Companies are buying these portable soundproof rooms like crazy to fix the worst thing about their open floor offices

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Room is a new company that’s created private, semi-soundproof phone booths for noisy, crowded offices.

Already, the company has snagged high profile clients like NASA, Salesforce, and Nike.

Room says they’re on track to sell $10 million worth of product in their first year of business.

If you work in an open office, it’s likely that you’ve ducked into a hallway, a closet, or even the bathroom to get a few moments of quiet to make a phone call.

With the move to the open office and the collective banishment of cubicles, finding a quiet, private place can sometimes be close to impossible.

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Germany considers ban on after-hours office communications to workers

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A ban on office communications in the evening and during vacation time could even become law.

Some German companies such as BMW, Volkswagen and Deutsche Telekom, in the last few years,  have banned after-hours calls and emails to workers.  The point of the ban is to actually let people take time off in the evening, rather than effectively being half-working all the time.

 

 

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Public libraries are shoving books aside to create community-centered coworking spaces

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Dozens of reading rooms have been reincarnated as de facto coworking spaces.

By Anita Hamilton: Jonathan Marino has just arrived at his tech startup in D.C.’s Chinatown neighborhood at 9:45 on a Monday morning. Marino is a 30-year-old director of content for Map Story which aims to be the Wikipedia of interactive maps. He greets his two interns with a huge smile, joins them at an open table tucked inside a glass-walled pod, and fires up his laptop. Hunched over their computers, the group looks like any other early-stage startup, with one key distinction–their “office” is merely a meeting area inside Washington, D.C.’s main public library.

 

 

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Comfy – a new app that solves the No. 1 complaint about offices

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Comfy

You go to work on a hot summer day, but as soon as you sit at your desk, your are freezing. Or it’s winter and the heater keeps you too hot. The heating and cooling system is designed to keep you comfortable but it’s not doing a very good job, and it wastes massive amounts of energy in the process.

 

 

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Top 8 futuristic office technologies that will change how we work

“There’s a lot of potential to build off existing technologies if you can recognize the right business use.”

The Kiplinger Letter has forecast future trends set to change the way we work for 90 years. According to a statement released by the letter, In 1959, they forecast copiers and printers, and in 1963, it mentioned “pocket gadgets” that would allow workers to call anyone from anywhere.

 

 

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Startups disrupt office space leasing market in New York City

Tech startups want loft or converted manufacturing space with big windows, high ceilings, wood or concrete floors and lots of open air.

There’s a tech revolution happening in New York. Hundreds if not thousands of new tech companies have hatched in NYC in the past two years. And many of  them are growing rapidly and gobbling up office space.

 

 

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Office ergonomics take a stand on the health hazards of sitting

Extended sitting  slows the body’s metabolism of glucose and lowers the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol in the blood.

Health studies have always concluded that people should sit less, and get up and move around more. But the accumulating research on sitting reveals something more intriguing, and disturbing: the health hazards of sitting for long stretches are significant even for people who are quite active when they’re not sitting down. Recently two studies have reiterated that point, published in The British Journal of Sports Medicine and in Diabetologia, a journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes.

What corporate offices can learn from coworking spaces

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Corporate offices are going to become coworking offices in the future.

If you are a fan of coworking and are going to the SXSW this year in Austin, you might want to arrive a few days early to hit the Global Coworking Unconference Conference (formerly known as the Coworking Unconference) being held in Austin on March 8. The all-day event is geared toward owners and there will be a range of panels on starting and running a space. But at least one discussion might be of interest not only to coworking entrepreneurs but also to forward-thinking managers as well.

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Study: working in an office is bad for your brain

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Working in an office can also make you less productive.

According to a new study, working in an office is bad for your brain and can make you less productive.  The study found that the hustle and bustle of modern offices can lead to a 32% drop in workers well being and reduce their productivity by 15%.

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