We were very excited last year when coworking was listed as a primary or secondary work location for 1.7% of the respondents of our annual independent worker survey. To the best of our knowledge, this was the first time coworking blipped on a national, statistically significant survey of any kind. ...

The New York Times article One Big Workbench covers the growth of hackerspaces, which are coworking facilities for people who like to hack or make things.  Think of them as shared workshops instead of shared offices.  Like coworking facilities, hackerspaces (also called makerspaces) generally use a gym-like membership model with  with monthly fees ...

Axle Contemporary is an art gallery on wheels.  Housed in the back of a custom retrofitted 1970 aluminum stepvan, Axle cruises around Santa Fe, New Mexico showing and selling art at strip malls and other locales not known for artistic appreciation. As reported in a New York Times article on Axle, it's ...

Well known tech journalist and analyst Tom Foremski's Futurists ... and the 'End of Work' looks at the employment disruption being caused by digital technologies. He argues that technology is destroying more jobs that it's creating, leading to a potential future where there simply isn't enough work to go around.  Key ...

The growth of the independent workforce (freelancers, temps, self-employed, etc.) has also led to a growing ecosystem of companies supporting independent workers and the firms that hire them. This ecosystem includes a wide range of firm types, including: Talent marketplaces: firms like Elance, Odesk and Freelancer.com that connect independent workers ...

In case you haven't heard, Detroit's a mess. It has acres of empty buildings, frightening crime rates, crushing public debt and sky high unemployment. Despite these problems, there's been a flurry articles on entrepreneurs partnering with foundations and grassroots organizations to rebuild the once great city.   These include: How ...

This is a bit more geeky than we like to get here at Smallbizlabs, but the rise of big data is resulting in growing numbers of people being exposed to statistical data and jargon. A spurious correlation is a statistical term that describes a relationship between two variables that seem to ...

Wayward Sons: The Emerging Gender Gap in Labor Markets and Education is a fascinating study by noted MIT economist economist David Autor and MIT PhD student Melanie Wasserman.  They suggest that an emerging economic gender gap favoring women is developing. This gap is being driven by the underperformance of boys ...