Cobot News

The one tool you need to run your coworking space. Cobot was created to free coworking space managers from mundane tasks, giving them the time to do what is important: attending to their coworkers.

[cobot]

November Updates

Once again, we’re here to present the latest Cobot’s updates!

We have a couple of important announcements regarding our Netbox integration and our Holiday Support times, but first off, let’s see what’s new this month:

November System Improvements:

Customer numbers are generated as soon as a member signs up

Set multiple time frames for specific week days for Time Passes and Bookings.

Customer numbers are generated as soon as a member signs up

Before, a member’s customer number would only be generated after the membership was confirmed, now they are generated as soon as they sign up.

This feature was requested by some spaces so they could draft contracts using the member number before the membership was confirmed. It is a small change but many spaces will benefit from this extra perk to help them organize themselves and welcome new members.

Set multiple time frames for specific week days for Time Passes and Bookings.

This is a major update that follows up from September’s update, Booking Times.

Now it works for all timespan fields, for example, Bookings and Time Passes and you can specify the weekday as well.

With this feature, you can set it so that a meeting room has one time schedule for Monday to Friday, and a different one for Saturday & Sunday; or create discounted Time Passes that are only valid during low-peak times - let’s say Friday afternoon, for example.

Spaces that are open 7 days a week but have different opening hours during the weekend or on Sundays will also benefit from this improvement.

All you have to do is enter the first 2 letter of the weekday and hours. For example, "mo - fr 10 - 18" or "sa 10 - 12”, or "mo - fr 10 - 18, sa 10 - 12 " to combine multiple times.

Now for our announcements:

Netbox becomes a legacy service.

We have seen tremendous growth in the number of our customers and within Cobot in 2016. Coming to that point has only been possible through reliable partners since the very beginning. In that regard, Linewize has provided infrastructure and know-how through their unique system, Netbox, a simple and cost effective plug'n'play attendance tracking solution for coworking spaces. We have come to a point where we have outgrown our partnership with Linewize as they have shifted their strategic focus to educational institutes, and away from coworking spaces.

To ensure the quality and support you expect from us, we have decided to stop offering Netbox to new customers. We are now making it a legacy service for existing members as we seek out the possibility of providing a new alternative.

If you want to use a current service for attendance tracking you can switch to our RADIUS service. Our RADIUS offering does not require a hardware appliance and is also cloud managed. If you just signed up for the Netbox within the last 6 months you can return the hardware for a full refund (excluding shipping) by reaching out to Linewize.

For those Netbox users that would rather not make any changes to your existing Wifi attendance, you don't have to worry! Your netbox shall continue to work as before with all the same features, without any changes and you will still receive support from us, as well as from Linewize. You can always transition to one of our new alternative systems whenever you are ready. The process is very simple and we will offer instructions and support at every step.

Thanks for trusting in and expanding with us. We apologise for these growing pains and will keep on working towards making cobot better and smarter for you.

Holiday limited technical support.

The holiday season is upon us! Like many of our spaces - the Cobot team is taking the holidays as an opportunity to relax and recharge. But fear not, we know some spaces run 24/7 365 days a year and we will be there for you in case anything happens.

From the 23rd of December on, most of our team will be off but we will offer emergency support for those in need of urgent help. Getting started sessions, demos and general questions regarding our product, however, will have to wait.

On Monday 2 January 2017 we will be back to our regular support hours, between 10am and 7pm CET.

Additionally, as a Christmas gift for those who are still trying out Cobot, we will extend the trial period until the first week of the new year.

Our next post will be on our thoughts about the Coworking Europe Conference in Brussels, so keep an eye on our blog next week!

Until then, Happy Coworking!

[cobot]

GCUC Canada 2016 Report

I had the luck to attend GCUC Canada in the beautiful city of Montreal last month, and I would like to share why I loved this edition of GCUC.

While being smaller than its big sister GCUC USA, it still attracted coworking pioneers from near and far, veterans and newcomers alike. Also the overarching topic was big! Here are my highlights:

The opening video presentation by Liz, founder of GCUC and a force in the coworking movement, was about the driving factors of the 4th industrial revolution, and guess what the most driving factor is according to a World Bank study?! The way people want work! ( sorry it seems like nobody took a photo of the slide with the numbers). Her talk contained tons of facts and felt very present even though it was pre recorded.

The following panel discussion with coworking space operators from Canada gave an interesting insight into the Canadian coworking scene. I’m always amazed how different coworking is in other places and how diverse the origin stories are.

My next highlight was "Purpose Driven Real Estate" by Natalie. Her talk focused on the social aspects and possibilities of real estate development. Arguing for a shift away from return on investment as the benchmark for real estate development on a much more meaningful "return on human investment", as she called it. She gave ample examples how they aim to use "...real estate as a force for economic development and community integration. Break the silos that exist between sectors and redefine the way we interact, collaborate, innovate and build our collective future."  Most prominent with their involvement in Le Salon 1861.

Of course no coworking conference is complete without some hard numbers and facts that are gathered by Carsten of Deskmag, coworking’s main business magazine.

E.g. did you know that almost 1/3 of spaces struggle with administrative workload. Something cobot can help with so that you can focus on the more impactful challenges, meaning taking good care of your members and the community.

Another insightful number from the presentation: The share of employees jumped by 10% to 36%  from the previous period of 2013/2014. A clear indication that coworking is driving the change in ways we work not only for a small independent elite. Also the average age of coworkers went up to 35 years, a further indication that coworking reaches more levels of our society.

A coworking conference first for me was the coworkers panel. It was great to hear from coworkers of other spaces directly what they love and expect from coworking. The take away is that "the empowerment of the community" is the prime expectation. Be there for your members! Other benefits according to coworker Anna Crooke that some of you can probably relate to is that she ”... shed the onesie. Now I show up in clothes."

Yes, members are the core of coworking. But do you know who takes care of them? Yes! The coworking space’s staff. Iris from coworking with Iris did an important contribution to the conference by  talking about “Growing Your Team Holistically”. She pointed out how hiring and growing a great team is key to run and grow your space. She covered all the major aspects of how to setup your hiring process. From identifying your needs based on your community values and existing staff over preparations like the Job Description and getting the word out to the Interview and then what to consider in the final offer.

After a small break we came back to the community with Oren’s talk “How to Sustain a Buzz in Your Community: Lessons From the Honeybees” which uses some memorable bee analogies. The most helpful analogy for new spaces in my opinion: There is no single bee, it starts with a swarm.

The day was concluded by a powerful speech by Tony, a pioneer of the industry that reminded everyone of the greater goals coworking aims for and that we have to be real, try things, Don’t be attached  

to outcomes, say yes, don’t try it alone, articulate a higher purpose and celebrate our victories. Because “we are a movement! Not just an industry.”

I said, yes, yes and yes after these great talks, fitting closing words and all around great conference day. I enjoyed every bit of the conference, not least pending time with people that are eager to share, learn and have a good time.

Big thanks to Ashley and the whole GCUC Canada team for this great experience. As always I can’t wait for my next coworking conference.

-- Thilo

PS: Thanks to the meshwork crew for organizing the conference boat where I had the pleasure to stay with other lovely coworking folks.

[cobot]

Cobot+Bisner Partnership: Now Beta Testing

About six months ago we first announced our partnership with Bisner. This new integration brings a community platform directly into Cobot allowing member to member chat, groups, news feeds, events and more. This will be a big step forward for our platform to help spaces connect more with their community.

Today, we are thrilled to announce that we’ve reached the beta-testing phase of the Bisner+Cobot integration. We don’t have a date planned yet but we can assure you that the final release is not far off.

Since we started our first internal and private beta testing about a month ago, we have been working hard together with the Bisner team on making constant improvements and gathering feedback to create a seamless experience for you and your members.

Everything is going very well but we still want to make sure we’ve got most things covered before making the beta testing public. If you are interested in taking part, please email us and we’ll gradually start letting spaces in over the next couple of weeks.

On top of that, both of our teams will be present at the Coworking Europe Conference in Brussels and will be happy to talk to you and give you a live demo if you’re around!

Thank you for your patience and to everyone helping us in this process!

Happy coworking!

[cobot]

October Updates

Every month Cobot deliveries new updates, so here’s a short list of what we’ve added in October for you:

-Add-on for meeting room displays

-“Invoice current charges” as soon as the member is confirmed

-"Minimum commitment" field.

Add-on for meeting room displays

An exciting new Meeting Room Display Add-on has just been released for Cobot.

Up until now, admins relied on our Google Calendar integration to sync with other display softwares. But this is a procedure that has become standard for coworking spaces and the need to log in on two additional platforms to set this up just wasn’t practical. This new add-on simplifies that task and brings you a very easy way to setup your meeting room display on any tablet.

How to activate the Meeting Room Display on a tablet?

To use the meeting room display, open your tablet and go into Setup > Add-ons, look for Meeting Room Display and click Install Add-on. Now you just need to position your tablet next to your meeting room and click on Visit Add-on. The tablet will then show all of your resources, select the correspondent room and it will show its upcoming bookings. Voilá!

“Invoice current charges” as soon as the member is confirmed.

This one of our most requested features so we’re very happy to deliver it to you now.

We’ve made it possible to invoice all the current charges as soon as an admin confirms the membership, even before the membership begins.

Being able to charge members whenever they want has always been something that admins have been pushing for. It gives them more flexibility to charge members in order to secure revenue and keep track over their finances. Before, if your space charges security deposits from members, you would still only receive that payment on the next invoice. Now you can easily charge that fee ahead right after the membership is confirmed.

"Minimum commitment" field.

Plans now have a "minimum commitment" field. if you fill this out as an admin, members will have to stay on that plan for at least x months. (i.e. you can give long-terms members a discount)

You can also assign members a minimum commitment time now. Coworking spaces are - and should remain - open to everyone, so it’s very common to have a big flow of non-members or sporadic members circulating amongst long-term members, which is very enriching to the coworking community. Still, the majority of spaces depend on having fixed members to be able to maintain their space.

To help spaces guarantee a certain monthly income and offer more diverse pricing models, we are introducing a new minimum commitment field - we do encourage giving committed members a friendly discount ;)

You can add a minimum commitment time to a new member or go under Plan > Add New/ Edit/ Customize Plan and add a number of minimum months.

As always, don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions or comments. We’re happy to listen and integrate every comment into our development process to improve Cobot for all spaces.

We will have another set of improvements ready for you next month. Until then, Happy Coworking!

[cobot]

September updates

It's that time of the month again when we tell you what Cobot has been up to over the past month, and we have a few updates to share with you today:

Booking credits can now be assigned by an amount instead of hours

Confirmation emails will be sent out upon sign up confirmation, not upon start of membership

Booking Times

Booking credits can now be assigned by an amount instead of hours

We’ve already told you about this one in detail, but let’s recap it quickly in case you’ve missed it.

Booking Credits can now be assigned to members by adding an amount of your local currency as credit. This new option simplifies these cases by letting admins choose how they want to assign Booking Credits, either by hours -as before- or by a monetary value. Members will also benefit from using this new feature, as they will now be able to save credits by using a cheaper room, or avoid the feeling that they are wasting credits if the bigger rooms are already booked and they have to use another space.

Confirmation emails will be sent out upon sign up confirmation, not upon start of membership

Some space admins pointed out that members would rather get a confirmation email directly when they confirm the membership, instead of only by the start of the membership.

As we said we would, we've addressed this request today. Now if the dates of confirmation and start of the membership are different, you will only get the first one. Also, you won’t see the confirmation message popping up twice on your admin dashboard.

Booking Times

No longer will you be troubled by members who insist on inconveniently booking a resource outside of your space opening hours!

Usually, members are familiar with the space’s rooms and rules so bookings normally run smoothly and exceptions or special events are simply talked through.

However, you can always get some members who might overstay their welcome. This happens especially with larger spaces that handle a big flow of non-members and have a business model that focuses a lot on flexible room rental.

Until now, the only option we had for spaces that needed to restrict bookings was to add to the description. However, this function would lock the timeframe completely, so if a member wanted to book a room that had this restriction applied they would have to book it for the entire time - and eventually, be charged for it.

Booking Times will allow you to set up a flexible timeframe for the booking of resources. You can enter your available times either when adding or editing a resource. It may or may not be the same as your regular opening hours and members can book how many hours they want within those times.

Do you have questions or ideas? Feel free to contact us through our support. We're happy to listen and continue to improve Cobot so that all of us have more time to spend on the things that really matter!

Happy coworking!

Your Cobot Team

[cobot]

Quick update: New option for Booking Credits

We are always looking forward to listening and working with you on building features that will make managing coworking spaces even easier, and today's update to Cobot brings a long-awaited request to the Booking Credits section:

We've added a drop-down menu that gives an additional option for booking credits to be assigned by an amount of money.

With this update, managing spaces that have several resources with different pricings becomes a lot easier. Before, Booking Credits allowed you to include a certain number of hours in a member’s plan, which they could use to book resources such as meeting rooms, projectors, etc. But let's say you have two meeting rooms in your coworking space, but one is significantly larger, so the hourly price is higher than the other.  In this scenario, if members had 3 hours of Booking Credits they could use it book either the large or the small room, which wasn’t very fair.

This new option simplifies these cases by letting admins choose how they want to assign Booking Credits,either by hours -as before- or by a monetary value. Members will also benefit from using this new feature, as they will now be able to save credits by using a cheaper room, or avoid the feeling that they are wasting credits if the bigger rooms are already booked and they have to use another space.

See you again very soon for some more updates we’ve worked on throughout this month. As always, we would love to hear your thoughts so feel free to reach out.

Until then, happy Coworking!

[cobot]

August System Improvements

As some team members are taking a late summer vacation, we’ve been extra busy here at Cobot – but that didn’t stop our super agile team to work on three fresh new improvement updates this month!

Our three new improvements address suggestions we’ve been getting from you lately. Here they are:

Copy an invite link for members in addition to sending an email

Retroactively change the start date of a membership after it has started

When a member now buys either time passes or booking passes, they immediately get an invoice – and charged, of course.

Copy an invite link for members in addition to sending an email 

This is for when you as an admin set up a membership, and you want to invite the member to claim their account. In the past, the only option was to send them an email invitation. Everything fine there, but we know better not to trust someone else’s inbox. It can get lost, unnoticeable in a list of 3.000+ unread emails or even go to spam.

Now you get an invite link which you can copy and paste to send it through your communication method of choice – for example, our Slack integration.

Retroactively change the start date of a membership after it has started

This is another very small change but it was a constant request.

The start date of the membership has always been a fixed point in time and space – a sacred date that defines everything. It still is, but now if you’ve made a mistake, if your member has made a mistake, if they’ve changed their minds, if something happened on that day and the member could not start coworking – you can now correct it.

Voilá – Cobot has made it possible to travel back in time!

When a member now buys either time passes or booking passes, they immediately get an invoice – and charged, of course.

And here’s one more frequently requested update. Before, whenever members would buy a time pass or booking pass and chose to pay it right away it would  go on to their next invoice. This confused many people – managers, members and consequently, us. Now it’s all automated to be invoiced and charged immediately.

This is especially helpful when dealing with non-members and drop-ins as one can easily forget about a booking made at the beginning of the month.

We hope you enjoy all the new features we’ve added to Cobot. As always, don’t hesitate to reach out. We deliver new sets of improvements every 30 days and your suggestion can be the next on our list.

Happy Coworking!

Your Cobot Team

[cobot]

Welcome our new team members!

We’re truly excited to introduce you to some of the new faces at Cobot, please welcome Amanda and Carmem!

Amanda will be working as the liaison between you and everything Cobot to help you find your way around all of our features. With years of assistant and customer service experience, she is looking forward to making your Cobot experience a great one. She will also be taking on the operational tasks and has already made sure we have our tickets for the Coworking Europe conference!

Originally from the rugged interior of Northern British Columbia, Canada, Amanda has been living in Berlin on and off since 2012. She has a great love of travel and everything culinary. When not working with the Cobot crew at Co.Up she can be found working as the Chief Keep it Together Officer at LIFEBOAT, her Virtual Personal Assistant business.

Our communication efforts are also growing as Carmem is taking over Cobot’s marketing outreach. Carmem has a long standing experience in the coworking community, starting in 2011 when she first moved to Germany.

Before joining Cobot, she co-founded COMO Clube, a creative space in São Paulo, where she’s originally from, and when she moved to Berlin she joined Agora’s core team. She knows first hand how coworking communities operate and will use that knowledge to help you explore Cobot in many different languages - aside from Cobot’s native languages English and German, Carmem also brings Portuguese and Spanish.

She’s also a passionate researcher with a particular interest in design methods, material exploration and digital media.

We’re all excited to have them both join the Cobot team and help us grow our platform. Stay tuned for more updates!

[cobot]

July System Improvements

We’re excited to share some new updates and features that we’ve added to Cobot this last month so check out below a list of the things we’ve added:

Time Pass assignments added to Activity Feed

Removed ‘Country’ entry from member sign up

Ability to switch features on/off to customize your space even more

Time Pass assignments added to Activity Feed

This is a simple but much requested feature to Cobot.

Many big spaces that have more than one or two managers have been struggling to keep track of Time Pass assignments. Now, whenever a manager assigns a Time Pass it will show up on the Activity Feed as well as on a member’s profile.

Removed ‘Country’ entry from member sign up

Another extra detail that we’d like to share is that we removed the drop-down menu for ‘Country’ entry from the member’s sign up page. From now on, when members sign up they can simply add the country in the Address box.

This makes sign up a little bit faster and it gathers all the address information together you need in just one place.

Ability to switch features on/off

Now this is a big change:

We’re always looking for ways to make it easier for managers to have ownership over their spaces. And as different spaces have their own particular needs we work hard to always offer new ways to help you customize your space even more. That’s why maybe, for some of you, some of these features might sound familiar. Some of these features existed already but because they were developed for individual cases they were only available upon request.

As the coworking community grew, those cases started to come up more and more often and

that’s why we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve added a whole new section where you can enable those of features yourself with just one click, according to the needs of your space.

Here are some of the new helpful features that you can now switch on and off as you like, starting now:

Sign up Features

Some spaces require a lot of information from their coworkers, others like to keep things simple and fast. Here you can choose whether you need members to enter certain information when they sign up or not  (such as address, phone number or tax ID). You can also choose if you want to show some of these entries to members at all.

Payment Features

We know that talking payment can be a hassle so that’s something we want to make as smooth as possible. In this section there are some features that will make things way easier for you.

Do you remember that last month we introduced a new purchase pattern for spaces that requires passes to be paid immediately? Back then, if you wanted it to be switched on you had to let us know. But now (just one month later) it’s all out there for you to manage it as you wish. You can choose if you want members to set up a payment method - which also means to pay immediately -  for time passes and you can also set up so that members who didn’t choose a payment method will be constantly redirected to the form to do it.

Additionally, you can also decide whether or not you want invoices to be charged automatically or if you want to go through them first for a quick review before they are sent out.

Hiding Features

You know that as a rule of thumb, we at Cobot are always in favor of transparency. However, we also know that there are a a couple of features that many coworking spaces would rather keep private or that they simply don’t use so it becomes just clutter and confusing. So we got many requests to make certain features not visible to either members or to the public, and we listened. As a result, you can now set your preferences and choose whether to show or hide things like prices, calendar and help desk.

Other

Here you can choose if you want members to be able to cancel their memberships by themselves or send you a message through Cobot. Also, we’re happy to customize that message for you if you want - just get in contact with our support team.

ps: Please note that some of these new features are only available to Pro accounts. But hey, now everyone who either signs up for a new account or upgrade is automatically a Pro (Learn more about our new plans and how to upgrade to Pro membership here).

Go ahead and try it out - we’d love to hear what you think!

Now just to wrap up, as you know, we’re planning great new developments for the next year so we got two fresh new members on board and we’ll be introducing them both to you on the following weeks!

Until then, enjoy and happy Coworking!

Your Cobot Team

[cobot]

New Plans and Prices for 2016

Don’t panic — If you are already a Cobot customer you are welcome to stay on your current plan for as long as you want.

We want to announce to you first hand that starting from August 1st we’ll simplify and only be offering Pro plans and readjusting our prices.

We know the first question that will come into your mind is why we are doing this.

Firstly, if you are a long time Cobot customer you know that we haven’t changed the prices since 2011 and we have come a long long way since then and so has the coworking community.

Over the past few years we’ve seen a massive growth in the number of coworking spaces and of course, an engaged community of coworkers. We think it’s amazing! However, that means we had a lot more work to do – and we’ve done it!

As you can see in this very blog we have shipped hundreds of new updates, integrations and general improvements that makes managing a coworking space smoother so that managers can dedicate more time for their coworkers – and we are incredibly proud of the work we do.

Also, three years ago, our team was tiny. We were only a couple of people and now our team consists of 8 amazing people working really hard to make Cobot the best coworking software there is.

We’ve gathered a lot of feedback from many users and people across our network and have spent a lot of time crunching data and analyzing numbers to make sure we’re following the right path and we believe these new plan models are more fair, complete and respond better to the needs of the coworking community.

What about existing Cobot Basic/Pro customers?

As we mentioned in the beginning of this post, if you are a current customer you can rest assured that nothing will change for you as long as you want. With time, when your space grows, you’ll have the option to upgrade to one of our new Pro plans.

In short, we are introducing two major changes into our plans structure:

1. We won’t offer basic plans anymore.

We couldn’t be more excited to announce that all of our plans on Cobot are now Pro!

There are now 5 tiers of Pro plans which are based on number of members you have and they all include:

Free drop-ins / Day pass users – We don’t charge you for coworkers who buy time passes.

Free Add-ons – to customize Cobot to your needs.

Secure Site – All site access is encrypted, firewall, automatic backups so your data is safe.

Unlimited Free Support – We help you set up your coworking space and will answer all your questions.

Your Domain – Ensure that your brand takes center stage.

Your Design – Apply your brand throughout the app to guarantee a consistent experience for your coworkers.

Your Email Copy – Address your members in the tone and style they recognize as yours.

2. We have introduced a limit of members to all plans.

Previously, we offered an unlimited members plan, but while we love to see the coworking community grow and want every space to have an infinite number of members we don’t think it’s fair: we realized that larger spaces require a lot more attention and often  a lot of customized work. Instead of having a structured plan for those really big spaces we’d rather work together with them so we can better tailor Cobot to their specific needs – and we’re very much looking forward to embrace new exciting projects.

Cobot Pro

Finally, here are our new plans and prices!

As always, we’re here to talk. Take a look at our new plans, and get in touch to either learn how to update your plan or to give us feedback — we’d love to hear from you.

[cobot]

June System Improvements

Robert Emmerich

Summer is in full bloom here in Berlin, days on the lake or lounging in the park - but don’t worry, we at Cobot are keeping busy!

June System Improvements

Purchase Time Passes from Member Landing Page

Unpaid Invoices shown on the Member Start Page

Preview Extras from Member’s List

Updated invoice formatting

Jump to Month

Coworkers Add-on - Auto-removal of Cancelled Members

Plan Changes Add-on Update

Purchase Time Passes from Member Landing Page

We noticed in the new design that several space’s members that didn’t see where to buy additional time passes at a glance. And we know that is a big revenue generator for our spaces.

So we added a big new “Purchase Time Passes” button right on the landing page that shows as soon as the member runs out of passes. And like the Modular Cobot you love - the button is replaced with a Passes counter as soon as more passes are purchased!

We have also reworked the purchase pattern for our spaces that require passes to be paid immediately. (if you want that feature turned on - let us know)

As you can imagine, we can’t let members buy passes without a payment method if the have to be billed immediately. So their new members didn’t have the purchase passes option on their sign-up page.

But now it is added later in their signup process. After members put in their payment method,  they are redirected to the passes purchase screen.

Unpaid Invoices shown on the Member Start Page

We pay attention to details - because all the little things add up to LOTS more time for you to spend with your members!

For instance, when your member forgot to pay (for all you working with PayPal, checks and/or cash), they will now get a notification right on their Membership Page!

And yes - that is a link so that they can jump right to the invoice they need to pay (I said we like the details!)

Preview Extras from Member List

This is a quick but handy new feature.

Now if a member has extras with their plan, you can see it right from the member’s view.  Just hover over the star, and the list will appear!

Updated invoice formatting

With the new admin view, comes a general spring cleaning, and one of the items on the list was redoing the invoice formatting so that it also felt as clean and sleek as the backend design.  (Making it more mobile friendly was another reason too!)

So enjoy, an invoice format that is as sleek as the platform design!

Coworkers Add-on - Auto-removal of Cancelled Members

Many of you are using our Coworkers Addon to show profiles of your members to the community right from their Membership Portal.  It is a nice addition to the Slack Addon which allows them to communicate with each other (If you don’t know, this is Slack)

What we realized is that as spaces got older, they and their members weren’t deleting old profiles when members cancelled and left the space. So now we made that automatic - when a member is cancelled, their profile is removed!

Plan Changes Add-on Update

Last but not least, while we were working on one addon, we thought we would do another favorite at the same time!

The Plan Changes Addon is an Analytics Report that shows a month-by-month report of who switched their plans in your space. This can be a very important tool for tracking trends among plans and income change within your space over time.

Not only does it now reflect the new design, but we have added the option to download each month as a .csv file for you to crunch in excel!

As always, we are working daily to improve your experience in Cobot!

We will be going into our next 6-month planning meeting this coming week to decide which of your suggestions we will put into action next.  So if you have any last minute request you would like us to consider, let us know!

Otherwise Happy Summer and Happy Coworking!

Your Cobot Team

[cobot]

Cobot Listens! A story of quick response

You may remember two weeks ago that we announced in our system updates post as per your request to switch from Markdown (technique similar to typing in HTML)

to a WYSIWYG editor (what you know from Facebook, Tumblr, etc)

We got feedback right away about how easier it was to use for most of you. But we missed one piece... with markdown, it was no problem to add images into text, but that was missing from our editor

Cobot Provides Solutions

3 or 4 days after we made the announcement, one of our spaces pointed out that this feature was no longer available. 3 or 4 days after that we had the fix in place, an Upload Image button in the Editor with a preview directly in window.

This is the case for all editors in Cobot including How-Tos and your email messages to members from Cobot.

Pride in Quick Response Time

We are sure you notice how much attention we out into our responses to you. We provide a support team that not only knows Cobot inside and out, but also all help run coworking spaces as well. We have significantly shortened our response time and made our support available for longer hours in the US. And we respond quickly and adjust our platform constantly with improvements to make running your space easier.

So enjoy! And don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions or comments. We integrate every comment into our development process and we especially appreciate the spaces that help us move our platform forward.

Happy Coworking!

Your Cobot Team

[cobot]

Cobot Simplifies the White-Label Process

One of the most important things for our spaces that have selected the Cobot Pro-Plan is that Cobot will run on your own Custom sub-domain. Your members will never know that Cobot is helping your space run so smoothly - they will think you are just that good!

Instead of seeing Cobot in the domain name,

it will look like it comes right from your website.

Improvements

We wanted to let you know that we have been doing some behind-the-scenes work on this process to automate it.

You heard us right, we don’t only automate your management of your space, but also our management of all your spaces!

The Details

We have switched to a new provider that will allow us to do this automated registration

The entire configuration process is now automated. As long as you have correctly setup your DNS Settings everything will be ready almost instantly!

Same is true for if/when you need to change the domain in the future

Why is this important?

BEFORE: The process involved waiting for our team to get the support ticket, do a manual registration process on our end, and then hope that the DNS settings were correct before we had to work on the ticket again somewhere in our queue.

NOW: We can do just the important part, supporting you to setup your DNS correctly and helping you negotiating the jungle of service providers!. Everything else Cobot takes care of - that’s service.

It is important because the more of our work we can automate, the better we can serve our spaces. It is same philosophy that we started Cobot with: automating your workflow, so that you have more time to spend on, with, and for your coworkers.

Next Steps

If you are in trial mode - give it a shot (it’s free)

If you are in Pro-plan - your renewal process is also automated now!

If you are in Coworking-plan - it is never too late to upgrade.

As always, We will continue to improve Cobot so that all of us have more time to spend on the things that really matter!

Happy Coworking,

Your Cobot Team

[cobot]

May System Improvements

We have been extra busy lately here at Cobot. Our guess is that everyone was trying out new software solutions just before the summer break! But here in Berlin the sun is shining, so we have plenty of extra energy!

Photo by Georg Slickers

Cobot also hit a milestone! this week. All spaces are now officially using the new Cobot backend design! Next stop - reworking the individual sections.

Today we wanted to let you how we have been making Cobot better for you!

May System Improvements:

Adding custom Javascript

Notification Icons in Activity Feed

Added Adjusted Invoice to the Member Feed

Next Invoice Amount & Renewal Date Added to Member Profile

Rich Text Editing

Extended length of Events Sync

Limited Beta of our Bisner Integration

Adding custom Javascript

For several years, we have supported adding Custom Javascript onto your Cobot site. You would probably use this for tracking services like Google Analytics or Piwik.

Previously, you needed to email us to add it. But we have reached a critical mass of spaces requesting it - it is now embedded right in Cobot.

If you want more detailed tracking - just go to Customize > Javascript

Notification Icons in Activity Feed

As part of the admin re-design, we are rethinking the way we present almost everything in Cobot. The first item we have pushed live is icons to identify activity feed messages at a glance.

Smiley Face for New Members

Document for invoices

Bell for charges and payments

Calendar for Booking

Invoice Adjustments added to Activity Feed

You have probably already worked with our support team to troubleshoot exactly the problem occurred. And you probably know that most often it is user error! So we are always looking for ways to make the important activities more transparent. That is why we have now added Invoice Adjustments to the activity feed.

When an invoice is edited, that shows in the member’s feed along with the person who made the edit.

Next Invoice and Renewal Date

For the sake of transparency, we also two other items to the Member Profile. You will now see at a glance the renewal date and next invoice amount for each member.

We believe that making the right information available keeps your space running smoother. So consider this an appetizer for how we are approaching the entire ongoing redesign!

Rich Text Editing

This is a short one, but a big help for our not-quite-so tech savvy spaces.

Previously we had a couple different text input methods for the different text areas in Cobot (it used to be Markdown). As part of our standardization - the FAQ section is now Rich Text Editing like most other systems on the internet.

Extended Event Syncing

We added this just to let you know that we are always working where possible to extend Cobot to meet your needs!

One of our spaces is scheduling their events more than 3 months. So we adjusted our sync up to 6 months for them. We are always paying attention to your requests, and wherever possible, we will add them right into the platform.

Bisner Beta

You know by now that the Bisner Integration is right around the corner...

This month we will be beginning our limited beta with the spaces that have already expressed interest. Another big steps forward towards a public release!

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As always please enjoy this update on what’s new in Cobot. We will have another set of improvements ready for you in just 30 days. Until then, enjoy!

Happy Coworking,

Your Cobot Team

[cobot]

Cobot as a Platform, our API!

We just wanted to give a short reminder this week as we prepare for our monthly Cobot update. We get more and more spaces that are interested in using Cobot as the backbone for their own system, be that for 

synchronizing with their own RFID system (all over!)

doing custom time tracking (London)

integrating with region-specific payment providers (South Africa)

generating custom reports (US)

or making a fully customized member experience (upcoming customer story)

The Cobot API has been a core part of the product for over 5 years. That means that like Cobot as a whole, the API is well documented, tested by time and confirmed by many spaces to provide a clean and reliable experience.  And an experience you can trust, is what you need most in building your relationship with your members!

So if you can imagine it, you can make it with Cobot. And our support team is available to speak to your programmers while building custom integrations just like we are there to speak to your space managers while they are handling the day-to-day activities of the space.

If you want a simpler variety, you can of course also use our “Integration Light”. Since last year Cobot is an approved Zapier Application, which means that with no programming experience, you can use Cobot with 500+ applications.  Read more about how that works here.

We will be sharing the full news about May System Updates this coming week!

Happy Coworking!

Your Cobot Team

[cobot]

GCUC USA Wrap-Up

2 weeks ago, we were in LA for the 2016 GCUC conference. It is always a wonderful chance to catch up with many of our Cobot spaces - and most importantly to keep a pulse on the coworking movement as a whole.

This year represented a distinct new viewpoint because it was the first time that GCUC partnered with Alliance Network. (It was called GCUCALL this year) This brought a different crowd and a different set of experience to the conference. This was the first conference in probably 6 years where we spent most of our time meeting new people!

Coworking facts and figures

As you have come to expect, Carsten from Deskmag gave his update for the status of Coworking in the US based on his annual survey.  If you aren’t already reading everything Carsten publishes, start. You can download the full presentation here.

But we wanted to take one slide to discuss our key take-away from the conference:

In 2015-2016, the percentage of full-time employees using Coworking spaces overtook the freelancers and entrepreneurs.

Why is this important?

Because it is finally happening - coworking is growing up.

We have noticed here at Cobot too! From our early days starting co-up.de and deciding to run Cobot, we now have 5 children between our Cobot team and are processing over $5M in invoicing for our spaces per month!

And coworking in total is doing the same. It is no longer just the designers and programmers that never want to have a 9-5, it is also the 9-5ers who realize that the way coworkers work is just much better!

It is a big turning point for the movement as a whole, because we are now an orientation point.

And that is because we have special sauce! Really two special sauces, Community and Flexibility.

These are the pieces that keep coworking at the forefront of the movement and why the spaces that are doing those two pieces well will continue to stand as the leaders.

Cobot and the Special Sauce

Flexibility: As you know we were built for flexibility from the beginning, we are the only software package there that was built specifically for coworking from the beginning (and you feel it in the user experience). And we will keep making your experience as flexible and seamless as possible.

Community: We primarily build our community at co.up with the Cobot Slack Addon and a healthy offering of events. But we know that a lot of you want a more robust solution which is why our partnership with Bisner is right around the corner. While there is no replacement for the hands-on work of building and being part of a community, we will continue to do our part to build digital tools to facilitate that process!

Coworking for Business?

As we mentioned, this GCUC conference included Alliance Network members, who are primarily running business centers. They see that we are starting to take their customers!

In the age of Google and Facebook, a full-time position looks a lot more like coworking then office space.  And this is exactly what we saw in the US coworking survey at the beginning of this post.

Because of this - business centers will continue to orient on coworking.  But an interesting undercurrent to the conference was that coworking will also orient more on business to help get profitable! We still see at least 25% of coworking spaces being unprofitable (much lower than the beginning of coworking but still much higher than the business centers). So there is a big opportunity for both sides to improve their business for the better. Those who are willing to learn.

Those who are willing to learn, will be those who lead!

Last Thoughts

We wanted to share one last slide from the presentation that we found especially important.

If you are wondering how to setup your space, or how to reevaluate your space for improvements - walk your way through this list!

Happy Coworking!

Your Cobot Team

[cobot]

In case you missed it: the Cobot/Bisner Partnership!

You know Cobot as the software that makes the management of your space seamless, so that you have more time to spend with your coworkers. We also have a series of tools to help you connect your community - our Coworkers Addon, our Slack Integration, our MailChimp emails.

This has been the core of Cobot’s commitment to community. And it works well, it is also how we run our space co.up. But we are increasingly asked by our spaces for a “Facebook in Cobot”. So in our last retreat, we decided that we wanted to recommit our efforts to our Cobot Manifesto where have 3 points that deal specifically with Community :

community over business

engagement over management

dialogue over reach

Partnerships Make it Possible!

This is why we are happy to formally announce our partnership with Bisner. We are actively working on our integration together and you can look forward to it coming into Cobot in the near future.

Bisner offers a perfect addition to Cobot. It is a place where your Community can Connect, Find Each other and Organize Themselves.

The integration will load into Cobot’s Members View and provide:

Member Profiles

Member Search (by word & tag)

Information Feed (From space and from other Members)

Groups

Member-to-Member Chat

Notifications

And coming in the second wave will be the addition of:

Support for connecting Multiple Spaces

Events

Community is the heart of coworking spaces.  It is the identity of the space and is the number one reason why people come back again and again.  Tools that support the building of community should be a core consideration of all spaces. And they should always enable the personal relationships and human moments that we all need to feel complete.

Thilo Utke, Co-Founder, Cobot

Why aren’t you programming it yourselves?

We considered building out our community functionality in Cobot - but we also came back to our Manifesto point 3

Excellence over Versatility

Working with Bisner allows us to keep our concentration on doing what we do best (managing your space) and allow them to do what they do best (connecting your community).

We see our role at Cobot like with our Wi-Fi integrations, Payment Integrations, Zapier Integration, etc. is to make the experience as smooth and bulletproof as possible.

How can I get started?

If you are interested in being a Beta Testing Space - then please get in contact with us.

Otherwise, just pay attention to our Blog and we will continue to give out more details as we approach the launch date.

Until next time - Happy Coworking

Your Cobot Team