Today sees the release of MindJet Catalyst, the latest edition of MindJet’s mind mapping software. A few days ago, I had the chance to talk to MindJet’s CEO, Scott Raskin, about the new release, his perspective on mind mapping software and where the company is headed.

Imran: It’s almost a year since we covered MindManager, what can you tell us about the newly released Mindjet Catalyst — what’s new and what’s the migration path for existing users?

Raskin: Mindjet Catalyst is the most exciting announcement that we’ve made as a company, combining powerful applications for online document sharing, web conferencing and project management with our award-winning application for visual collaboration. Mindjet Catalyst takes the concept of a team brainstorming on a whiteboard and brings it into the digital realm, meshing the best of creative, in-person meetings with online collaboration capabilities, ultimately enhancing creativity, innovation and problem-solving.  All current Mindjet Connect customers will be upgraded to the Mindjet Catalyst platform at no extra cost.

Imran: Are there any mind mapping theories, methodologies or best-practices upon which Mindjet bases its products?

Raskin: We believe that in today’s business world, several factors are making it imperative that organizations of all sizes re-evaluate how they encourage and manage collaboration. Innovation and creative problem-solving are key to every enterprise, large or small, and we believe innovation depends on unleashing the collective creativity and ingenuity of employees, partners and business ecosystems. Gary Hamel noted that companies intent on generating sustained wealth must create a dynamic, open internal market for ideas within an organization.

Our products are based on a strong belief in the power of visually linking and layering information to build relationships between knowledge and insights from every member of a team (be they images, lists, notes, data, charts or documents) and by locating — virtually — every piece of pertinent information for any given project, all in one place.

Imran: What can you tell us about the broader marketplace, where it’s headed and why we’re seeing product after product entering this space?

Raskin: Well, it’s interesting when you mention the “broader marketplace.” If you can say anything about collaboration right now, it’s certainly a “broad” sector. People are lumping everything into “collaboration” these days — whether it’s web conferencing, virtual workspaces, wikis, enterprise social networking, microblogging, you name it. If it facilitates communication among groups, people are calling it collaboration. This is where we differ with most people. My argument is that these tools are not collaboration tools — they’re really just communication tools on steroids. I can meet with people in a web conference, or post items to a wiki, but we’re really just continuing to push information back and forth and not engaging in activities that lead to true innovation.

People are overloaded with information and companies must innovate. That’s why companies are rushing in to try to meet this need. But unless people have a platform that enables them to dialogue and brainstorm with others in a visual manner, create strategic and actionable plans and then execute on them, they’re not going to address the innovation problem. We think we offer significant value that no one else who makes a “collaboration” product today offers.

Imran: Is mind mapping as critical as a word processor or spreadsheet? Should iWork, Google Apps, OpenOffice or Microsoft Office integrate mind mapping?

Raskin: Absolutely. A customer of ours who is a former VP at WebEx says that he tells all of his teams that Mindjet is the “only tool that is never optional.” Will the word processor or spreadsheet ever go away? Certainly not — they fulfill specific needs for specific purposes. But imagine having a central, visually-oriented dashboard that enables you and all of the teams you work with to collaborate in real time, manage multiple documents and spreadsheets related to any project, and track your progress from start to finish to success. If you’re in sales, imagine a tool that creates instant trust with your potential customers by mapping out for them in real-time that you understand their critical needs and can visualize for them a path to meeting those needs. Some have called what we do the “indispensable fifth productivity app” after documents, spreadsheets, presentations and email. Adding mapping to your current suite of tools makes those tools work exponentially more productively for you.

Imran: What’s next for the company after the move to Catalyst?

Scott: We have a lot coming out in the next few months and even over the next year that we’re very excited about:

• Our currently available Mindjet for iPhone app, and also the upcoming release of MindManager 8 for Mac on October 20th.
• For Mindjet Catalyst, we’re on schedule to go out with a new release every 45 days.
• Our readiness for several of the exciting new capabilities that will be coming for MindManager in Windows 7, including touchscreen compatibility.
• We’ll have more news about purpose-built solutions that integrate with existing infrastructures.
• We’re working on enhancements for working with maps in social media outlets.

MindJet has kindly offered WebWorkerDaily readers a year’s free subscription (worth around $1,500) to the first 25 people who contact the company at gigaom@mindjet.com.

How do you see mind mapping tools evolving in the future?

Along with Daniel Pink, one of the most intriguing speakers I saw at last month’s TEDGlobal 2009 was notorious graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister. British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown’s opening session was a tough act to follow, but Sagmeister made an impression with some striking observations on career sabbaticals.

Sagmeister illustrated a traditional career as a timeline comprising three distinct “eras:” learning, work and retirement, with each “era” roughly taking up a third of one’s lifetime; around twenty-five years each.

While a confident minority of people might take a traditional career sabbatical, Sagmeister keeps his perspective and his work fresh by taking periodic sabbaticals throughout his career to date. In essence, Sagmeister closes his studio every eighth year, interspersing some of his retirement years into his active working career. This new career timeline looked more like learning, work, retirement, work, retirement…and so on.

Returning from a sabbatical in Indonesia back in 2007, Sagmeister realized his work had a new clarity, vision and purpose and that his “job became a calling again.” Sagmeister felt his post-sabbatical work was stronger and edgier; his year out provided the insight, innovation and income for the following seven years. So what is his formula?

1. Talk to people who’ve taken sabbaticals about how and why they did it, and what they learned.
2. Add five years to your planned working life.
3. Intersperse those extra years into your career, taking a year off every seventh year.

Humorously, Daniel Pink himself decided to re-imagine “going on sabbatical” as “taking a Sagmeister”!

As the world of work evolves into distributed portfolio careers and job markets become more flexible — and turbulent — it’s worth reconsidering the structure of your career. We have weekends and workweeks to partition our time and recharge ourselves, yet in the arc of a lifetime, we locate our intellectual renewal at its close. Perhaps it’s worth reconsidering and questioning this orthodoxy and begin to “take Sagmeisters,” breaking up our working lives with periodic sabbaticals and rebooting our passions. Sagmeister’s solution may not work well for everyone, but there’s an opportunity to experiment and mold the structure of our working lives to suit ourselves.

How would you incorporate sabbaticals into your working life?

Last week I explored the concept Noded working. “Noded” is really a subset of a much wider phenomenon emerging in the world of work — the notion of “portfolio careers.”

In her blog on the subject, Katie Ledger — co-author of the forthcoming book “And What Do You Do?: 10 Steps to Creating a Portfolio Career” — describes portfolio careers as work that “uses all your skills and passions…doing two or more jobs for different employers.”

The turbulence and insecurity of a globalized job market means that many people are, in essence, temporary workers with little assurance of a permanent job. As such, people are seeking security by establishing control over who they work with and what they work on.

The title of Ledger’s book is telling. Like many others, I find myself being asked,  “And what do you do?” frequently. But even after almost three years of self-employment, I struggle to find a concise response without rambling through a range of consultancy projects, advisory board roles, startup investments, writing gigs and conference development. Perhaps “a portfolio of digital technology projects” should suffice as an answer?

Though each of my activities and roles requires a different range of skills and attitudes, sometimes with no overlap between them, somehow it adds up to a cohesive career. Although outwardly it might seem unfocused and fragmented, I can now deploy “portfolio working” as a useful umbrella term.

Most significantly, people discussing portfolio careers often underline motivation as the key element in this mode of working — people use a portfolio of options when seeking a better work/life balance, to learn new skills, to extract themselves from office politics or simply for fulfillment.

Career coach Marianne Cantwell defines portfolio careerists as “free-range humans“ who are not “penned into an unhappy job-cage.” Contrast this with Cantwell’s “battery-cage humans” who see limited options for their careers, forced only to seek out particular types of jobs. It’s perhaps an unfair contrast, but fundamentally, it’s about choosing who you work for and what you do, as opposed to being imprisoned by rigidly defined roles.

Elsewhere, Ledger suggests there are common qualities shared by successful practitioners of portfolio careers and helps readers evaluate whether they’re suitable for such a mode of work.

Read more at “Portfolio Careers: Creating a Career of Multiple Part-Time Jobs” and subscribe to the Portfolio Careers blog.

Do you have a portfolio career? How do you manage your various portfolio roles?

Rounding off our week of features on the Future of Work, I thought it appropriate to consider methods of exploring the future, in particular ways to help you think about your career trajectory.

Perhaps one of the most well-known and used mechanisms for understanding possible futures is scenario planning. Scenario planning essentially helps construct “storylines” that draw together factors from various overlapping domains — politics, technology, culture, demographics — into narratives that can sometimes yield surprising, serendipitous insights.

Scenario planning has a long history of use as a predictive tool in the military and large organizations, but it’s also surprisingly applicable to individuals who wish to model, simulate and explore their own personal future.

A recent piece in Wired outlines a method for personal scenario planning to help workers consider and imagine their career future, and model the factors that might influence it.

Conveniently, Wired’s artilce distills scenario planning into five easy steps:

1. List driving forces. Which events, trends and variables affect your career? Categorize them under “uncertainties” and “relative certainties,” ranked by importance. These are essentially the determining factors in your career.
2. Make a scenario grid. Map your possible futures by selecting the most important uncertainties (from above) as axes of a 2×2 grid, you can then begin to populate each section of the grid with the description of a “potential future,” based on your chosen factors.
3. Imagine possible futures. Rewrite your potential futures as fictional, but plausible, news stories to make each scenario more tangible and real.
   
4. Brainstorm implications and actions. Here you begin to strategize how each possible future could be navigated. Begin with the implications of each scenario, followed by discrete actions. Some actions might work in multiple scenarios, indicating that these are the most secure paths forward.
5. Track the indicators. The scenarios you’ve established prepares you to absorb what’s ahead and recognize events and developments which signal if elements of particular scenarios are in play. Testing your actions against these indicators regularly helps you anticipate your reaction to various futures.

Wired’s article uses the example of an aerospace engineer seeking to future-proof his career over the next five years. There’s no reason the same methodology couldn’t be applied to the world of a designer, developer, consultant, journalist or any of the multitude of web working disciplines.

I recently took part in an Arup-hosted scenario planning session at TED Global 2009, in Oxford. Over the course of two hours, around seventy people teased out a set of priorities for addressing global problems, using Arup’s own Drivers Of Change scenario planning tools. It was a fascinating exercise in anticipating future developments, and something that I’m certain would work well on a personal and individual scale for managing a career.

I’d love to see an enterprising and imaginative group create a crowdsourcing-driven application for personal scenario planning. Perhaps we might even see the evolution of scenario coaches to assist freelancers, in particular.

Read more at “Your Future in 5 Easy Steps: Wired Guide to Personal Scenario Planning.”

Which methodologies and practices do you use to future-proof your own career? What are your “drivers of change”?

Recently I was sent an interesting piece on “motivating yourself when you just don’t feel like it.” In other words, how to slay the demon procrastination.

The suggestion of this article was particularly timely as I’ve been feeling somewhat adrift for the last few weeks. I’d already overcome my inertia, but I realize that some of these tips could have been useful in getting me going again.

In the post, Jason Barr suggests eight techniques, but I particularly like these five:

• Let fear take hold. Use the “fight or flight” response to scare yourself into acting — and working!
• Keep the finish line In sight. Avoid natural tendencies to look simply at an immediate objective and focus on the ultimate goals.
• Make it a game. Figure out ways to measure yourself — then try to beat yourself
• Tell someone else. Sharing a goal or objective can bake in some social pressure (something that we’ve written about before).
• Break it up. Break your “big hairy goal” up into into more manageable steps.

Most of Jason’s suggestions seem fairly obvious but I’m intrigued by the suggestion to make your work tasks into a game. There’s been some interesting discussion recently on using gaming metaphors to change behavior — everything from the RPG-like metaphors of Weight Watchers, to the underlying psychology of Nike Plus, to the MPG readout of Toyota’s Prius and smart meters in homes reducing energy consumption. The first step in changing your behavior is generally to “instrument” and measure it.

I’d love to see the mostly dry GTD and productivity tools re-imagined as role-playing games, complete with leaderboards: “Can you ‘level-up’ and deliver that annual report?”

How are you measuring yourself and your work?

Read more at “8 Great Ways to Motivate Yourself When You Just Don’t Feel Like It.”

The coffee shop has long been an valuable digital oasis for freelancers and untethered workers, providing an essential mix of cake, connectivity and company. It has inadvertently, and sometimes deliberately, become the third place, figuratively located between home and work.

Last December we reported that the UK’s Pret a Manger chain was launching free Wi-Fi access — now it seems they’re set to be joined by Starbucks, at just over 500 locations throughout the UK.

Though Starbucks has long offered paid Wi-Fi via T-Mobile and BT, as well as complimentary iPhone usage, this latest development is purported to open connectivity to anyone using Starbucks’ prepay cards.

Curiously, while at one time smaller indie outlets would offer free Wi-Fi connectivity to compete with the bigger players, it seems they’re now curtailing their generosity, just as the larger chains are starting to offer complimentary access.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that some stores are now covering up electrical outlets and limiting the time that customers are allowed to use a laptop — unless they’re eating or drinking something. It seems that in New York City, the recession has driven idle workers to nursing the same cup for hours at a time — behavior that’s starting to impact stores’ businesses.

Coffee shops in New York in particular — one independent chain of stores is aptly called Cafe Grumpy — seem to be leading the charge in withdrawing perks from their customers. This might be more understandable when you learn that some frugal customers are starting bringing their own food, cups and teabags.

There’s always been an unwritten social contract between web workers and store owners: Workers help make a place look busy and spend enough for owners to ignore the overhead caused by their usage of connectivity and power, while cafe owners provide a “demi-office” environment for the workers. When someone tries to take take advantage of such a delicate balance, it’s only understandable that the relationship begins to break down.

Sadly, as CNET’s Rafe Needleman illustrates, independent stores owners are likely to lose this battle as larger chains draw workers away with their drift towards free connectivity.

Personally, I believe independent owners can be more creative in supporting the untethered — perhaps providing low-cost subscription plans for access to various resources is one way to go, or arranging blocks of time or events to support web workers. These are all personal touches that are harder for larger chains to match.

Do you think the coffee shop/web worker social contract is equitable? What can be done to keep a balance?

My obsession with portable solar energy continues — in the past I’ve written about Suntrica’s portable chargers, Reware’s Juice Bags and Noon Solar’s range of bags. Suntrica’s chargers, though difficult to purchase outside Finland, currently offer the most elegant and practical solution for cheap, mobile and clean solar energy.

Interestingly, a unique field test of mobile solar power is taking place in a handful of African nations, where electrical power is often unreliable: AfriGadget’s Flexible Light And Power (FLAP) initiative.

FLAP is a collaboration between San Francisco’s iconic messenger bag company, Timbuk2, the Pop!Tech conference, and Portable Light. Timbuk2 has modified one of its standard messenger bags with a removable flap that contains a photovoltaic solar panel connected to an LED light and a USB power outlet, which can be used for charging portable electronics such as phones and MP3 players.

AfriGadget’s founder, Erik Hersman, has been traveling through communities in Ghana, Kenya and Uganda, assessing the usability, usefulness and adaptability of FLAP for everyday use. So far it seems the solar-charged light is the key feature, with the bag’s built-in USB charging being less crucial. However, given the crucial cultural role that mobile communication is playing in countries such as Kenya and Uganda, I’d be surprised if this feature doesn’t become more popular.

Interestingly, Timbuk2 plan to offer the solar flap as part of their own range of accessories — bringing technology tested and evaluated in the developing world to its geek-dense customer base in the developed world.

With the popularity and utility of Timbuk2 bags among web workers, combined with the emerging interest in solar power, this seems like a great collaboration. I hope some benefit will accrue to those developing nations’ communities, and not simply to more affluent buyers elsewhere.

Would you buy a bag with a solar charger or solar accessories?

This week I’ve been speculating on the Future of Work and the types of skills that might be required. However, hindsight can provide useful clues to the future, so it’s important to reflect on existing behavior in order to determine where we’re headed.

Between April and June of this year, online accounting service FreeAgent surveyed its users. The result is “The Freelancer Report,” an in-depth study of 535 freelancers and small businesses. Though the respondents were mainly based in the UK and the Netherlands, and the survey was primarily intended to understand the impact of the global recession, it provides some indications of trending behaviors and make for interesting reading.

• More than half of responders describe themselves as freelancers, with a minority using terms such as “consultant” and “contractor,” while “small business” is the smallest category. Does this represent the triumph of personal branding for freelancers?

• Unsurprisingly, the bulk of surveyed freelancers are working in technology — from IT and consultancy to design and development. Curiously, journalism is also quite prominent, suggesting that the implosion of the newspaper industry is perhaps encouraging talent to go it alone.

• Most respondents have been self-employed for under three years, suggesting that the recession isn’t hurting independent workers.

• Freelancers seem to be servicing large and small clients quite evenly, indicating that it’s a mode of work with which that most clients are comfortable.

• It’s heartening to know most freelancers are paying a lot of attention to actually running their businesses — from accounting to invoicing — suggesting most aren’t surprised by the overheads of operation, and are not just simply delivering the work.

• Surprisingly, most don’t seem to have felt the full effects of the recession, and although cautiously optimistic, many anticipate lower earnings in the immediate future.

The report goes on to rank “indices of optimism,” “expected earnings” and the degree to which various industries are feeling the downturn.

Overall, it seems freelancing is particularly a robust and optimistic mode of work, even in a meltdown. This is perhaps a reflection on the agility of small businesses in a turbulent marketplace and being able to maintain a portfolio of opportunities.

Has the recession impacted your freelancing business to the extent that you thought it might?

Recently, I’ve been talking to many local journalists about the unfolding implosion of the newspaper industry and its implications for their profession.

As the industry struggles to adapt to a world which is moving onto the web, journalists are not only learning to blend social media with traditional reporting, but as UK-based multimedia journalist Adam Westbrook explains, some are also exploring how distributed work teams could replace the newsroom.

Westbrook’s piece introduces the philosophy of Noded working: principles for forming distributed teams for particular projects.

The Noded concept is explained in a book. A downloadable preview describes the philosophy as:

“A group of individuals, often but not necessarily geographically distant, that come together to form temporary or recurring project teams. Unlike ‘distributed teams,’ Noded teams work for a wide range of clients and any member of a Noded team can take the lead to bring in work, manage work and choose their team members.”

Delving deeper, the Noded philosophy can be summarized as seven discrete principles:

1. Personality — Individualism is celebrated, enabling all members of a Noded team to define their own values and vision, but with a shared agenda.
2. Team — Each member is treated as an independent business owner or freelancer. Collaboration is driven by the needs of each project, often involving various combinations of members.
3. Leadership & Roles — There are no fixed roles. Traditional team leadership is replaced by project leadership, likely rotating between members who bring in the business.
4. Goals — There’s no collective group goal, only a range of individual member goals, which together form a kind of autonomy with shared purpose.
5. For Everyone — Anyone from employees of large companies to freelancers and indie workers can be part of a Noded team.
6. No Branding — A noded team isn’t branded discretely, but is a representation of the brands of each member, accompanied by an icon illustrating the Noded nature of the group.
7. Means Business — Noded teams are formed for business purposes.

The Noded philosophy seems to codify many of the existing principles of freelancers who work as part of project teams, defining a set of structures for establishing loosely coupled joint ventures.

Though many web workers are likely already members of Noded-like teams — whether they are aware of it or not — there’s something useful about having the Noded philosophy expressed that, now articulated, makes it easier to understand how to form project teams that cross organizational and disciplinary boundaries.

The Noded philosophy is analogous to co-working in many ways, with one major difference. Where the originators of co-working explicitly encourage others to modify and extend their values, the people behind the Noded concept appear to be establishing sole ownership over the philosophy and seeking to establish their own brand. This is understandable, but somewhat in contrast to their own stated beliefs.

Do your working practices already follow the Noded principles?

Last week, Sam explored trends in the technology jobs market, suggesting that significant opportunities only reveal themselves when examining both the available jobs and the underlying trends in demand for skills. Coincidentally, on the same day that Sam’s piece was published, The New York Times suggested that “the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians.”

As the post-Web 2.0 notion of “Web Squared” (a smarter web extending into the real world through sensor applications) becomes reality, we will see a proliferation of data. Figures such as Google Chief Economist Hal Varian are predicting that statisticians will be the hot profession as their skills are increasingly in demand.

As suggested by Daniel Pink’s assertions on the rise of a right-brained working elite, the ability to extract stories from a world of increasing and abundant data will be increasingly critical to many industries. Indeed, the opening of U.S. federal government data at data.gov (and the appointment of Sir Tim Berners-Lee to similarly open the UK’s data archives) implies a new societal and cultural importance for data wranglers.

Consider this: IBM is preparing to expand its data analysis employee base from 200 to 4,000 — a staggering twenty-fold increase. You can be certain that a significant portion of this new work force will be untethered, distributed widely across the globe, implying that one of the core skills for a new generation of web workers will be analysis.

So, if you’re looking to sharpen up your data analysis skills, where do you start?

1. The recently published book “Beautiful Data” brings together essays some of the world’s most cutting-edge data practitioners — such as Stamen Design — on subjects as diverse as DNA analysis, crime maps and crowdsourcing.
2. Ben Fry’s PhD thesis “Computational Information Design,” which outlines the need for a new field based on multiple disciplines.
3. The post “Three Sexy Skills Of Data Geeks,” which explains statistics, data munging and visualization — or studying, suffering and storytelling, as the author jokingly suggests.
4. Blogs such as Dataspora and Flowing Data.

For all of us working in and around digital media, computing, or data of any form, it looks like there will be a whole new vocabulary and skillset that we’ll need to be prepared for. The resources above should help get us all started.

How’re your data analysis skills?

Last month — courtesy of Nokia — I had the privilege of attending one of the most exciting conferences in the technology calendar, TEDGlobal 2009. Though TED is invitation-only — and monstrously expensive at $4,500 — it succeeds in bringing together an extraordinarily diverse range of speakers and delegates…plus, everyone gets a really, really cool gift bag!

The final session of the week-long conference opened with Daniel Pink, a former speechwriter for Al Gore, now a “career analyst” investigating and examining the changing patterns of work around the world.

Pink has been the subject of much attention lately, with his assertions that “right-brainers will rule this century,” as well as high-profile appearances at TED and a recent interview with Oprah Winfrey. These assertions offer some intriguing insights into “the future of work in a post-broadband world” — notably the patterns of work, business relationships, structures and skills that we’ll perhaps require in the future.

Pink’s latest book speaks of a “conceptual age” of work where “left-brained” reasoning will need to be augmented by what he describes as six critical “right-brain” qualities:

1. Design — The ability to conceive more than purely functional services or products, and develop emotionally engaging, joyful and attractive solutions.
2. Story — In a society abundant with data, the ability to weave a compelling narrative will become increasingly crucial.
3. Symphony — Being able to synthesize disparate, often disconnected, developments into something new, often straddling many industries, will be the basis of innovation.
4. Empathy — Looking beyond analytics to understand underlying motivations can provide unique and distinct insights.
   
5. Play — Wiring levity and play into cultures, experiences and solutions where appropriate.
6. Meaning — Moving past material abundance to “work on stuff that matters.”

Pink’s TED session focused less on these attributes and more on empirical analysis of how workers are usually incentivized, concluding that contemporary incentive systems actually destroy creativity and that autonomy, mastery and purpose are better notions of management than traditional compliance, citing Atlassian as a prime example of a company that incentivizes right-brain activities.

The six aptitudes discussed above may invite controversy and are there to be challenged, but I’m certain many of our readers are already exhibiting many of these qualities, though perhaps without an explicit awareness of doing so. The real value of Pink’s work is in providing labels and language that become the starting point for discussion and debate. For example, how do you get good at “symphony?”

In an interesting counterpoint to Pink’s assertions, Wired UK recently ran a piece, “Stand by for Google’s next market-changing move,” that explores the trends towards the left-brained in the advertising industry; where “data is valued more highly than relationships…and creative genius.”

Read more at TED, Daniel Pink’s site, Oprah and Cooltown Studios.

Are you practicing any of Daniel Pink’s right-brained qualities?

One of the most anticipated features of the new iPhone OS 3.0 has been “tethering,” or the ability to share your iPhone’s 3G Internet connection with your laptop, via Bluetooth or USB.

For web workers — “the great untethered” — iPhone OS 3.0’s tethering represents an opportunity to work with greater freedom, mobility and flexibility. Even for those already using 3G datacards and dongles, the feature means you have one less device to carry. Official tethering has been a long time in coming. Unofficial iPhone apps such as Nullriver’s Netshare and PDANet have provided tethering capability to jailbroken iPhones for some time. Netshare was an official App Store release for a while, until Apple forced its withdrawal due to the lack of tethering rights in AT&T’s terms.

Here in the UK, O2’s tethering support for iPhone launched today, coinciding with the launch of iPhone 3G S. Sadly, despite the fact that O2’s iPhone contracts include “unlimited” data usage, tethering will cost an additional £15-£30 ($25-$50) each month, with no pay-as-you-go option. It’s worth noting that this pricing is identical to O2’s standalone 3G data charges.

O2 is claiming that “using your laptop can be more data-intensive than using your iPhone,” but doesn’t apply the same terms to other contracts and handsets. It’s likely that the carrier simply senses an opportunity to charge iPhone users for something for which they’ve effectively already paid.

In response, enterprising users are already creating patches to tether iPhones to O2 without jailbreaking, albeit running the risk of breaching their contracts as well as disabling MMS and Visual Voicemail. Indeed, even AT&T’s yet-to-be-launched tethering feature is being prised open.

It’ll be interesting to see if O2’s pricing has a negative effect on take-up and usage, diminishing a feature that’s clearly in demand and extraordinarily useful.

Do you plan to take up tethering services for your iPhone…and do you expect to pay?

Though the demise of Portland, Ore.’s Cubespace coworking community represents a sad development in the nascent history of coworking, the region’s vibrant Silicon Forest will give rise to other coworking options in due course.

In the meantime, there are ongoing successes elsewhere, notably in Italy, with Rome, Milan and Genoa playing host to no less than eight coworking communities.

Last week, I got the chance to speak with Massimo Carraro, one of the leading Italian evangelists for coworking and a phenomenal source of experience and expertise in bootstrapping multiple coworking communities.

Imran: Massimo, please introduce yourself to our readers and your role in developing coworking spaces in Italy.

Massimo: I’m a copywriter and run my own communications agency in Milano, Italy. I first became involved in coworking a year ago, when my partner and I decided to share part of our office space. That’s how it all began, with a blog called Coworking Milano and some word-of-mouth marketing.

We soon started getting requests from other space owners, who asked us, “How can it be done, this coworking thing?”  We realized that there was a lot of interest in the coworking issue, particularly from the media. (We enjoyed a full-page article in national newspaper La Repubblica a few weeks after opening.)

About a year later, we launched Coworking Project by Cowo®, a ”coworking starting kit” and network for anyone interested in sharing their own space. It’s a low-cost proposal, aimed at network-building rather than profit: affiliation costs just €100 ($140) for the first year.  We have kept things very simple, addressing our proposal to people who own a small office, putting them in a position to gain moderate revenues from renting out a desk or two, while trying at the same time to convey a notion of community. By doing so, we believe we give a service to nomadic workers, helping to make Italy a coworking-friendly country. Our network is growing very rapidly.

Imran: What do you think have been the driving forces for the adoption of coworking in Italy?

Massimo: Loosely defined, “coworking” is already an Italian habit. Many people have told me, “Yeah, I’ve done that with my brother, to help him with his startup.” Besides this, I firmly believe that sharing a workspace with a collaborative attitude is simply an excellent idea, and Italians are catching on.

Imran: What’s the general breakdown of residents in your space — permanent residents, drop-ins, part timers?

Massimo: Most of the people coworking with us are permanent residents, with some part-timers. We also have occasional drop-ins from out of town, but not very often.

Imran: What kind of work are they involved in? Do you see much collaboration between residents?

Massimo: We were expecting mostly developers, but in the end we see there are many different professional profiles involved in coworking. Currently,we host an engineer who owns a boat design company, an audio producer, a freelance journalist and a PR professional. Previously, we’ve hosted developers, TV writers and consultants. As far as collaboration between coworkers go, I haven’t seen many joint projects starting up, but residents do exchange views and opinions. I’ve often provided a marketing perspective on our coworkers’ activities.

Imran: What have been the greatest challenges and surprises in bootstrapping and operating Italian coworking communities?

Massimo: Our greatest surprise has been the excellent response through word of mouth marketing alone, followed by incredible media exposure.

Our greatest challenge — yet to be achieved — is to involve institutional partners such as city administrations, or tech companies, to give our project a stronger, long-term vision, like the Amsterdam Smart Work Center.

It’s very clear that coworking may operate in society as a sustainable catalyst of new entrepreneurial talents, both in terms of costs and flexibility. My view is that there many advantages for a wide range of people — students, startups, young entrepreneurs, freelancers — in having an active and prosperous set of coworking spaces; indeed, it should be a public concern to provide coworking. We have tried to involve Telecom Italia, Cisco and Italian mayors in our future plans, with varying degrees of success.

If done properly, coworking can be almost costless, in the sense that it can be activated in existing spaces, something that should be very appealing in a troubled economy. Also, the enormous potential of having a network of qualified places when traveling for work can’t be underestimated.

Another challenge is that it’s impossible to avoid thinking of sustainable profits. Though we’re not profit-seeking for its own sake, with the rate at which we’re adding spaces  — almost one per week — I foresee a time when managing this will be a full-time role.

To raise revenue, we’re focusing on selling web services to coworking spaces and taking a percentage on transactions at affiliated spaces. We’re also considering how nomadic workers and travel services might yield some revenues.

Imran: What are the key pieces of advice you’d give to people thinking about coworking and those thinking about establishing a coworking space?

Massimo: To coworkers: Share your experience, don’t just sit there doing your thing. Coworking is about people, so take advantage of it.

To space owners: Try to share, not just rent a desk. The coworking option for a small business is an interesting one because it breaks the solitude of both coworkers and space owners, so it’s a creative solution. Don’t just think about the money, try to keep a balance between revenue and personal reward, in terms of human exchange.

Do post your thoughts and reactions to Massimo’s observations in the comments below.

One of my favorite blogs recently has been The Art of Manliness. It’s not a boneheaded celebration of dumb machismo, rather a thoughtful exploration of what being a man can and should mean in a post-feminist world. With values anchored in equality, the writers explore everything from employment and relationships to parenting, grooming and etiquette.

Last month, in response to the deepening recession, one contributor wrote “How To Network Like A Man.” It’s a great essay on networking, oriented around the story of a man losing his job and immediately putting to work his network of professional relationships to find new work. The advice in the essay isn’t gender-specific, and applies pretty broadly to almost anyone in a professional context — for web workers, good networking skills are even more valuable than understanding CSS or Photoshop inside out.

Here are some of the key points to take away from the piece:

1. Develop a networker’s mentality — being communicative, reciprocal and thinking of yourself as a”business owner” can help place you in the correct frame of mind for networking effectively.
2. Know Your Networking Tools – LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and blogging are all name-checked as being part of the portfolio of digital tools necessary to actively network and maintain a significant public profile. (MySpace looks a little out of place there to me.) The article also provides a few tips on business cards, resumes, phone etiquette and the age-old handshake.
3. Look like a professional — the writer notes that appropriate professionalism with headshots, email signatures and documents can all help to brand yourself appropriately, and goes on to suggest a few dress codes for different personas and even times of day.

Some of the best networking advice I’ve read recently comes from Guy Kawasaki in a post called “The Art of Schmoozing.” He suggests that the essence of networking is “establishing relationships before you need them” and “discovering what you can do for someone else.” Kawasaki’s advice is really about altruism and generosity of time.

Share your networking tips in the comments.

The practice of wireframing is common to most web production professionals. Oddly, there’s no clear market leader or category-defining product in this space; even solutions such as Adobe’s Creative Suite lack dedicated wireframing or rapid prototyping tools.

There are, however, a number of useful smaller options. Late last year,  Mike Gunderloy evaluated the popular Balsamiq Mockups and its deliberately sketchy wireframes. I recently discovered FlairBuilder, another up-and-coming wireframing tool which, like Balsamiq, is based on the Adobe AIR platform.

While lacking Balsamiq’s cutesy, sketchy style, FlairBuilder has a number of interesting features useful for wireframing:

• A tabbed interface, enabling users to work on multiple projects and pages, along with tools to create “master” templates for a number of pages within a particular project.
• A pretty comprehensive gallery of components, segmented into palettes, along with a nifty search-as-you-type tool to help locate individual components.
• Integration with web applications, including Google Maps, Vimeo and YouTube, allows live content from third-party services to be incorporated into a wireframe layout.
• An online viewer allows non-FlairBuilder users to open and view projects created within the app, which is great for working with clients.

At $99, FlairBuilder is inexpensive enough for most web design or development professionals to take a chance on — in fact, it’s only marginally more expensive than Balsamiq.

Both Balsamiq and Flairbuilder do a reasonable job at a low cost. Personally, I use a combination of MindNode for high-level site structure and OmniGraffle-based wireframing templates to put together information architectures. But I can’t help thinking there’s great potential in an application or service that’s more integrated into the workflow of other common design tools such as Dreamweaver, Illustrator and Photoshop, or that’s oriented around web-based collaboration like Google Docs.

Incidentally, there’s a great unsung blog called Wireframes that’s worth adding to your feed reader.

What wireframing tools, methodologies and practices do you use?

It’s been said that the apps that break out at Austin’s South by Southwest festival are those that help festival-goers navigate and orient themselves within the sprawl of parties, panel sessions and gigs.

The 2007 edition of SXSW was Twitter’s big moment, the tipping point for the now iconic service. The following year, many thought that SCHED*, a web-based event calendar and agenda builder, would be the breakout service of 2008 — the “new Twitter.”

Though such expectations were inflated by the media, SCHED* provided useful personalized schedules that have endured through two editions of the festival. The latest edition of the app now includes mobile support, iPhone compatibility, and the ability to integrate with iCal and Google Calendar.

As the organizer of a “proto-SXSW” here in the U.K. — LSx 2009, the second Leeds Web Festival — I figured this was a great opportunity to put SCHED* through its paces with the somewhat smaller schedule of events for LSx. Also, it’d be a useful trial run for a fuller deployment in 2010, when LSx will likely merge with the Live At Leeds music festival.

Here’s how things work:

1. Upon making an inquiry via the SCHED* web site, I was put in touch with the company’s business development people to collate our requirements and also to discuss which plans and pricing would be most appropriate for LSx. At this stage, SCHED* simply needs to understand the demographics, audience size and dates. The company offers Basic, Premium and Premium Plus plans, ranging from $399 to $850, depending on features rather than usage. The company was generous enough to let us experiment with the app using a nonprofit discounted plan.
2. Once the invoice is settled, you need to provide a logo, official conference/festival name, URL of the official site, your chosen SCHED* subdomain (http://lsx.sched.org), event location and the beginning and end dates.
3. Once your new site is live, it’s administered and updated in batches using a SCHED*-supplied offline Excel spreadsheet or online Google Spreadsheet. It initially seems an odd choice to utilize a spreadsheet interface to administer your SCHED* site, but the complexity of venues, events and categories would likely not work well at all in a web-based HTML form.

It’s unfair to compare SCHED* to Twitter as a SxSW breakout service — Twitter is a consumer app, whereas SCHED is really intended for festival and conference organizers. However, I found SCHED* to be competitively priced — compared with Crowdvine and Expectnation — and  it certainly adds value to the audience of a conference or festival. What’s perhaps even more valuable for organizers is the level of direct support and account handling that the company provides, something that’s lacking in most of the self-service web services around today. Well done for great service, SCHED*.

If you are involved in organizing meetups, BarCamps, work events and other gatherings, SCHED*’s a powerful tool for organizers and attendees alike.

What tool do you use for scheduling your events?