Working Together![]()
Arguably the most important interaction at the corporate office space is the post-weekend water cooler social, where employees exchange trade secrets, such as who’s going out with whom, and theorizing why the accounting department is going through so much toner. Unfortunately, self-employed entrepreneurs or telecommuting contractors miss that bit of social interaction.
But in 2005, some like-minded workers in San Francisco decided they could continue their independent careers and still share ideas and office equipment with others, even if no one really works together. Called “coworking,” the idea balances human interaction into the work life of an independent worker. In a survey conducted by the Sonoma County Economic Development Board (EDB), 80 percent of the coworkers reported business growth in the past two years, and 60 percent wanted even more coworking options in the county.
A coalition of coworkers called the Coworking Alliance of Sonoma County recently formed to connect fellow coworkers and keep track of open spaces in their office network. A separate survey from the EDB found 65 percent of the subjects planning to stay in their current office environment for at least two more years.
Tears of Joy![]()
Oxford’s Dictionaries’ 2015 Word of the Year may stump everyone, because the winner isn’t actually a word.
Emojis, the modern equivalent of hieroglyphs, are (apparently) now considered words. To be specific, Oxford Dictionaries granted the “face with tears of joy” emoji as the recipient of the honor. A survey from Swiftkey, a company specializing in text completion prediction software, shows the face with tears of joy emoji comprised 20 percent of all emoji use in 2015.
Because consumers seek evermore-efficient channels of communication, Oxford Dictionaries believed it was time to embrace the “pictures are a thousand words” idea behind pictographs and emojis. This doesn’t mean businesses should re-market their products with pictographs; it just means your emojis shouldn’t be underlined during spellchecks.
www.blog.oxforddictionaries.com
The Name Game
Physical land isn’t the only kind of real estate in short supply. According to a survey of venture-funded startups created from 2012 onward (conducted by Clutch, an analytics, review and source agency), 41 percent had made-up names. Additionally, 88 percent of startups used .com in their domain name.
The correlation, according to Clutch, is the slowly dwindling supply of available .com domains. With the pool of available .coms shrinking every day, perspective startups have to decide whether they should embrace a less common domain, such as .co or .net, make the domain separate from their startups’ name or create a unique name that has a better chance of securing a similar .com domain.
