Flaming Desks is a blog…

The dudes at Homstie are doing something a bit similar to us here at Flaming desks. Basically, it’s a site that let’s people with too much storage space offer it to people who need it. Anything from a cupboard to a garage!

This is their Homestiepage

Nice idea, eh? I didn’t think anyone had any spare storage space… but they clearly do and I should meet them with all my junk!

This was found via the awesome Pitch TV… Virgin Atlantic’s cool entrepreneur-finding thing. (Here’s Homstie’s pitch video.)

Pitch TV is a very cool programme which lets people submit video pitches for new business ideas - Virign then put the best ones on a channel on their in flight entertainment for high-flying execs to watch, and hopefully invest in.

Dunno if there’s been a success story yet - will have to do some more digging.

(I’m gonna apply on behalf of Flaming Desks too… if anything to learn more about how Pitch TV works…)

Oh hello. I’m from White October and I’m new here.

While Dave wasn’t looking I decided that the address finder while registering a desk wasn’t accurate enough, so a quick look on the Internets and I found a rather handy post. I would link to it but it seems that over the weekend the poor chaps blog has been hacked by some nice Chinese hacker. So I should just take all the credit myself….

It now should be as accurate as a postcode can be in the UK for most addresses, well the ones I have tried out anyway!

I have also made a few changes to the registration form as per Daves roadmap.

A chap I know has just launched this new site called Crashpadder. Still in extremely early days, they have produced a platform that allows people to offer space in their homes to travellers and ‘”likeminded people”! It is at the ‘provider’s’ descretion as to whether or not they charge for the place to sleep (I have found a few on there that offer for free) but the principle is very much the same as FD.

Whilst their biggest struggle is clearly going to be getting people to upload their properties etc. the advantage they have (in comparison to FD) is the incentive of being able to charge for your offering. As we have said time and time again, we really need to put emphasis on the networking benefits of offering a desk space free of charge.

One of the things I like about the site is the little attention to detail within a listing’s page … “Bedtime”! I think that this is a really nice little touch. …Not that everyone had filled that part out… but it’s a nice idea! Maybe we could allow desk lenders to state their preferred biscuits seeing as this has already began to establish itself as common Flaming Desks practice!

Anyway, it’s a nice site worth looking at. They’re using the map function quite nicely (not quite to our super-dooper-to-the-edge-with-fancy-overlay-style standard) and in terms of ease of use, I also like the speech bubble type things that pop up on the map not only pointing the locations of the houses available, but also displaying a thumbnail and small breakdown of the house ’stats’! Dave - I am sure you’ll tell me this is a common function that comes as standard, but I like it!

So, generally I think it is quite nice!

Comments anyone?!

Thanks to Steve for his comment and link to designer Maarten Baas.

He is a young Dutch furniture designer and has a great range of furntiture called “Smoke” which you can view on his website in the ‘Works’ section.
Long story short, he burns classic pieces of furniture, and just before the pieces become structurally unsound, he puts out the flames, and lacquers them up, making these amazing piece’s of furniture that look like they’ve just been pulled off a bonfire!

There’s a nice clip here from his Milan show earlier this year.

He’s had some nice little write ups and interviews on various different sites should anyone want to learn a little more!

ParkAtMyHouse.com - the service that lets you do exactly that.

Our mate Jay, who runs the very excellent auctions-for-experiences website, Sweemo.com just pointed me in the direction of a service called Park At My House.

I was gonna explain what it is, but between the picture above, and the name, I think that’s pretty obvious.

Note to team; can we all have a play with this to see what stuff they’re doing that’s good?  Cheers.

Airbeds... pah! It's all about the desks...

http://airbedandbreakfast.com/

Except it’s airbeds / sofas that they’re renting out and they’re charging.  That said the interface is great - very much in the direction that we’re heading with the mapping.

Techcrunch said they set up with $20,000 of seed capital… I think we can beat that with our $0.00 slush fund!

Coworking wiki map thing

I got an email from Robin over at the brand new and shiny “help with social media stuff” agency We Are Social, pointing me in the direction of the Coworking wiki.

As Robin pointed out, Flaming Desks operates in a very similar arena.  See, what the clever people who set up Coworking do is encourage and educate people to set up kind of collective cafe office spaces.  So, you go along, and post a notice saying you’re looking for coworkers in your area, then when you’ve got enough people you set up a flexible cafe-stylee office and everyone chips-in for the rent - plus, you make other desks available on hourly, daily, weekly, and/or monthly rates (up to the individual organiser).

There are some good examples.  And they’ve got a cool map thing which I don’t fully understand, but am sure I would if I was involved.

Flaming desks is different, in that we’re giving people the opportunity to list desks that they’re temporarily not using, and offer them to others for free, as a way of meeting good/nice people.

The internet is a big place where we can all live happily together, so I’ve bunged our URL on their wiki (they had a “Similar stuff” page), and linked to them in our sidebar for our visitors who may be looking for longer term desk-usage-action.