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]

Just a reminder that there’s less than a week to go before the Design 2.0 conference in New York City. The event, arranged by design supersite Core77, has assembled an all-star panel of design thinkers to discuss the intersection of design, innovation and strategy. What exactly is Design 2.0? Well, strategic designer Emily Chang has a great blog post describing the key elements of the Design 2.0 philosophy, which can be summarized by words such as intuitive, social, minimal, transparent, useful and fun. Google, of course, is one company that knowingly or unknowingly has embraced many of these Design 2.0 ideas. After all, the company’s search products are intuitive, social, minimal, useful and fun.

That’s why it’s interesting to see that one of the panelists at the Design 2.0 event will be Marissa Mayer of Google, who leads the product management efforts on the company’s primary search products. According to Emily Chang, the Design 2.0 minimalism embraced by Google is part of a larger trend on the Internet:

“Perhaps it’s the success of Google’s search page, or our collective reaction against the flashing banner ads and intrusive popups of the last decade, or the Jonathan Ives effect, but it’s as though web users, designers, and developers alike have all agreed to a new de facto standard of Mies van der Rohe’s “less is more.”

In the arts, minimalism can be defined as “reducing the concept or idea to its simplest form.” Minimalism strips away our concerns for the superfluous and let’s us focus on what’s important. It also let’s us imagine the possibilities by giving us the environmental freedom to feel in control and comfortable - a psychological state that makes it easy to explore and to create. Minimalism in design allows patterns to emerge because people are comfortable with the experience…

Natural. Expressive. It sounds simple, almost elementary, but how do you achieve an experience that’s both intuitive and exploratory to your audience, particularly when all of us have such subjective and unique perspectives? First, by focusing on designing experiences and then, by providing areas for people to express themselves.”

Tags: Design 2.0 Google

Almost every successful business can identify its best customer and its worst customer. Take, for example, a Las Vegas casino. The best customer is the highroller who books a swanky suite every time he (or she) visits and drops lots of cash in the casino. The worst customer is the penny-pinching senior citizen on the cut-rate tour bus who only stays for a few hours, plays the 25-cent slots, and tries to gobble down any and all free food that’s available. Or consider an airline: the best customer is the executive flying long-haul business class on short notice. The worst customer, of course, is the bargain-basement leisure traveler who travels coach and knows every trick in the book for getting the cheapest Internet fares.

As a result, every business tends to set up a vast set of rewards, perks and incentives for their best customers and a corresponding set of punishments and disincentives for their worst customers. For airlines, it means lavish perks like exclusive airport lounges, express check-in, free cocktails, and lots-o-legroom for their best customers. For their worst customers? Long lines at the counter, minimal cabin service, and the near-impossibility of connecting with a live customer service rep (approximate wait time: 43 minutes). This is the way things typically go in Corporate America - you punish your worst customers (or dissuade them from even showing up) and reward your best customers.

This is a leap of faith, but… What if businesses actively took steps to embrace their worst customers? By minimizing the risks and costs of dealing with them, these so-called “worst” customers could actually become their “best” customers. Sound unlikely?

Well, consider the example of EchoStar Communications (aka DISH Network) and its plans to offer prepaid satellite TV service to its so-called “worst” customers: the low-wage earner with a spotty credit history. Most satellite TV providers avoid these customers like the plague, preferring to move up market. Yet, these are exactly the types of people who probably watch a lot of TV (they don’t have a lot of disposable income to do much else). If you structure your business appropriately, they might actually turn into your best customers. According to Red Herring, EchoStar has found a way to deal with the various risks (payment risk, churn, etc.) by offering prepaid service to these customers:

“EchoStar Communications said Friday that it has taken its prepaid satellite TV service DishNow nationwide in the United States. The prepaid service targets the millions of consumers who don’t meet its credit standards. The company is bringing a payment strategy that has been employed in a number of markets, including the cell phone and satellite radio markets, to attract consumers from underserved segments of the population. College students who have not yet established credit histories, people who don’t have bank accounts or social security cards, those who prefer to pay their expenses in cash, and recent immigrants all fall into this demographic group.

“We are targeting people who are looking for flexibility in how they pay for their services,” said Francie Bauer, a spokesperson for EchoStar. “It is a pretty large market. This demographic has been ignored and we see it as a good opportunity for our retailers to establish new revenue streams.”

In the end, thanks to this innovative strategy, maybe Echo Communications will wind up with the type of DISH Network subscriber like the one featured in this photo.

Tags: customer EchoStar DISHNetwork innovation

[image: Total TV addict in West Virginia via Emily Hambidge on Flickr]