Sunday, April 19, 2009

CoHabitat, new coworking space in Uptown Dallas, holds open house Friday

By Teresa Gubbins

DALLAS — "Geek" is such an insensitive word, so let's say that approximately 200 individuals with an interest in and aptitude for technical concepts turned out on Friday night for the open house-crawfish boil of CoHabitat, a new coworking space on Thomas Avenue in Uptown Dallas.

Already established in tech cities such as San Francisco, New York, Seattle, and Austin, "coworking" is a catchy word for a shared workspace, where freelancers and independent workers pay to share office space. What makes it more than renting a terminal at Kinko's is the idea that working in the same space will produce fringe benefits such as networking and collaboration. These places always have Internet and usually some kind of coffeehouse vibe, too. It's become sufficiently widespread that South by Southwest's Interactive Festival hosted a panel on the subject in March.

From CoHabitat's Web site:

CoHabitat was co-founded by Blake Burris and Dave Copps, a pair of entrepreneurs and friends who each had their own firm and were seeking shared office space. They ended up in Uptown, south of McKinney Avenue, in a gorgeous 100-year-old two-story house on Thomas Avenue with grand columns and a balcony. They painted the rooms in whimsically saturated colors and installed dozens of electrical outlets and gear, including smoked glass desks and computer monitors, which can be reserved or used first-come first-serve.

"I hate working in a corporate environment -- all those offices with dropped ceilings, it robs your soul," said Burris.

People can come and work for the day at $25 a pop or they can become part- and full-time members, with rates running from $175 to $350 per month.

Friday night's crawfish boil and accompanying keg of beer was typical of the kind of community-building activity that's a cornerstone of coworking culture, and drew not just locals but attendees from Shreveport, College Station, and Austin. As you floated from one room to another, you could hear the buzzword "funding" over and over again, as in "I got funding from Facebook" and "that guy over there is a venture capitalist looking to drop some funding on a start-up."

Tom McCracken, founder of LevelTen Interactive, a a website design/internet marketing company located nearby, came with co-workers Chris Sloan and Brandon Manbeck to check out the facilities.

"We're interested in renting space for meetings and events and wanted to see what they had," McCracken said.

Jason Ice, 31, of Dallas, a product designer and illustrator, was seeking networking possibilities and customers. "I've already had a couple of people ask for my card," he said.

Tanya Nguyen was an alumna of CoHabitat, where she created a startup called PC Interns that hires, and mentors, teens to do computer repair work at reduced rates.

"We moved our offices to Plano, but this is where we started, we used to run the company here," she said.

Jel Stewart, 30, of Dallas, an employee at Travelocity, brought coworker Burin Asavesna, 23, of Fort Worth, who'd founded a startup called Cubeless, an online social network for corporations.

"We hope to meet people and get a feel for what the independents are doing," Stewart said.

Photos by Marc Lee

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