Archive for the ‘press’ Category

Beehive Baltimore celebrates nine months of coworking

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

What if there was a place where freelancers, creatives, entrepreneurs and financiers could meet up to collaborate on up-and-coming startup ideas? That place exists today, and it’s called Beehive Baltimore.

On October 1st, Beehive Baltimore will celebrate its first nine months of operation as a coworking facility, located in the Emerging Technology Center in Canton.

If you’re not familiar with coworking, it’s a shared workspace for creative professionals who might otherwise work at home or in a coffee shop. These days, anyone who works primarily via laptop and the internet is a great candidate for coworking!

Beehive Baltimore opened Feb. 1, 2009, specifically to cater to these kinds of professionals, and the Beehive community now has over 40 members including people in Web design, programming, marketing, public relations, finance and other information-based industries.

Last Thursday, we held an open house at the Hive for prospective members and others in the community to stop by, meet some of our members, and find out more about what coworking is all about.

Beehive is designed to be a community of peers, and does not aim to make a profit. Working in partnership with the Emerging Technology Center in Canton, Beehive aims to connect freelancers, seasoned entrepreneurs, and other professionals via long-term relationships that lead to mutual benefit – and possibly to new startups!

The Hive (as we call it) has also already given birth to multiple events and meet-ups that might not otherwise have a place to meet. Some of the groups that we either have hosted or have helped create include:

• Baltimore Angels (an angel investment group)
• Baltimore Hackers (a computer language study group)
• Baltimore/Washington Javascript meetup
• Baltimore Flash/Flex User Group (a group for users of Adobe’s Flex platform)
• Refresh Baltimore (a web professionals group)
• Barcamp Baltimore (a user-generated tech conference)
• TEDxMidAtlantic (coming on Nov. 5)

On Oct. 1st at 12pm, Beehive Baltimore will host its first “Show and Tell” event, where participants are invited to share their projects, startups, or prototypes and get feedback from the group.

And on Oct. 15th, Beehive Baltimore will be recognized by the Maryland Daily Record as an “Innovator of the Year.”

Several Beehive members and affiliates will be providing some guest posts for BaltTech over the next two weeks while Gus Sentementes is on vacation. So stay tuned for some voices from the Hive over the coming days!

Beehive Baltimore is part of a large coworking movement. Hundreds of cities all around the world from Los Angeles to Charlotte to Paris to Shanghai have implemented coworking facilities, and we see ourselves as connected to these communities.

And so coworking looks to be an integral part of the tech startup ecosystem – where entrepreneurs, creative talent, and angel investors can all come together to talk about the Next Big Idea.

To find out more about Beehive Baltimore, visit http://beehivebaltimore.org.

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Laid off from the Sun? You’re welcome at the Hive!

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

This year has been full of gut-wrenching change here in Baltimore, and no industry has felt that change more sharply than the newspaper industry. Starting in February with the demise of the Baltimore Examiner and followed by deep, continuous cuts at the Baltimore Sun, long-time employees of these institutions are looking at what to do next in a market that seems to have all but forgotten the value of traditional journalism.

We lament these developments but believe that there’s only one solution: to start anew. Towards that end, we at Beehive Baltimore are encouraging laid off staff from the Sun to come and work for free through the month of May. Meet your local creative and tech community. Get networked. Work on some projects. Meet some collaborators. The future is now and we’re all writing it together. Come and be a part of it!

So, if you have been laid off from the Baltimore Sun, please join us at the Hive and bring your creative projects, ideas, and contacts. You won’t be disappointed, and we’d love to have you.

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Beehive Video from Ignite #2

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

Beehive Baltimore was collectively a presenter at Ignite Baltimore #2 on February 5th.

You can check out the video on their site here.

Thanks to Mike Subelsky (@subelsky) and Patti Chan (@pattichan) for making Ignite Baltimore a reality, and a great piece of the emerging culture of ideas in Baltimore!

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Beehive In The Baltimore Sun

Sunday, February 15th, 2009

Baltimore Sun reporter Gus Sentementes wrote a great article covering Beehive Baltimore in the Sunday, February 15 edition of the Baltimore Sun.

You can read the article here. Thanks to Gus for helping to raise awareness of coworking here in Maryland.

A few comments — not criticisms — on the article: the consensus is that it’s coworking, not co-working. This has been the subject of some debate in the community and I was informed that I got it wrong when I first started working with the concept. Arbitrary? Probably so. I think the reason the founders chose and have stuck with the coworking form is that it conveys more of a wholeness of concept than “co-working,” which might imply “working, separate but together,” while the former seems to imply more “working together.”

There has also been some debate as to whether “coworking” might be interpreted by some as “cow orking,” and if so, what “orking” might be, and whether the cow would like it. Regardless, coworking stands as the official name.

Newt Fowler and I in fact traveled to Philadelphia to talk with Alex and Geoff at Indyhall prior to SocialDevCampEast 2 (in November); we then held an exploratory session at SDCE2 to see if there was interest in coworking in Baltimore. In fact, I ended up spending a weekend in Vienna, Austria in September with Alex, which was one of the things that got me started on the idea.

I should also mention Beehive’s third (silent?) partner, Stephen Muirhead, who is also my business partner in Roundhouse Technologies.  Stephen has believed in the coworking concept since day one and has been keeping our banking and books straight since the beginning.  And of course, we should also thank all of our members who have shown such wonderful support and faith in coworking in Baltimore, and our operations committee who has helped insure a regular schedule of keeping the lights on.

Anyway, Gus certainly got all the basic facts right and we certainly appreciate the Sun’s interest in covering the emergence of coworking in Baltimore. Thanks again Gus!

UPDATE: Alex Hillman generously points out that the question of whether coworking has a hyphen has been thoroughly explored and definitively answered at the website doescoworkinghaveahyphen.com. We recommend this resource for further discussion on this and related topics.

UPDATE #2: The Sun just put up the photo showing Mike Subelsky talking in our server closet. While this was highly amusing when it happened, it should be pointed out that there’s ample space in and around the Hive for taking phone calls and that Mike was simply trying the closet on for size at the exact moment the photographer was there. And so a moment was frozen in time. We neither require nor expect folks to use the closet when taking calls, and Mike will be the first to admit that as an experiment, results were mixed. We did half-expect him to emerge in his Superman outfit, though.

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