It’s March and do you know what’s coming up? Pi Day! And since Pi Day (Mar 14) falls on a Sun this year, we thought we’d broaden our appreciation for Pi (and pie) by offering two forms of free drop-in days.

1. Within the first two weeks of Mar, bring in a pie for a free day of coworking. Your pie offering must be large enough to be divided evenly by 3.14 reasonably sized portions. “Pie offering” could also be extended to flans, tarts, buttertarts, tarlettes, quiches, bureks, tourtieres, and empanadas, but not pizzas. All pies brought into the office will be offered for sharing to any member or guest who is in the space at the time. And yeah, storebought is totally fine. Limit one free drop-in day per person over the two week period.

Cakes need not apply. We’ll save that for another month.

2. Mon Mar 15 will be a free drop-in day if you can either rattle off by memory the first 10 digits of Pi after the decimal or wear Pi-related clothing.

Either way, we’d love to have you in for a few days of coworking. Drop by and check us out.

—rachel

(photo by jwannie under a creative Commons licence)

It’s our second week of operations, and so far it has been awesome.

Last week we had a graphic designer, a sales rep, a writer, a corporate coach, an iPhone developer, an editor, an operations consultant, a web developer, a job seeker, and a few others come through our door. The diversity has been great, and we’re glad that many people have wanted to check out the space.

We added some art to the walls from a local photographer. He’s not quite done with his installation, so we’ll make a separate blog post when he’s ready.

We also installed a wiki on our website. We want to use it to keep an open dialogue with our member and guests for amenities for the space, events to consider holding, and a dedicated space for members to promote themselves. Most of it is just a placeholder for now, but we’re looking forward to having that fully functional soon.

This coming week we will be hosting an event for New Path Consulting as well as Coffee and iPhone – we’re happy to have both groups in our space.

Don’t let this new bit of snowfall stop you from enjoying our last week of a free open house. Join us!

—rachel

K Sawyer Paul of Gredunza Press reviewed Crush It: why now is the time to cash in on your passion. He had this to say about it:

First things first: If you’re going to be swayed by this review of Crush It, buy the ebook, or the pdf, or however it’s being sold digitally. The book is 118 pages as a digital document, and a few pages less than that in hardcover. You don’t even need an ereader, because it will take less than two hours to read front to back. I’ve seen people play WOW without blinking for that long. Your eyes will survive reading like that. I purchased it as an epub and loaded it on the Sony Reader, and definitely got my $9 worth. $25 for hardcover is a rip off.

Okay, now onto the actual content. Crush It is a self-business-related self-help book, and its greatest audience are the people with a passionate hobby who don’t know how to monetize. To summarize 118 pages: there is money in eyeballs, and doing enough things online will bring them to you. How do you do things online? Well, use Twitter. And Facebook. And Flickr. And Ustream. Use all the free websites that allow you to share and distribute content. Don’t worry about being really good at these things. Don’t worry about lighting, or sound, or even being that great a writer. Just blog. And Tweet. And if you know what you’re talking about and talk about it long enough, you will become rich.

This is advice from a guy who yells at a low-budget camera and tells people that wine is either awesome or garbage.

Gary Vaynerchuck is an annoying ass, but he might actually be onto something, because his advice does yield results. These results may vary, but you can’t argue with success. There are lots of success stories about people with insatiable passion projects who dig at them for years and finally break through. And you can’t argue with Gary’s advice in the book, not really, anyway. He doesn’t give away any secrets, and much of what he says in the book’s short narrative is common sense and obvious to anyone who’s seen the internet in the last five years. But being obvious doesn’t mean he’s wrong.

It also doesn’t mean he has much to say that isn’t said in a million other places. While the narrative (Vaynerchuck didn’t write anything. He emoted into a microphone for a couple of days and handed it off to an editor) is brisk and witty, the nuggets of advice are actually pretty sparse. Things pick up once he’s done with his life story, and the pieces on authenticity and availability are truly important for anyone’s brand image. For this, Crush It works. I also like that, figuratively, every fourth sentence is work your ass off. People need to hear that more.

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K Sawyer Paul and Éisee Sylvester are co-owners of Gredunza Press. They assist new authors in finding information, advice, and the best routes to modern publishing and provide publishing services that will improve the marketability of their books.

We are open!

Sure, it’s Family Day here in Ontario, but lonely freelancers are our family, and are welcome to come by today.

We did a dry run on Sat to host CrisisCampTO, and all went well, so we are open today. Drop in for a coffee or tea and to see the space, and do stay for the day if you’d like to do some work.

— rachel

K Sawyer Paul of Gredunza Press reviewed Crowdsourcing: Why the power of the crowd is driving the future of business. He had this to say about it:

The cynical viewpoint of the modern Internet is that there are lots and lots of tiny businesses making millions of the backs of the masses who happily upload their videos, photos, documents and opinions. The sites then make tons of money placing ads next to all this free content. Crowdsourcing explains the dos and don’ts of running a business like iStockphoto and Digg. What would have been nice is maybe some advice for the majority of us who use these sites instead of the people who own them, but I can’t criticize the book for its focus.

So, for those who do want to cash in on this particular model, this book is quite useful. It paints a fairly lush picture of the landscape, and has a way of focusing on the winners far more than the losers (in fact, there isn’t a single example that doesn’t lead to fortune, even after initial failure). And though it offers no bullet-point solution system, a few nuggets of advice pour through in between the lines: make your process transparent, give the contributors a sense of ownership, and don’t place money as the most important aspect of the community. The big no-no appears to just be censorship. The main example author Jeff Howe uses is the Digg “riot” of 2007, when the owners censored submissions that contained the HD-DVD hack under threat of legal action, which prompted users of Digg just kept uploading the story until the owners buckled.

The censorship question ties directly into the sense of ownership, which Howe explains on page 15: “What unites all successful crowdsourcing efforts is a deep commitment to the community…. The crowd wants to feel a sense of ownership over its creations, and is keenly aware when it is being exploited.”

As to why this crowd exists at all, Howe points at the amount of overeducated, under-stimulated people there are in the workforce. The number of university-educated people has increased dramatically in the last fifty years, but the number of intellectually stimulating jobs has only increased so much. This has left a large population of incredibly smart people figuratively breaking rocks with other rocks. They then spend their free time doing awesome things like building user-generated encyclopedias and determining what is and isn’t worthwhile news. As Howe states on page 39, “The result is that a large number of people are performing their most meaningful, rewarding labor away from the workforce.”

Howe explains the best possible benefit of crowdsourcing is in product evaluations, essentially making an enthusiast crowd into another round of R&D. From page 148: “Forward-thinking companies are tapping this emerging well of intellectual capital and changing the face of R&D in the process.” But Howe doesn’t at all touch the downside of that argument: the first round of enthusiast purchasers of any product can essentially become test subjects. This sort of thing happens all the time, from Apple charging $600 for the first iPhone and $200 for the one a year after, which had far more going for it.

But that criticism is about the users. Apple profited huge off using the crowd, because these enthusiasts essentially paid to be beta testers. This book is about becoming the people who subject your community to that sort of thing. It’s too bad, because I really wanted at least a chapter on being on the other side of this coin, but people on that side could do well by looking at Crushing It by Gary Vaynerchuck.

Probably the most useful piece of advice gleaned from the book comes from the story of video game developer Valve, who’s game Half Life was modified by a teenager into a little game called Counter-Strike. Instead of suing the teenager into oblivion, Valve bought the rights and gave him a job. The advice from this is to trust the crowd, even with your own intellectual property, for they may know what to do with it better than you. This is a heavy hurdle, as it suggests scrapping your legal team and letting your fan base do what they like with your product. And while this is great advice for the majority of new IP’s, this sort of thing cannot work in every case. Sometimes you have to sue the kid, and this book doesn’t tell you that.

To summarize, this book is focused entirely on the ownership side of crowdsourcing, on becoming a wrangler of the social upload and finding ways of profiting off the casual consumption and submissions of millions. For people looking to get into that racket, this is a must-buy.

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K Sawyer Paul and Éisee Sylvester are co-owners of Gredunza Press. They assist new authors in finding information, advice, and the best routes to modern publishing and provide publishing services that will improve the marketability of their books.