In a guest blog post over at GigaOm, Jackson West of SFist writes about the continued emergence of an Internet start-up culture in Wi-Fi-equipped cafes around San Francisco. (While Jackson puts an “indie” spin on the trend by specifically NOT mentioning Starbucks, the overwhelming anecdotal evidence here in New York City and other cities suggests that the corner Starbucks - no matter how unhip - is also a potential hotspot of entrepreneurial activity.) Rather than work alone in lofts or garages, Web 2.0 entrepreneurs would rather seek out social interaction in “third places” like Internet cafes:

“Forget Palo Alto garages - San Francisco coffee shops are where to get your startup off the ground. Internet cafes are emerging as an important place to get work done, hold meetings and network. Since writers, designers, developers and anyone else who can work from their laptop are going to show up, you can even recruit talent, publicize your project and even demo your product for potential users and investors.”

IFTF’s Future Now blog then picks up this strand of thought with a post called “Cafes, the New Garages?”:

I think this won’t come as news to many, but the notion that cafes can legitimately be thought of as business places (and not just to sell coffee, but to conduct a wide variety of businesses) has a lovely early modern quality about it At the same time, it reinforces a point that many smart writers about the relationship between the Internet and physical places have made: Web access (and especially wireless access) doesn’t make place irrelevant, it just changes the criteria people use for deciding which places they’re going to work in. In an interview we conducted a couple months ago, MIT professor William Mitchell explained how unwiring Internet access and other facilities was changing both the ways users think about workspace, and the opportunities architects have to design interesting spaces. […]

The shift from garages to cafes reflects not a sense that you can completely do away with offices or meeting-spaces, but a shift in preference away from spaces that are privately owned and isolated, to ones that are more public, that provide services, and offer the potential for fruitful random encounters and social interactions.”

[NOTE: For anyone dropping by the San Francisco area, Jackson West also provides a short-list of the best Internet cafes for networking and meeting other like-minded individuals: “Any one of them will keep you fueled with caffeine, connected online and give you a chance to network with fellow travellers.”]

Tags: cafe startup SanFrancisco innovation

[image: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images]