It may boast all the recognisable trappings of a swanky London gentlemen’s
club, but One Alfred Place is not your average private members’ hangout.
Among the period features, bespoke furniture and contemporary art, the club
provides the mod cons of a 21st-century office.
When they join in February, new members will be given their own club telephone
number, with an 0207 London prefix, a personal e-mail address and access to
the club’s free wi-fi network. There are meeting rooms, and the waitresses
double as PAs, delivering reports, printing documents and offering IT
support in between mixing margaritas. Even the sofas have been designed to
be comfy while you are using a laptop.
Welcome to the brave new world of the moofer – or mobile out-of-office worker.
Look around: you’ll see them conducting deals, holding meetings or finding
inspiration at a coffee shop, hotel lobby, airport lounge or park bench near
you. This new generation of young, tech-savvy workers live their business
lives in nomadic fashion, wherever they can find a wi-fi connection – and
they don’t believe in the traditional nine to five. Many are entrepreneurs
running their own internet-based companies, but they could be management
types working for big firms and often away from the office, media
consultants out and about meeting clients or freelance writers.
“The reason we started the club now is that there is a huge new trend of
people who are working in this way,” says Rob Shreeve, the chief executive
at One Alfred Place. “They are using new technology to take their office
with them. But while it’s all well and good working out of a hotel, you
can’t really hold meetings there. And the same applies to traditional
gentlemen’s clubs, where it’s impossible to use a phone, let alone recharge
your laptop.”
Of course the trend for more flexible working practices has been around for
years. But in 2007 the trickle has become a flood as new technology makes it
more practical than ever. One key development has been the rapid growth in
the availability of public wi-fi. In the past year this has gone from being
a patchwork quilt of isolated hotspots to covering entire swathes of cities
and town centres. Many of these wi-fi networks are also free.
As important has been the hugely increased speeds of the 3G phone networks
thanks to a technology known as HSDPA. This means that even outside a wi-fi
network you are still connected to the internet. Savvy moofers of 2007 can
use its fast, multi-megabit broadband speeds on their mobile phone or laptop
to do anything from sending or receiving a presentation to quickly sharing
photos and video while on the move. Then there are the ever more
sophisticated smartphones that double as calendars, notebooks, voice
recorders and cameras, giving the modern entrepreneur all the tools of
executive life in a device smaller than a Filofax.
Today’s ultra-competitive mobile tariffs and free minutes increasingly
marginalise landlines, weakening further the ties to a fixed physical space,
while virtual office suites such as Google Docs and other cloud technologies
enable workers to access private documents from any computer in the world
via the internet.
“I’ve worked from the back of a camel, from a tent in the middle of the desert
and out of a tiger sanctuary,” says Sachin Duggal, a 24-year-old technology
entrepreneur.
“I’ve watched and commented on a presentation on my BlackBerry in the middle
of an Indian wedding, and I was taking calls at three this morning. I’ve
stopped thinking of work as something you start at nine and finish at six.
To me there’s just life.”
Duggal founded his first company at 15, building and repairing computers from
his bedroom. Now he’s overseeing his latest venture (see below), valued at
£16m, living and working almost exclusively off piste, not tied to a desk, a
timetable or even a continent, rotating between the UK and India every five
to six days.
He’s not alone. Andy Wood, 30, founded his digital production company Tough
Cookie (now a part of Whizz Kid Entertainment, after a buyout last year)
with a friend in 2003. Without an office, the partners started off Skyping
each other from home about the shape the new business should take. “We would
set up client meetings and spend the time between them working from a
Starbucks, or anywhere on the Cloud network,” he says. “Our staff meetings
used to be in Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street.”
Filming music gigs for broadcast over the web on digital equipment, the
company could work off laptops from virtually anywhere, and fast. “We once
edited gig footage of the Rumble Strips on a tour bus on the way back from
Manchester, and dropped it off with the client as soon as we were back in
London,” says Wood.
As well as the new technology, a cultural shift means the idea of a job for
life is a thing of the past for today’s graduates. A recent survey
commissioned by the Work Foundation and Microsoft found that 78% of people
believed working away from the office was the future, with more than half
saying they would be happier if there were a greater element of mobile
working in their job. Meanwhile, the Future Laboratory, a trend forecaster,
predicts that 5.5m people will be using technology to work away from the
office by 2012.
“We need to redefine the term ‘office work’,” says James McCarthy of
Microsoft, who set up the site www.moof.mobi to kickstart a discussion among
employees of the benefits of mobile working. “Far too many of us endure a
daily commute, only to sit at our desks and work on jobs that we could do
from anywhere with an internet connection.”
Moofing requires a readjustment, because, like the technology, you are in
effect always on. For workaholics this is a boon because it improves
productivity. However, the flipside of the “always on” lifestyle is the
nightmare vision of constant accessibility – as with the commuters who
cannot put down their BlackBerry. Business contacts know that you are always
at the end of a phone, or checking e-mails remotely, and start to expect an
almost immediate response.
Most moofers running their own businesses accept they have to be available all
the time. Steven Malpass, 36, of www.blitzworld.co.uk, designs and builds
off-road buggies for a living, and he has cut his response times to e-mail
orders by 75% with his technology set-up. Relying on a mobile phone and his
own web-coding skills, he has put through deals worth thousands of pounds
and updated the stock on his website from the tops of mountains on ski trips
to Whistler and Banff in Canada. “It’s difficult not to sneak a look
sometimes,” he admits. “But at the end of the day, it’s your business, and
you want to make sure it succeeds.”
The biggest drawback of the mobile working life (and the reason the office
will never disappear) is the lack of interaction with colleagues. That,
after all, is why offices were invented, before e-mail and intranets became
a way of ensuring everyone was strapped to their chairs.
For the moofer who doesn’t even have a communal office as a base, this is the
kind of gap that One Alfred Place is trying to fill. Just don’t join
expecting a wild night of champagne-fuelled excess.
The high-flyers always connected
Name Sherry Madera
Age 33
Occupation Chief executive of AwayPhone (www.awayphone.com
), a phone system for globetrotting executives who want to establish a local
presence. The system enables customers to travel with a local number in more
than 100 countries.
Name Steven Malpass
Age 36
Occupation Designs, manufactures and sells off-road buggies from his
website www.blitzworld.com . Having
constant access to his e-mails using his mobile phone has increased company
productivity, while sophisticated web applications allow him to process
larger orders than bigger rival companies.
Name Andy Wood
Age 30
Occupation Founded a digital production company that films live music
gigs for broadcast over the web. Laptops with high-speed broadband
connection mean they can work from anywhere. “When we go to clients we have
a five-minute showreel to show them on our mobiles. It gets across that this
is the product, in the way it’s supposed to be seen,” says Wood.
Name Sachin Duggal
Age 24
Occupation An internet entrepreneur, he spends his time in the UK and
India. He is launching a web service called www.nivio.com
that allows you to access your personal Windows desktop on any terminal in
the world.
Name Vanita Kara
Age 33
Occupation Security consultant for DNV, a Norwegian risk management
firm. Using a laptop and a phone, she can work from home rather than go to
the office. “It’s so simple it doesn’t feel like a big deal,” she says. “I’m
not using anything particularly advanced or special. All I need is a laptop
and a phone although my dad is always a bit shocked.”
Moofing tools
DO-IT-ALL PHONE Nokia E61i £280 www.nokia.co.uk
Featuring a qwerty keyboard and large screen, this powerful 3G smartphone
makes for easy e-mailing and web surfing on the move. It can also run other
applications, such as advanced diary features, or view pictures and even
edit presentations.
LIGHTWEIGHT LAPTOP Dell Latitude D630 £699 www.dell.co.uk
The D630 is lightweight yet powerful and offers nine hours of battery life.
Decent processing power will handle spreadsheets and presentations, and
there is an optional internal 3G card giving fast internet access if out of
wi-fi range.
SKYPE AWAY Sennheiser PC146 USB headset £80 www.sennheiser.co.uk
A Skype account (sign up at www.skype.com) allows free calls over the web.
However, you’ll need a decent headset such as this with a built-in
microphone. Its noise-cancelling technology helps you make clearer calls.
CORDLESS MOUSE MoGo Mouse X54 Pro £65 www.newtonperipherals.com
This flat laptop mouse works wirelessly by Bluetooth and, when you’re done,
it folds up and stores away inside the 54 express-card expansion slot of
newer laptops. It also acts as a multimedia remote that can control a
PowerPoint presentation.
ESSENTIAL SOFTWARE It’s not only hardware that you’ll need if you want
to become a successful moofer. Instead of storing documents locally on your
hard drive, why not store them online at www.diino.com,
which enables you to upload up to 2GB of data a month, for nothing. Citrix
Online’s GoToMeeting (www.gotomeeting.com)
allows up to 10 people to share documents and chat simultaneously for an
annual subscription of £250.
