I'm baaaaack...was: Re: Bedouins with laptops


(Quoted "Bedouins..." below)

And, as relevant to the original post, I was visiting friends who had wireless Wi-Fi in their house and after seeing something weird on their computer screens, they looked outside (it was nighttime) and there was a guy parked in front of their house with a laptop going (they could see the glow of the screen) and they quickly ran back and unplugged all their Wi-Fi, and the guy then drove off. They call this "war driving" (as opposed to war-dialing back in the old BBS days.

Me: I'm back from a week long trip driving all over the US for a mix of family and personal missions. Almost got killed in a truck accident (I got out without a scratch, the truck tipped over...his fault; came on the on-ramp too fast, turned too quickly to straighten out, all mass on the truck shifted to left, truck tipped over to left (in a counter clockwise roll), and I saw it from about 50 feet behind the truck (me doing 60, he doing 50), the top of the truck moved about 2 feet farther to left than the bottom of the truck and I KNEW it was going to tip over..had about 1.2-1.4(?) seconds to get my car into the far left land from the middle lane (he was in the right lane), and just as I got in that lane, the truck was on its side with a loud ka-wump. If I did not move lanes, the truck would have come down on me and I'd be history. Two years ago wife and I were coming back from a wedding on a highway and a similar thing happened during a rainstorm (car ahead of us lost control, started spinning around, we had about 2 seconds to get from the middle lane to the left lane, and have the spinning car pass to behind us from ahead of us, on our right. Another close brush with death. But, we got out unscathed. I'm not a cat, but I don't know how many lives I have. Gonna run out someday?

Still unpacking suitcases, getting caught up on mail, other snot.

Snot? Oh, yes, we've got another "Snot Report" to do (all the *** that's fit to hit the fan): Those crook CEOs are at it again. Another scam to report: The latest misdeeds, theivery, lying, double-crossiing, backstabbing CEOs, etc.

Stay tuned.


===== no change to below, included for reference and context =====

On Sun, 11 Mar 2007, Marco wrote:

...this is where it comes in handy that I trained as a pastry chef -
I'm doing my part to promote hi-tech commerce and employment !

Marco

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WHERE NEO-NOMADS' IDEAS PERCOLATE
New 'bedouins' transform a laptop, cell phone and coffeehouse into
their office

Dan Fost, Chronicle Staff Writer

Sunday, March 11, 2007
Urban nomads who call themselves Bedouin workers use coff... Kevin
Burton, who runs the Internet startup Tailrank, wor... It's just
another day at the office for bedouins tapping ... Trailrank.com owner
Kevin Burton sets up shop several day... More...

A new breed of worker, fueled by caffeine and using the tools of
modern technology, is flourishing in the coffeehouses of San
Francisco. Roaming from cafe to cafe and borrowing a name from the
nomadic Arabs who wandered freely in the desert, they've come to be
known as "bedouins."

San Francisco's modern-day bedouins are typically armed with laptops
and cell phones, paying for their office space and Internet access by
buying coffee and muffins.

"In 'Lawrence of Arabia,' the bedouins always felt like they were on
the warpath. They had greater cause," said Niall Kennedy, a 27-year-
old San Franciscan who quit his day job at Microsoft Corp. to run his
own Web company, Patrick Media, out of cafes and a rented desk. "At a
startup, you're always on the go, plowing ahead, with some higher
cause driving you."

San Francisco's bedouins see themselves changing the nature of the
workplace, if not the world at large. They see large companies like
General Motors laying off workers, contributing to insecurity. And at
the same time, they see the Internet providing the tools to start
companies on the cheap. In the Bedouin lifestyle, they are free to
make their own rules.

"The San Francisco coffeehouse is the new Palo Alto garage," declares
Kevin Burton, 30, who runs his Internet startup Tailrank without
renting offices. "It's where all the innovation is happening."

Burton and Kennedy are among those popularizing the bedouin name,
separating the movement from traditional freelancing by stressing the
workers' involvement in technology, in general, and Web 2.0 ideology
in particular. While the movement is at its apex in San Francisco,
where young urban independents can easily find a coffeehouse with the
right vibe for them, it's also happening across the more suburban
reaches of the Bay Area, and across the country as a whole.

The move toward mobile self employment is also part of what author
Daniel Pink identified when he wrote "Free Agent Nation" in 2001.

"A whole infrastructure has emerged to help people work in this way,"
Pink said. "Part of it includes places like Kinkos, Office Depot and
Staples." It also includes places like Starbucks and independent
coffee shops, where Wi-Fi -- wireless Internet access for laptops and
other devices -- is available.

"The infrastructure makes it possible for people to work where they
want, when they want, how they want," said Pink, who is based in
Washington, D.C. Pink said numbers are hard to pin down, as the Census
Bureau does not count independent workers. Using available census data
and private surveys, Pink estimates that one-fifth of the workforce,
or 30 million out of 150 million people, are working on their own.

In February 2005, the census identified 10.3 million independent
contractors, 2.5 million on-call workers, 1.2 million temporary help
agency workers, and 813,000 workers with contract firms. The
independent workforce is hard to track, as the workers are neither
employee nor employer -- and yet, in what Pink termed a "Zen turn,"
they are both employee and employer.

"It's been a slow steady trajectory over the last 15 or 20 years for a
whole host of reasons. One of them, obviously, is there's no lifetime
job security any more. I'm going to be more secure working for
myself."

Pink calls it "Karl Marx's revenge, where individuals own the means of
production. And they can take the means of production and hop from
coffee shop to coffee shop."

Funny he should mention Marx. Soviet iconography is popping up all
over the Bay Area's bedouin landscape, from the coffee cup and star on
the red background of Ritual Roasters' logo, to the cell phone and
mouse that look suspiciously like a hammer and sickle on the logo of
Web Worker Daily, a blog that covers the bedouin phenomenon.

Web Worker Daily is published by GigaOm, a media company that
practices what it preaches. Om Malik, 40, a technology journalist who
lives in San Francisco's Financial District, started blogging five
years ago and last year quit his day job, taking an undisclosed amount
of venture capital to launch GigaOm as a business. He now has a full-
time staff of five and a team of freelancers, all scattered about,
contributing to different online journals. One is in Oakland, one in
San Mateo, two in San Francisco and one at Lake Tahoe, he said. The
freelancers are in Utah, Denver, New Jersey, Washington, D.C., and
spread around the world.

"There is nothing more free than being a Web worker," Malik says.
"There is no boss. You work for yourself. This is the new Wild West.
The individual is more important. That's the American way. It's about
doing things your own way. Web workers represent that. ... It's the
future, my friend."

There is a downside, Malik readily admits. "I can put in an 18-hour
day," he said. "You don't know when to stop."

The Starbucks model

If you could split the Web workers into two main camps, you could say
that one camp plugs in at Starbucks, while the other chooses
independent neighborhood cafes. The two have vastly different ethics.

Starbucks offers a more corporate culture, and is a popular place for
business meetings. Executives who travel a lot often prefer Starbucks,
knowing they can find many branches in whatever city they go to. They
also pay for the Wi-Fi, through Starbucks' partnership with T-Mobile.

Malik, for instance, swears by his Starbucks. (He doesn't want to say
where it is, for fear that publicists from the companies he covers
will stake him out there and ruin the experience.) "The biggest day of
my own little boy life was when my own local Starbucks made me
'customer of the week,' " Malik said. "That's a Web worker gold
medal."

Yet many of the scrappier startups, particularly those who have not
taken funding from venture capitalists, prefer the ethos of the
independent cafes, where the music is a little louder and the Wi-Fi is
free.

Ritual: the scene

Ritual Roasters in San Francisco's Mission District is in many ways
the epicenter of the bedouin movement. Ritual, on Valencia Street near
21st Street, is almost always packed with people working on laptops.

Every bedouin seems to have a Ritual story. There's the time someone
buzzed through the cafe on a Segway scooter. Rubyred Labs, a hip Web
design shop in South Park, had its launch party there. Teams from
established Web companies such as Google Inc. and Flickr, a photo
sharing site that's now owned by Yahoo, meet there. "You'd never know
these guys were millionaires," said Ritual co-owner Jeremy Tooker.

The founders of Web video startup Dovetail Television were meeting
there one day, griping as usual about how hard it was to find talented
programmers.

"I'm looking around and there's gotta be 50 people with laptops," said
Brett Levine, 31, a co-founder and the company's lead programmer. "I
got on a chair and yelled, 'Hey, are there any ActionScript
programmers in the room?' People at the counter looked at me
glaringly, but a couple of people looked around and raised their
hand."

They lined up for interviews. None were actually hired, but it
cemented in Levine's mind the notion of where the talent pool lies.

Kennedy, the self-professed bedouin who has worked at blog aggregator
Technorati and at tech giant Microsoft but who is now working on his
own idea of developing a new more personal way to search the Internet,
is a regular at Ritual and blogs about it often. Kennedy tries to earn
his spot in the cafe. "They'll come up to me and say, 'Did you notice
that the Wi-Fi is down?' I can troubleshoot that kind of thing. Or
when they were talking about redesigning their Web site, I was able to
give advice."

"In the old days, people used to yell, 'Is there a doctor in the
house?' " Kennedy said. "In cafes now, it's, 'Is there a Wi-Fi
technician in the house?' "

On one recent weekday, software engineer Chase Tingley, 29, worked at
one table, where he telecommutes for Idiom, a Massachusetts software
company. Tingley moved to San Francisco when his wife took a job at a
law firm. At the next table, three friends worked on their own
projects: system administrator Sean Kelly, 36, wrote database
reporting scripts, while Kaytea Petro, 28, worked at her job in
publishing, and Robert Boyle, 37, hacked out code for the company he's
co-founded, Podaddies.com, which he said will "monetize user-generated
video."

As for why they're there, Kelly said, "I'm visiting with my friends
instead of being locked up in a big building in the South Bay."

And he added, cheekily, "If you bring a flask, you can tip it into
your coffee and your boss isn't watching you."

Tingley, at the next table, turned around and asked, "Can we be in
separate articles?"

Coffee to the people

Kevin Burton, an expert in blogs and RSS feeds who runs a Web startup
called Tailrank.com that claims to "track the hottest news in the
blogosphere," spends about 10 percent of his time at Ritual, but the
crowds have driven him elsewhere. His favorite at the moment is Coffee
to the People on Masonic Avenue.

When you enter, you have no doubt you're in the Haight-Ashbury
neighborhood. The coffee drinks have names like Flower Power, the menu
includes a vegan blueberry cornbread. At one table, a woman with an
open laptop talks on her cell phone, while the man reading a paperback
next to her keeps a hand over his ear. (Most bedouins say cell phones
need to go outside the cafe.) Nearby, Kiff Gallagher, 37, pursues his
passion, making music, while trading stocks online.

"I have a home office, but I just get cooped up," he said.

Burton arrives at 11 a.m., and his lead engineer, Jonathan Moore, 30,
arrives a few minutes later. Burton has a double latte and a cupcake,
and starts explaining how his site uses "wisdom of the crowds"
algorithms to scrape the hottest news from the blogosphere and upend
the mainstream media.

As he talks, Gallagher joins in, and advises, "Lower your voice. I
already know the ins and outs of your business plan from the last time
I was here."

That is an occupational hazard in the bedouin workforce. Kennedy
rented a desk at San Francisco's Obvious Corp., a Web company in South
Park, so he could have confidential meetings. Kennedy also said he has
equipped his laptop with a firewall that's always on and e-mail and
instant messaging encryption. He said it's fairly easy to sit in a
cafe and start "sniffing the network, see what sites people are
accessing, get an idea of a site that hasn't launched yet, see
people's e-mail logins and passwords."

Bedouin history

Using a cafe to run a business is nothing particularly new. Venerable
insurance firm Lloyd's of London was actually started in a coffee
house, Kennedy points out. According to the Lloyd's of London Web
site, "Edward Lloyd opened a coffee house in 1688, encouraging a
clientele of ships' captains, merchants and ship owners -- earning him
a reputation for trustworthy shipping news. This ensured that Lloyd's
coffee house became recognized as the place for obtaining marine
insurance."

Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote some of their best work
in Parisian cafes. And in San Francisco, writers and poets of the Beat
generation, such as Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, wrote in
the cafes of North Beach.

Caffe Trieste was among the most popular North Beach hangouts. "To
have a cappuccino, you come to North Beach, to Caffe Trieste," says
Giovanni "Papa Gianni" Giotta, the founder.

Now Caffe Trieste has joined the ranks of Wi-Fi cafes. It would figure
that the one laptop in action on a recent afternoon belonged to an art
dealer. "A cappuccino for overhead isn't bad," said David Salow, 33.
He struck out on his own three months ago, and has yet to open a
gallery. "Sixty to 70 percent of what I do can be done with the
standard tools available to everyone -- a phone, a computer and a
laptop connection."
So, how much coffee do you need to buy?

The proliferation of Wi-Fi cafes brings with it a moral dilemma: If
you're one of these people sitting around and working on your laptop
in a cafe, how much coffee do you need to buy?

Every cafe owner has wrestled with the flip side of that question: How
much do I need to sell to make it worth letting someone take up space
in my cafe?

Roger Soudah, owner of Cafe Reverie on Cole Street, was persuaded in
2004 to add Wi-Fi by one of his steady customers, Craigslist founder
Craig Newmark. But Soudah got fed up with the Wi-Fi squatters by the
next year.

"I got fed up and pulled it out of the wall, and my employees
cheered," he said. "My space is really small. We count on turnover for
that reason."

He tells of one woman who designs places with feng shui principles.
"She comes in with all these humongous blueprints and a laptop, taking
up four tables, then has the nerve to say, 'Can you turn the music
down?' " he said. "I feng shui'd her out of here."

Newmark says he won't be deterred. "My evil plans include using a
cellular data connection," he said. "I plan to foil Roger again."

Other cafe owners welcome the bedouin workforce and its laptops.

At Ritual Roasters in the Mission, co-owner Jeremy Tooker said the
main downside is the cost of power, which he said runs $2,000 a month.
(Some laptop workers in the cafe said that's not so bad, calculating
on the fly that that pencils out to about $64 a day, or $4 an hour.)
Ritual covers up its outlets on weekends, and Tooker said it will
likely eliminate many other outlets altogether, figuring that will
increase turnover.

The hardcore customers shrug off the change. "I bought three
batteries" for the laptop, said system administrator Sean Kelly. "It's
a little spendy, but it's totally worth it."

Cafe Lo Cubano in San Francisco's Laurel Heights is contemplating a
tiered system for access, according to floor manager Jeremiah Vernon.
"People sit outside in their cars, stealing the Wi-Fi without buying
anything," Vernon said.

To solve the problem, the new system would give small purchases an
hour of free Wi-Fi, modest purchases would get five hours, and $10 or
more would buy a full day. That allows the morning business customers
the chance to buy their cafe Cubano and check their e-mail, as they do
now, without allowing others to clog up the space for hours. One
regular buys a cup in the morning, and returns with the cup hours
later asking for a free refill, Vernon said.

One coffee shop, Coffee to the People in the Haight, even wrestled
with the issue on its blog last year. "Here at CTTP, we need to bring
in on average $100 PER HOUR simply to cover our costs," co-owner Karin
Tamerius wrote. "That means, if all of our customers were people who
stayed for three hours and spent $1.50 for coffee, we would require
200 people in our shop every hour we were open, 7 days a week, just to
stay in business."

"Fortunately, not all of our patrons are quite so thrifty."

Indeed, almost every mobile worker interviewed said they try to buy
something at least every hour.

But not everyone.

Ryan Mickle, 26, moved to San Francisco last month to run a Web site
he co-founded, DoTheRightThing.com, which lets users rate companies on
their social value. But Mickle can't always afford to do the right
thing himself.

"We're bootstrapping entrepreneurs. We don't have any funds," he said.
His Web site is not yet bringing in any money. "I'm reluctant to pay
$9 for the overpriced food that tends to be in the cafe," he said.
"It's the Wi-Fi user's dilemma. ... It's a mind game I play with
myself: How many coffees is fair? I need to be sure to invest in them
as a consumer or they're not going to last very long."

But Mickle vows that when he does incorporate, make money and issue
stock, he will give shares to the cafes that he used as office space.

In a way, argues author Daniel Pink, the Wi-Fi cafe is bringing
efficiency to the commercial real estate market.

Most offices sit vacant all night long, he said, creating an
"incredible inefficiency." Pink, the author of "Free Agent Nation" and
"A Whole New Mind," said people can rent interim offices from
companies like Regus Corp., where the coffee is free, or do their work
in a cafe. "This is just confirmation that Starbucks and its cousins
are all really in the commercial real estate business," he said.
"They're giving very cheap real estate for a very pricey cup of
coffee."

-- Dan Fost
Laboring by latte

A sampling of coffee shops favored by the bedouins by the Bay:

Grove Cafe: 2250 Chestnut St., San Francisco. Vibe -- A Marina
neighborhood joint popular with Marin businesspeople who need to zip
across the Golden Gate Bridge for meetings in the city.

Ritual Roasters: 1026 Valencia St., San Francisco. Vibe -- Mission
hipster, and Web worker-friendly. It helps to have tattoos, and you
have to like loud thumping music. The coffee gets rave reviews.

Coffee to the People: 1206 Masonic Ave., San Francisco. Vibe -- Haight-
Ashbury all the way, with Martin Luther King poster, music from the
'60s and '70s, and walls of bumper stickers.

Cafe Lo Cubano: 3401 California St., San Francisco. Vibe -- Laurel
Village business casual. One man seen sleeping at his laptop; floor
manager Jeremiah Vernon once saw a pro football scout and an agent
talk to players for six hours.

Caffe Trieste: 601 Vallejo St., San Francisco. Vibe -- Old school
North Beach classic, with the aging photos of Ferlinghetti and
Pavarotti on the walls, and special greetings from founder Papa
Gianni.

Starbucks: 3595 California St., San Francisco. Vibe -- According to
district manager Ian Ippolito, "Our store in Laurel Village is a 24-
hour location, so we attract a lot of business professionals working
on projects after hours, students and night shift workers."

Starbucks: 2727 Mariposa St., San Francisco. Vibe -- In the dot-com
days, this was Starbucks' experimental Circadia cafe. Although the
experiment went the way of the dot-coms, the cafe survives and still
features a conference room customers can rent for $20 an hour. Call
ahead, it books up.

Barefoot Coffee Roasters: 5237 Stevens Creek Blvd., Santa Clara. Vibe
-- Bedouin worker Niall Kennedy favors this spot when he's in Silicon
Valley, not only for the coffee, which the cafe takes very seriously,
but for its attention to the technology, particularly the security.
The cafe also provides WPA keys, among the latest in wireless
protection, Kennedy says, "so your traffic is encrypted if people want
to sniff your laptop."

Nomad Cafe: 6500 Shattuck Ave., Oakland. Vibe -- East Bay eco-hip,
with local artists on the walls, organic food and drink, and bins for
recycling and composting.

For a more complete list of San Francisco Wi-Fi cafes, check out:

www.cheesebikini.com/wifi-cafes

www.bestofsanfrancisco.net/cappuccinocafes.htm

www.tinyurl.com/2382xp


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