folks.

Nothing says planning and organization like a wiki. That’s why cafeBricolage now one: http://cafebricolage.pbwiki.com/

The main thing we’re doing with the wiki now is collecting names of would be cafeBricoluers, “Friends of cafeBricolage,” if you will.

So, if you think you’d come and work out of cafeBricolage once a week or once a month, come let us know on the wiki.

If you have a small company, and you think you’d be a candidate for cafeBricolage’s coworking space, let us know by putting your name down on the wiki (if you wish to remain anonymous because you think it would annoy your landlord, just put “Anonymous” and the number of folks in your company.

And lastly, if you’re “just” a fan of of cafeBricolage and think you’ll be a “user” by hanging out, sipping on our coffee, and attending events at the locale, well, then, we’d still love to see your name up on the “Friends” page on our wiki.

Thanks!

I have a longer post in the works ansering “Why the Cafe?“, but since there’s been a lot of talk in the blogosworld about this recent article from the San Francisco Chronicle, I figured I should write a note about it here.

The article, “WHERE NEO-NOMADS’ IDEAS PERCOLATE: New ‘bedouins’ transform a laptop, cell phone and coffeehouse into their office” details cafe working culture in Silicon Valley, and uses the term “bedouins,” or nomadic Arabs.

Being nomadic may be fun and good — we had a lot of fun cafeSlamming the other week in the Lower East Side — but eventually nomads will need their trading post, their watering hole. That’s one reason “why the cafe”: it’s a place we “unteathered” “e-bedouins” can come rest our weary, latte craving heads.

Firstly, I want to applaud Charlie O’Donnell, the panelists, and the nextNY community, and say that last night’s NYCHub event was a great success. Also, a big ‘thank you’ to CRESA Partners and their Kristian Hansen for hosting the event. It was a great space. To check out pictures from the event, see Ed Costello’s Flickr photos.

I certainly came away with a similar impression that Charlie did. Actually, the event did two things for me: firstly, it reinforced my earlier conclusion that our NYC challenges are about the intersection of three things — Culture, Centralization, & Resources — and secondly, that we as nextNYers are a tremendous resource to the broader community.

I’ll talk more about nextNY as a resource in a different post, but first I want to say — after gauging the response from last night’s crowd — that it is high time to get moving with cafeBricolage.

First a few Q/As:

What’s in it for Nate?
This was a question I was startled with and want to clear up immediately. Somehow, people think this is a proprietary business idea or that I’m staking my (future) kids’ college money on this project. I’m not. This is an Open Source concept and idea and needs other “core” team members to see it through. On the flip side, there are a few tenants that are required for me to be passionate about the project and to continue seeing it move forward.

What are the tenants of cafeBricolage?
Glad you asked. Of course I laid out the “manifesto” earlier, but to sum it up, I’m interested in building a space with core three elements to it: a coworking space designed for mixed team sizes, a cafe, and a formalized community support structure (dare we say “incubator”?). These three things combined are what address the Culture, Centralization, and Resource issues so clearly lacking in our environment. This is the cafeBricolage Manifesto. (By the way, while I like the name “cafeBricolage,” and many others do too, this is not a deal breaker for me! Names are important because they convey the nature of things — cafeBricolage conveys great meaning! — and if there’s a better name to use, by all means let’s use it.

What’s Next?

Well, who’s coming with me? Anyone who desires to a part of the cafeBricolage Core — at least in these early stages (i.e. no commitment… yet!) — should make sure I know about it. I can’t and won’t do this alone, so comment below to show support. Also, this will get me your email address and show others that there really is a community serious about it. (Even if I’ve already heard from you, you should still comment below
First on the table will be figuring out the big things:

• What’s the legal structure of organization. Will it be non-profit or for-profit. Will the three elements be one organization, two, or three? These are big questions!
• What are our space requirements in terms of location, square-footage, and amenities?
• What kind of allies do we need on board? Who needs to be a part of the Core that isn’t? (With one of the first words in this list being “legal”, obviously there need to be smart legal minds in on these discussions. No reason to go through hours of planning only to find that something’s not plausible. Having a diverse Core with legal and business experts on hand will be essential).

With these (and more?) big questions answered, getting our hands dirty is the next step. This means delegation, organization and formalization. It also means a lot of research. But this all can’t be done until we meet and see “who’s in.”

As I said, contact me and discuss below. I’ll take the email addresses and get a Google Group going once I see who’s serious about being involved. I’m excited — very excited — and I look forward to working with you all to realize this project.