Charles Handy came up with the term ‘portfolio worker’ near 20 years ago and today, mobile workers — aka. “free agents“, road warriors, freelances, one-man-bands or “scanners“ — are commonplace.
But there are some aspects of mobile working where reality fails to live up to the romance. Anyone who has found themselves traipsing around a city in search of a quiet, WiFi-enabled workspace will know what I mean.
Pricy per-hour broadband charges, costly coffee, loud music, noisy children, sticky table-tops barely big enough for your Blackberry…a quiet spot where you can concentrate, make phone calls or get down to some wireless work is hard to come by in the city.
So the new WorkSnug application (also coming to Android) is a welcome work-related addition to the often consumery iPhone, as well as heartening proof of the value of customer-driven nnovation. Developed with head-set maker Plantronics, it’s a free app for 3G iPhones that uses augmented reality to guide you to the nearest places in the city to access WiFi while on the go.
If you point your iPhone in the direction you want to go, the screen displays the nearest addresses — these may be cafes, museums, libraries, co-working hubs or other venues where WiFi’s on offer. Each has a brief review and a simple rating system that measures noise levels (low, medium, high), access to power, and how cool a place is, by WorkSnug’s standards.
Neat features encourage engagement — users can tweet their own feedback on a place that’s been reviewed, or email in other reviews, creating a virtuous circle of objective reviews and a natural community.
And community is the ultimate goal — Leyland’s interested in WorkSnug as a means of bringing together like-minded people worldwide (not unlike TED) Ultimately, that community will be quality and content controllers to a large degree, influencing reviews and which cities are covered to a growing extent.
In the shorter term, if the initial app’s London version is approved, WorkSnug’s band of roving reviewers will tackle San Francisco next, with other global cities lined up behind.
