#cowerks

On October 17th, 2014, I had the honor to speak with Dr. Bob Lucky from Bell Labs and Dr. Donald Sebastian of NJIT's NJ Innovation Institute on the past, present, and future of technology and entrepreneurship in Monmouth County, NJ for the MODC at Gibbs Hall at Fort Monmouth.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 20th, 2014 Media Contact: team [at] cowerking.com

ASBURY PARK, NJ: Cowerks, Asbury Park’s own technology and coworking space rents private offices, communal desk space, as well as conference rooms to start ups, freelancers, and other entrepreneurs looking to build upon their resources, and grow in their industry through interacting and collaboration with like minded creatives.

On Saturday April 26th, Cowerks will host the following workshops:

Crowdfunding 101: How to Run a Successful Campaign

John Vaskis, Lead Engineer for Vertical Gaming Lead at Indiegogo will provide an overview of key concepts of crowdfunding. Participants will leave with the tools and tips they need to implement or improve their ability to raise capital and market their projects.

Introduction To Web Design: HTML 101

Taught by Rupa DasGupta, an artist, graphic designer and front end developer on staff for Monmouth University, this class will take you through the very basics of HTML & CSS. Students will build their very own website and leave with a solid foundation for further growth.

Building Killer Websites with Drupal (Intro to Site Building)

This intro course is for anyone who wants to start making websites with Drupal including web designers, web developers,  marketing professionals, and business owners. Instructor Sean Walsh of the Crowd Communications Group, will provide an introduction to Drupal 7, a discussion of best practices, and a walkthrough of how to build, manage, and enhance a site. The goal of this workshop is to provide participants with the basic tools and tips they need to build a Drupal 7 website.

Cowerks University To Host ‘Evolution of a Local Brand’ with Rook Coffee Co-Founder Holly Migliaccio

New Jersey Based Coffee Business Quickly Becoming a Shore Institution

ASBURY PARK, NJ: On Wednesday, June 26 Cowerks University will host Holly Migliaccio, co-founder and owner of New Jersey-based Rook Coffee Roasters. Rook Coffee is a visionary coffee company with four coffee bars in Monmouth County, NJ, a roastery and distribution center, a cold brew bottling business and an online retail business. Holly will be talking about how she evolved the Rook brand into what is now becoming a shore institution, and the challenges associated with growth.

Holly Migliaccio was born and raised in Monmouth County. After spending several years experiencing the city life between New York and San Francisco, she returned to her Jersey roots and settled back in Monmouth County in 2008.

Holly spent the first part of her career working the fast-paced world of the Internet for top companies such as Yahoo! and TheLadders.com. Holding various management positions over seven years in sales, marketing, operations and training, she built a well-rounded set of business skills that would eventually prepare her for her own entrepreneurial venture.

In 2008, Holly took a leap of faith and resigned from her corporate career to spend three months traveling throughout Southeast Asia with only a backpack. Upon returning to the states, Holly and longtime childhood friend, Shawn Kingsley, decided to open a business based on a shared passion...coffee.

“I’ve always been impressed how they run their brick and mortar operation very much like a startup. I’m excited to hear Holly speak at Cowerks and learn a bit about their past and where they're going as a company,” commented Bret Morgan, co-founder of Cowerks and organizer of Cowerks University. "Cowerks University’s goal is to provide a community resource for small business, entrepreneurs and technology enthusiasts to learn, network, and grow their companies,” said Morgan.

The event will begin at 7:30 p.m. and is free to attend. There is limited seating. For more information and to RSVP please go here. Cowerks is located at 619 Lake Ave., 3rd Floor, Asbury Park, NJ.

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Upcoming Events at Cowerks:

6/18/13

Cowerks University w/ SorinRandLLP: "Financing"

7PM at Cowerks 619 Lake Ave Third Floor

http://www.meetup.com/Jersey-Shore-Tech/events/107961902/

Come learn from Dave Sorin, founding partner at SorinRand LLP about how to raise capital and financing for your small business or start-up

6/14/13

Summer Tech & Entrepreneur Social at Jersey Shore

6:30PM at the Berkeley Bar

http://www.meetup.com/Jersey-Shore-Tech/events/114685722/ - $8

We spend a lot of time hearing demo's, speakers and learning.  Let's mix it up - this meetup is to welcome summer, have a drink, and meet some new people.   Bring biz cards and a smile.

Come hangout down the shore at Asbury Park's Dauphin Grill at the Berkeley Hotel.  Casual attire welcome.  Drink specials include $3 selected craft beers, $5 Sobieski Vodka drinks.

Free working for the day of the event Asbury's Park's coworking space, Cowerks, with your ticket.

6/21/13

Jersey Shore Tech Meetup  #33 With Greg Besner, CFO of Second Market

7PM at Cowerks 619 Lake Ave Third Floor FREE

http://www.meetup.com/Jersey-Shore-Tech/events/118053512/

Greg has been the Founder and CEO of two successful companies in addition to serving as President, COO and CFO for several successful venture-backed companies.  He is also an Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship at New York University teaching a class called “Ready, Fire, Aim”.

6/22/13

Hacking Asbury

7PM at Cowerks 619 Lake Ave Third Floor

More info/tickets at http://hackingasbury.com $25

TLDR; Help us continue to build great resources for entrepreneurs & tech enthusiasts here in Asbury Park & the Jersey Shore by visiting http://igg.me/cowerks and making a contribution.

A Hacker’s Reflections on Coworking, Technology, & Entrepreneurship in Asbury Park and the Jersey Shore.

The Early Days (2008 - 2010)

It’s been two and a half years since Danny Croak and I started Cowerks and we're just weeks away from the big move to our new offices. It’s been a huge undertaking, starting when we signed the lease on 619 Lake Avenue last June. We are on the eve of opening the new location and I want to reflect a bit on the budding technology and entrepreneurial eco-system that has sprung up in and around Asbury Park and the Jersey Shore.

The origins of Cowerks started way back in 2008 when my father shared with me an article on coworking as a “new” kind of office paradigm and suggested that we open up a space in Asbury Park. At the time Danny Croak and I were running BandsOnABudget.com out of a small 400 sq/ft office space we happened to share with another company. I saw the value in a community of “like minded” people but we were still in a lease and not quite ready to make the leap. Nonetheless, the seed was planted.

Fast forward to the winter of 2010. Our lease was expiring in a few months and we had outgrown our space at 626 Mattison Avenue. We were looking to upsize but were a little hesitant to take on too much space too quickly. It was around this time I dusted off a google doc with some notes I had put together for starting a coworking space here at the Jersey Shore. I shared the ideas with Danny and in our typical fashion, over a few beers it snowballed from a few key points to a solid business model with financials and a plan.

The hunt was on - over the next few months we checked out every available piece of commercial real estate in downtown Asbury Park, but whenever we ran the financials on a particular location, it became clear that we didn’t have a viable business model in that particular space.

After a few months of frustration the entire idea of coworking at the Jersey Shore was almost mothballed until the tenant in the space next to our existing office tipped us off that he was vacating exactly at the time we were planning a move. This space, located at 630 Mattison Ave, was about double the size of our existing office and when we ran the numbers, we soon realized that we had a viable business model for Cowerks.

We launched in June of 2010 to very little fanfare and our ideas of having a vibrant coworking community seemed more like pipe dreams. BandsOnABudget.com was profitable enough to carry the operational costs but we knew that we needed to do something to attract talent to the space.

The idea of the Jersey Shore Web Developers meetup started as a lead generator for Cowerks - we figured that if we could build a community to hang out in the space we’d be able to attract a few talented individuals to work here. The first Jersey Shore Web Developers meetup was held in August 2010 with about ten attendees. One of those individuals happened to be Kevin Fricovsky, a designer and developer who coincidentally was trying to run a creative meetup of his own in Red Bank. Kevin would soon come on board as a co-organizer of Jersey Shore Web Developers as well as become co-founder for Asbury Agile.

The Rise of Jersey Shore Tech

The first six months of Jersey Shore Web Developers was slow - the busy months had 15 people and the slower, 2 or 3. In true start-up fashion, we were too stubborn to quit so we plowed through that first winter and our numbers started growing by the spring of 2011. It was at this point that Chris Ackermann approached Kevin and myself about a tech meetup he had recently started and suggested a possible collaboration. We ended up bringing Chris on as a co-organizer as well and merged the two groups under the umbrella of the Jersey Shore Tech Meetup.

Since the merger, our meetup has grown into a vibrant community of 500 members, making it one of the larger tech meet ups in the state of New Jersey. Each month's event is attended by close to fifty entrepreneurs and technology enthusiasts from all over Monmouth and Ocean counties and most months boast a waiting list.

We've also been able to spawn off satellite workshops & events such as Cowerks University, the Jersey Shore Entrepreneurs & Investors meetup, a 5 week entrepreneurs bootcamp, hack nights, monthly art shows with live music, as well as Asbury Agile, NJ's first and only Web Developers conference. We also host the NJ Wordpress, Jersey Shore Facebook Developers, & NJ Hadoop Meetups.

We were also fortunate enough, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, to raise over $100,000 for the Red Cross in just seven days via our Cowerks Restore the Shore campaign by turning our space into a fulfillment center that sent out over 4000 packages over 2 weekends.

Tech and Entrepreneurship is alive and well here in Asbury Park!

...and it's about to get a lot bigger.

Over the past 9 months we've built what we feel is going to be a community hub for tech and entrepreneurship here at the Jersey Shore.

Our new space boasts four private offices, a conference room, common space to accommodate about a dozen freelancers, contractors, and other "one-(wo)man" shows. Did I mention that there's a huge walk out balcony overlooking Lake Wesley and Ocean Grove?

Aside from the amenities, we plan to expand upon the events we've been hosting. We plan to partner with additional service providers, as we've been doing with startup law firm SorinRand and IncubateNYC, to bring quality, "real world" advice through workshops, bootcamps, and breakout sessions.

Further down the pipeline we plan to partner with local high schools to offer students access to technology classes as well as mentorship from experienced entrepreneurs. I sincerely feel that what we've been building is going to help pave the way for the next generation of entrepreneurs right here in our backyard.

We Must All Hang Together, or Assuredly We Shall All Hang Separately -Ben Franklin

What we are building is bigger than any one individual or business and that is evident in the community that has grown over these past 2 1/2 years. With that being said, it's time for you, as a valuable member of this community, to step up and get involved.

We've decided to launch a crowd funding campaign on Indiegogo to help fund our vision at http://igg.me/cowerks. We've created levels of participation starting as low as $20 and made sure you'll get some cool schwag to show off for your contribution.

We've tried to keep all of our events either low, or in most cases, no-cost and feel that the value to the community has been immense. You no longer have to travel to NYC or attend a conference costing hundreds, or even thousands of dollars, to have access to the insight and experiences of some of the industries best and brightest. No more sitting on a train for 2 hours just to network for 45 minutes with other entrepreneurs.

As we continue to expand our content offerings we have every intention of keeping things either low or no cost in the interest of building a vibrant network and resource for the community.

If you can share in this vision I hope you'd consider contributing and help fuel the fire of entrepreneurship here in our backyard.

Thank you for your support,

Bret Morgan http://igg.me/cowerks bret [at] cowerking [dot] com

Gregory Edgerton of Humble Humans, Danny Croak, and myself we're sitting around Cowerks yesterday afternoon working on new designs for the next iteration of BandsOnABudget.com. Deviating on a tangent, we started discussing the new Cowerks office space, currently nearing it's completion.

We're at the point where we needed to decide what type of signage the new building will have and, more importantly, do we use this as an opportunity to refresh the now 2 1/2 year old Cowerks logo. 

I was a big fan of Joe Lifrieri at HugsForMonsters's original design for the Cowerks logo but two of our biggest challenges over the past few years has been:

1) Having a lack of a proper stacked version of the logo.

2) The number of colors make it difficult to keep down costs on shirts and other "screen printed" items.

Moving forward with a new design, I was concerned with maintaining some sort of brand consistency and didn't want to scrap the original logo in it's entirety. For that reason we opted to stick with the original font, "League Gothic", as well as the sprocket.

We paired back on the number of colors for the new iteration but in a way that allows us a certain degree of flexibility for what that color can actually be. We initially opted for a derivative of the red in the original Cowerks logo but it presents itself well in black as well as other colors of the spectrum.

Gregory, steered the direction towards using a "stacked" logo vs. a "rectangular" one, not only for readability, but because they're a bit more versatile when using then for promotion on print materials. They also hold their own a bit more along side others, i.e. next to sponsor logos.

I think Humble Humans did a wonderful job with our direction and, all in all, Sunday at Cowerks turned out to be quite a productive day, albeit for different reasons than we initially were hoping for. I think the new logo maintains enough of the old to keep things familiar, but is clean, concise, and fresh to take us into the next few years.

Look for this new logo over the next few weeks as we make the switch over.

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