Hope the year is going well for you so far! As for Conjunctured, we’ve come a long way since our opening in 2008. And we owe it all to the supportive tech, entrepreneur, and social media community here in Austin. That, and we’ve worked pretty dang hard to keep things chugging along! Thanks to everyone for not only believing in coworking, but also believing in us too!

In an effort to provide a bit of a recap over the back half of 2009, here’s the lowdown of some recent Conjunctured happenings.

• Reached maximum capacity in mid September (25 full time members) and have had a waiting list in place for newly interested members! This was a great milestone for us and was a big realization that Austin truly embraces coworking! You can see a list of our current members, lifetime members, and alumni online. Also, if you’re interested in coming in for just the day, just let us know, as we always have room for day visitors. (First day of coworking is always on the house!)
• Celebrated our 1year anniversary party in true style, Sept 2009. (photobooth and all!) Checkout the photos
• Launched “Conjunctured Specialists,” a seal of approval for certain experts in their field. A number of people regularly emailed us asking for connects to web designers, programmers, and creatives in our community of members. Now we have an official place to direct them to. So, if you or someone you know needs some freelance work done, please consider choosing a Specialist we recommend.
• Traded in our loving coffee robot, Rosie, and replaced her with French presses, a commercial quality espresso machine, and a variety of weekly freshly roasted coffee beans from local roaster, Casa Brasil, thus making many of us at Conjunctured higher on the coffee snob spectrum than ever before!
• Proud to be the official home of five different community organization meetings:
  • Cocoa Coder
  • Wordpress Meetup
  • Bootstrap Web Subgroup:
  • Bootstrap Community Subgroup
  • Google Wave Meetup, Austin
• Hosted two successful Conjunctured Poker Nights. Thanks to Jason Stoddard for helping lead this initiative!
• Awarded Austin Chronicle “Best of” award. (”Best High Tech Co op“). This was at the end of 2008, but still something cool to mention!
• Received 8 five star reviews on our Conjunctured Yelp profile! If you would like to review us too, please do!
• Assisted in pro-bono Austin AIDSWalk social media consulting.

That’s a few notable things from the recent past. We’ve got some BIG ideas for the near future, but you’ll have to stay tuned to see what’s next! Hint: Please let us know where you think Conjunctured 2.0 should be located ;)

Stay on top of upcoming Conjunctured happenings by following us on Twitter and becoming our fan on Facebook.

In the meantime, if you haven’t dropped by Conjunctured lately, please do! We’ve changed the artwork on the walls, rearranged furniture a bit, have more people than ever constantly buzzing around, the coffee is always amazingly fresh, and there’s always a positive and productive energy. That, plus: you’re pretty much always guaranteed to learn something new and not only meet someone new, but someone as driven and passionate about what they do as you are! How many places can promise that?

Speaking of passionate people, we asked some of the Conjunctured members to give a quick 2009 recap on their companies and what they have in store for 2010. Here’s what a few of them had to say:

Stefani Zellmer, Swizzle:
Swizzle, the startup advertising agency founded by Stefani Zellmer along with her husband Chris Davis, is looking forward to continuing their “Switcheroo” campaign for Velocity Credit Union with a microsite that strives to turn one of their billboard headlines, “Bank Schmank,” into everyday vernacular. See this campaign and others on their website at Swizzleme.com.

Dusty Reagan, Featured Users & FriendorFollow:
In 2009, Dusty Reagan’s Twitter application development company Floating Head Studios, released Featured Users an ad network that allows Twitter users to sponsor their favorite Twitter applications in order to gain exposure for their personal and professional Twitter accounts. Floating Head Studios also upgraded key back-end features to their flagship product Friend Or Follow, which has seen a 16x increase in Web traffic January 2009.

In 2010 Dusty will be celebrating the release of his first published book, “Twitter Application Development For Dummies.” Available for pre-order at Amazon here: http://bit.ly/61S0W2. Along with the book’s launch, Floating Head Studios will be releasing the book’s accompanying example Twitter app, Twooshes. Also in time for the book launch and SXSWi 2010 will be the newest version of Friend Or Follow, which includes a paid pro version.

Carson Coots, Myles, LLC
We are looking forward to an exciting year. We ended 2009 with the launch of the new Barton Place condominium website, BartonPlaceAustin.com, and have begun working on 3 new local sites set to launch in mid February.  Our Houston-area news site, OnlyKaty.com, has experienced phenomenal traffic growth during the last six months, and continues to prove the power of consistent blogging on your traffic.  In 2010, Myles LLC is looking for Austin businesses interested in more than just pretty design.  We want businesses interested in integrating compelling stories into their online (and offline) campaigns.  Businesses that understand that the media is not the message, and consistency is key.  If you match, call Carson Coots at 832-755-1312.

Matthew Arnold & Cheyenne Martin, Aldea Artisans:
Aldea works with independent Guatemalan weavers, connecting them to conscious consumers through the woven goods they make.  By combining contemporary fashion with traditional Mayan weaving techniques, we’ve been able to gain new key customers this year.

This year we’ve proudly been selling our scarves through Whole Foods Market and specialty boutiques around the country.  We’ve also started working with university bookstores around the country, creating custom scarves to fit individual colleges.  We’ve struck recent success here in our hometown of Austin as we’ve built a key relationship with the University of Texas.  Our 2010 focus will be on the university market.  Starting in January, we’ll be preparing for the Campus Market Expo tradeshow to be held this March in Orlando.  Our hope is that we’ll leave Orlando with new clients, some national PR and suntans.

Cesar Torres
Cesar spent lots of 2009 blogging on his blog and tweeting. He plans to do more of this in 2010 and hopes to finally put a down payment on a jetpack. This is the future, after all.

Kevin Scott
Kevin Scott is a web developer originally hailing from Connecticut via NYC. He worked at Edulence, a small web development shop, for most of 2009 while freelancing on the side. In December he moved to Austin to pursue music and work as a full-time freelancer. He works primarily with the LAMP stack and Flash, and is looking to learn Python and Rails in 2010. He also plays guitar, bass, and piano. In 2008 he made a music video which can be found here: http://vimeo.com/2105645

Kyle Bunch, SEOintelligence:
SEOintelligence has had a busy and exciting 2009, and we’re about to share the juiciest fruits we’re harvesting from the year’s labors.  SEOintelligence will formally launch version 2.0 of our search toolset in January 2010.  This new version represents a fundamental step forward from all of the earlier eleases, bringing better management of core search related-data (keywords and competitors) and a host of new tools to monitor your sites across not only Google, Bing, and Yahoo, but rankings engines like Compete, Alexa and Technorati as well.

We look forward to sharing SEOintelligence 2.0 with all of you early in the New Year, and wish everyone a wonderful holiday season and prosperous 2010.

Brad Istre, Sidedoor Studio:
Renovatix signed on with Sidedoor Studio in April of 2009 to completely overhaul their branding on the web. Their business has been given a fresh new look on both the web and with their sales and marketing materials. The team at Renovatix Solutions are experts in their field; our goal was to position them visually in their market so they can focus on what they do best.

In May of 2009, Sidedoor Studio teamed up with Steve and Lee Nagel to create a website highlighting the Swing Fore! Yellow Charity Golf Classic at Gleneagles Country Club in Plano, Texas. The charity benefits the Lance Armstrong Foundation. Sidedoor was honored to donate and design the site for such a wonderful cause.

Continuing their efforts for 2010 Sidedoor Studio is currently rebranding the law firm of Van Wey Law who was recently featured on the Dan Rather Reports Tonight. Their new site will be launching mid January.

Nik Daftary, Turn2Live:
At turn2live.com, we’ve been busy building out the back-end for the nationwide release of version 3.0.  We’re stoked about the incredible difference you’ll see when we go live with the new site. In fact, in Spring of 2010  we’ll help you find ALL the live-event that match your mood. Feeling Quirky + Energetic? Texas Rollerderby. Sunny + Mellow? Ray LaMontagne at the Hollywood Bowl.  Whether it’s a romantic date night you seek or a day packed with energy and intensity, Turn2Live will help you navigate through and package together the most relevant dining, live-music, sports, theatre and movie options available to you right now.

Jon Ray, CM4
2009 was an interesting year for me, as I made an attempt to shed freelance clients in lieu of creating my own infrastructure and product. For the majority of 2009, I worked with a team of engineers in Southern California and Shenzhen, China developing a soft case line of products for the Nintendo Wii, DS, DSi and Sony PSPgo and am still in development on a line of premium controllers for the Wii, Playstation 3 and XBOX360. These products are being branded under the premium label, CM4, Inc. The entire process has been really interesting and an amazing learning experience, taking an idea sketched on paper 10 months ago to a physical product on store shelves, today. I’m excited to watch this project grow in 2010 and hope to utilize much of the talent oozing from the Conjunctured walls. Someone should probably take a sponge to that. ;)

Shelly Leonard, SparkNight:
Spontaneous date planning service launches in Austin—
A fun, spontaneous evening with your sweetie is just a phone call away thanks to a new Austin business. If you’re too busy to plan a night out, or have simply run out of date ideas, SparkNight is your answer. They’ll create an entire evening from start to finish - dinner reservations, event tickets and more - so you can sit back and enjoy a romantic night with your partner. The company was launched in Des Moines, Iowa as part of Startup Weekend 2009. They’ve recently moved to Austin and their first happy couple enjoyed a date just a few weeks ago. For more information, or to surprise your special someone with a romantic evening out, contact Shelly at shelly@sparknight.com or (515) 834-0167.

Dave Winter & David Walker, SEO Launchpad:
SEO Launchpad is run by a partnership of Daves. Dave Winter and David Walker to be exact. We both launched SEO Launchpad after meeting at Conjunctured. Together, we have over 8 years of Search Engine Optimization & Google Adwords experience. With a number of independent projects under our belt, we’ve now combined forces to have a bigger impact. The forces aligned as we recently completed our first collaborative SEO buildout for a private practice Austin, TX psychologist–successfully generating him over 100 Google Page One rankings in only one month. Coming off this successful project, we’re looking forward to aggressive growth within the local community. We are introducing for 2010 free 30 minute consultations for any new potential client—we’ll give special attention to anyone you recommend. For more information, visit http://SEOlaunchpad.net or email dave@seolaunchpad.net

Abdon Nacif & David Walker, 302designs:
302designs, an earth-friendly & poetic apparel design company, experienced an exciting year of growth! We expanded our organic t-shirt product selection to include eco-friendly hoodies as well as supersoft organic cotton longsleeves and v-neck shirts for men and women. We’ve grown our online business steadily as well as our outreach to boutiques across the nation. In October, we launched a new line of business, custom apparel printing for local businesses and organizations, with a radio campaign on Austin’s popular KGSR radio station. (Was great to have Conjunctured members, Dave Winter and Carson Coots, volunteer their voice talent for the radio spot!) 2010 will be a year of extending our distribution through hiring a national sales force of reps.

Thomas Umstattd, Umstattd Media
One of my favorite accomplishments of 2009 was learning to make Espresso at Conjunctured from Dave Walker. In 2010 I hope we get a freezer so I can make iced americanos.

Cheers to an amazing 2010!

much love,
the Conjunctured crew

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512.524.4296 (p)
howdy@conjunctured.com
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Conjunctured : A Coworking Company
http://conjunctured.com
http://twitter.com/conjunctured

At Conjunctured, we’ve taken every effort we can to minimize the impact we have. Capital Metro buses 4/320 stop ten feet from our front door and the Saltillo Plaza MetroRail station will be three blocks away when it’s completed in October and the trains go live in March. We recycle (we’re one of two commercial accounts for the city’s new single stream recycling program); our house is outfitted with nothing but CFLs; we have a shower and are having a rack installed for bike commuters.

We love the Austin biking community so much, fellow coworker Michelle Greer has helped us put together “Bike To Coworking Day,” courtesy of Sun & Ski Sports. It’s a pretty simple concept: wear green or ride your bike (if you’re ambitious, do both!) and we’ll waive our $25 drop-in rate. Check out our ridiculous promo video below, complete with body paint, Hell’s Angels and goat sacrifices. Hope to see you October 23rd!

It’s been two months since our grand opening party and about six months since we began bringing together the necessary pieces to create a central space for the community to come together. We love that we can provide a place for people to meet, work alone together or work together on projects founded within the space.

So far, we’re up to 20 members and we’ve had a blast getting to know these guys and gals the past couple of months. We’ve got developers, designers, artists, writers, real estate folks, consultants and more; meet these incredible people here: http://conjunctured.com/members/

From our early planning meetings at Jelly, our goal for the the space was to make it as accessible as possible to as many people as possible. Since our opening, we’ve learned that our initial estimates on capacity and usage were too conservative. It turns out we can support a larger community than we originally anticipated.

We’re announcing today that we are removing our tiered pricing and replacing it with one, 24/7 membership at $250 a month. That means no more keeping track of credits or wondering if coworking for one hour will cost you a full day. Flattening our pricing puts us one step closer to making Conjunctured a place where everyone can come and work.

By giving members unlimited access, we can make our resources and real estate go further than we projected. However, since the house is only so big, new memberships come on a first come first serve basis. Current members have first dibs at the new rate (if you’re already a Conjunctured member at the $325 or $425 level, we’ll be crediting your account based on the new setup; if you’re a Conjunctured member at $175 level, you’ll be credited with one full month of full-time 24/7 access). Daily rates will be given an overhaul soon, but currently remain unchanged.

We’re really excited to be at this point of growth so early since we projected that max capacity would come later on down the line. We have only but the Austin community to thank for this–we could not have done anything without your support, words of advice and encouragement and we’re super grateful. Thank you.

If you have questions, give us a shout via email or Twitter. For more info or to sign up, visit our updated rates page here: http://conjunctured.com/rates/

Again, many thanks for all your support. We love y’all
-Cesar, David, Dusty & John

PS: Last Friday, Don Teague, an NBC Nightly News correspondent, was around town with us filming a segment on coworking and the Austin scene. Make sure to watch the blog or Twitter (@conjunctured) to see the video when it’s released.

Last Tuesday Mike Chapman (@mikechapman) gave a great presentation for Austin Bootstrap Web at Conjunctured on the ins and outs of Twitter for both personal use and for use in business. Around 20 or so bootstrappers made the event.

For pics and an audio recap of Mike’s presentation check out the media below, provided by Austin Bootstrap Web’s fearless leader, Jon Lebkowsky (@jonl).

Mike Chapman on Twitter:

1. Taking a glance at how other coworkers have setup their labels differently in Gmail or organized their bookmarks and comparing it to my own methods.
2. John Metcalf excitedly asking me what Firefox addon I have that shows a site’s Google PageRank + Alexa rating and me excitedly sharing it with him.
3. Watching Cesar Torres design a client’s business cards in Adobe Illustrator and me watching his fingers go crazy with keyboard shortcuts that I never use.
4. Seeing that Dusty Reagan, as tech-savvy as he is, still keeps his to-do list in his handy little Moleskine. And also, that I got to excitedly share with my him how I manage my own to-do lists with Todoist.
5. Seeing live demos of useful web apps (and iPhone Apps too for that matter) that I had never seen in action. In this case, Microsoft Office Live, thanks to Robert Starek. Most of these demos don’t result in me installing the programs, but it’s just a lot more efficient to get a demo by an avid & passionate user, rather than seeing a tutorial online.
6. Watching how Cullen Wilson handles client proposals so quickly and easily—a task that I normally dread and find time consuming. Maybe some of that will rub off on me!
7. Realizing that productive work really can happen while lying down on a couch for hours at a time. (Scott Bellware prefers the ‘lounge room’ to the tables and chairs of the ‘coworking room’ any day of the week.)

Coworking is a constant reminder to me that being consistently exposed to difference is a powerful thing. We all have our unique way of doing things, but if we learn from others as well as share with others our methods we all become more successful in our own rights. It’s simply impossible to have the time to discover everything on our own, so it seems coworking provides an innovative means to in-person crowdsourcing.

-David

If you’ve been keeping up with tweets and RSS, you’ll know that last Thursday I was at the first-ever JellyinDenton.

On Saturday, as a part of what I’m now deeming my “Texas Two-Step,” I drove down from the DFW area through Austin, on to San Antonio to attend their first ever BarCamp San Antonio. There were talks on podcasting, branding, Ruby on Rails, email marketing, BIL & TED and more (yours truly led a discussion on how to build communities using online and real-world tools).

Early in the day, our pal, Joseph Lopez (from Austin/Austin 3.0), instigated a great panel about how to bring about a creative space in San Antonio—whether that meant a physical space like Conjunctured or Bryan, TX’s Creative Space or how to push the city to become more of a creative class city—a “space” where creative types of all industries want to flock. The exchanges I observed in the discussion were nothing short of amazing; it was really cool witnessing a community mobilizing first-hand.

Throughout the day, rumblings of JellyinSanAntonio and a formalized coworking space occurred between me and members of the San Antonio community, most likely as a result of Joey’s discussion. While San Antonio is setting a goal for having a space by 2009, one awesome announcement of the day ensures that they’re well on their way. Connie Reece, Austin (and the world’s) social media maven was in attendance to announce the creation of Social Media Club San Antonio. With the people who’ve stepped up to take the reins on this initiative, San Antonio is going to no doubt have a great SMC presence. Congrats!

It was great to get a sense for what is happening around this great (giant) state this weekend, specifically in the respective tech sectors. Things are happening around here, y’all. Stay tuned for some Texas-sized awesomeness. :)

–C

This past Thursday (Sept. 4th), I spent the day in Denton, TX, about an hour north of the mid-point between Fort Worth and Dallas. I was there helping the community break in the idea of coworking through the town’s first ever JellyinDenton.

It’s great to see the Jelly concept spread around since we’re huge proponents of Jelly around Conjunctured; without Jelly, Dusty (who started JellyinAustin), David, John and I might not have come together.

The event was a huge success from what I observed. Stormy Shippy (yes, that is his real name) did a great job as host for the Jelly meetup and for showing us around town after the laptops were closed, post-Jelly (Jam?).

The absolute best part of the trip for me was reading the local paper in the morning and seeing the front page article, above the fold, recapping the event; this shows that the city is very supportive and totally “gets it.”

We wish nothing but the best of luck to Stormy and his friends up north. It’s great to see a group take the coworking concept and totally run with it. I see a really successful future for this community and am really excited for them. :)

–C

Conjunctured is sponsoring the Austin Tech Happy Hour coming up September 11 at The Marq, located at 5th and Congress.

The event is scheduled from 6:00-8:00PM that night and will include an appearance by Sarah Lacy, who has been on a tour promoting her new book “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good — The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0” (the last time she was in Austin was during her discussion with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg at SXSW).

Our good friends from SeedStage Studios will be filming the event for the pilot of their show on SeedStage.tv.

Come on out and hang out with us (if you’re not too tired from the Amazon Web Services Start-Up Tour stop earlier that day). Can’t wait to see y’all!

When: Thursday, September 11th, 6:00-8:00PM
Where: The Marq (21+), 5th and Congress
Tickets: EventBrite, $7.50, $10 at the door

If you’re not familiar with Jelly, it’s an every-so-often casual coworking session. Anyone is welcome to come, bring your laptop, art supplies, or whatever, and work alongside other creative, fun people, for free!

We streamed live via Stickam. John and some of his friends at Radar.net even joined in on the virtual coworking session.

If you missed this months Jelly at Conjunctured. Watch our Google Calendar for our next free coworking event!

It seems like so long ago, but I just wanted to say how much fun we had at Mashable’s SummerMash Austin last week. It was great to hang with Pete Cashmore and Karen Hartline, Yoono, MySites and Houston’s own Erica O’Grady; we’re glad we got to show them that Austin doesn’t just party hard during SXSW. The best of the best were out at Buffalo Billiards and it only served as a taste of things to come in March. You can read Karen’s review of the night on the Mashable site.

Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins, associate editor at Mashable, even dropped by from Dallas to check out what he calls the “burgeoning Web 2.0 community” in Austin. Make sure to read his post-event reflections on the Mashable site, as well as watch the included videos. He underlines what local groups like Conjunctured, Austin Startup and Austin 3.0 have been discussing for the past few months—there’s something happening with the Austin technology community. I know I usually find myself caught up in a bubble regarding the future of Austin tech, so it’s great to hear the same thing from people outside of our small, yet ever-evolving community.

Thanks so much to everyone who wore a Conjunctured sticker that night and special congratulations to the winners of the Part Time passes we raffled as part of our event sponsorship. See you soon guys!

Make sure to check out The Creative Space’s Michael Cummings‘ absolutely awesome photos from the event.

–C