Being based in LKIC, a London based business incubator, bestows on us an array of benefits including cheap rent, 100Mbit internet, highly scalable office space and the opportunity to collaborate with academics.
One of the main attractions to us before we started up here was that we would be sharing the building with 35 other fledgling technology startups. We loved the idea of exploring potential collaboration, learning from others mistakes and successes and having a shoulder to cry on when the chips were down. However, this is the one area where we were slightly disappointed. The problem is there is no one central point of meeting, no water cooler. Being experts at the rapid development of web apps, especially social web apps, we set to work and created CoSocial.
CoSocial is a light weight social network designed for incubators, shared workspaces and co-working spaces. It enables people and organisations to create a presence in an organic and effortless way. The only thing people can do once they have signed up is write and post notes. Herein lies its strength. Notes can used to organise events, buy and sell goods or services, advertise vacancies, ask a question or just vent a frustration. In the same way the constraints of a 140 character tweet leads to innovative uses, we hope the constraints of a title and body field will lead to increased communication.
The ultimate aim of CoSocial is that it will provide a number of benefits to small businesses:
- It will make small businesses more enjoyable places to work by encouraging social events with employees of other businesses (it can be hard to muster the enthusiasm to go for after work drinks with the same 2 or 3 people you?ve been working with for the last 10 hours).
- It will provide a central location for businesses to organise all kinds of events from social drinks to ?brown bag seminars?.
- It will foster collaboration by providing a quick and easy way for people and organisations to broadcast their thoughts and projects and then for individuals to communicate with each other.
The reality with any social web app in development today is that it must be ?light weight?. People only have the time and concentration to engage with one, or at most, two social networks. Almost without exception these are likely to be Facebook and Twitter. So a ?light weight? social network is one which requires minimal commitment and input whilst still being useful.
To achieve this we have used the minimal number of fields and content types possible and rely on integration with company blogs and individual?s Twitter feeds to provide a real time stream of thoughts, projects and activities.
CoSocial is currently in private beta within LKIC and will be shortly roled out a number of other London based incubators. We plan to provide CoSocial as hosted solution from late Q4 2010 onwards. If you are interested in finding out more or using CoSocial please get in touch.