www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/03/11/BEDOUINS.TMP
Urban nomads who call themselves Bedouin workers use coff... A new breed of worker, fueled by caffeine and using the tools of modern technology, is flourishing in the coffeehouses of San Francisco. Roaming from cafe to cafe and borrowing a name from the nomadic Arabs who wandered freely in the desert, they've come to be known as "bedouins." San Francisco's modern-day bedouins are typically armed with laptops and cell phones, paying for their office space and Internet access by buying coffee and muffins. "In 'Lawrence of Arabia,' the bedouins always felt like they were on the warpath. They had greater cause," said Niall Kennedy, a 27-year-old San Franciscan who quit his day job at Microsoft Corp. to run his own Web company, Patrick Media, out of cafes and a rented desk. "At a startup, you're always on the go, plowing ahead, with some higher cause driving you." San Francisco's bedouins see themselves changing the nature of the workplace, if not the world at large. They see large companies like General Motors laying off workers, contributing to insecurity. And at the same time, they see the Internet providing the tools to start companies on the cheap. In the Bedouin lifestyle, they are free to make their own rules. "The San Francisco coffeehouse is the new Palo Alto garage," declares Kevin Burton, 30, who runs his Internet startup Tailrank without renting offices. Burton and Kennedy are among those popularizing the bedouin name, separating the movement from traditional freelancing by stressing the workers' involvement in technology, in general, and Web 20 ideology in particular. While the movement is at its apex in San Francisco, where young urban independents can easily find a coffeehouse with the right vibe for them, it's also happening across the more suburban reaches of the Bay Area, and across the country as a whole. The move toward mobile self employment is also part of what author Daniel Pink identified when he wrote "Free Agent Nation" in 2001. "A whole infrastructure has emerged to help people work in this way," Pink said. "Part of it includes places like Kinkos, Office Depot and Staples." It also includes places like Starbucks and independent coffee shops, where Wi-Fi -- wireless Internet access for laptops and other devices -- is available. "The infrastructure makes it possible for people to work where they want, when they want, how they want," said Pink, who is based in Washington, DC Pink said numbers are hard to pin down, as the Census Bureau does not count independent workers. Using available census data and private surveys, Pink estimates that one-fifth of the workforce, or 30 million out of 150 million people, are working on their own. The independent workforce is hard to track, as the workers are neither employee nor employer -- and yet, in what Pink termed a "Zen turn," they are both employee and employer. "It's been a slow steady trajectory over the last 15 or 20 years for a whole host of reasons. One of them, obviously, is there's no lifetime job security any more. Pink calls it "Karl Marx's revenge, where individuals own the means of production. And they can take the means of production and hop from coffee shop to coffee shop." Soviet iconography is popping up all over the Bay Area's bedouin landscape, from the coffee cup and star on the red background of Ritual Roasters' logo, to the cell phone and mouse that look suspiciously like a hammer and sickle on the logo of Web Worker Daily, a blog that covers the bedouin phenomenon. Web Worker Daily is published by GigaOm, a media company that practices what it preaches. Om Malik, 40, a technology journalist who lives in San Francisco's Financial District, started blogging five years ago and last year quit his day job, taking an undisclosed amount of venture capital to launch GigaOm as a business. He now has a full-time staff of five and a team of freelancers, all scattered about, contributing to different online journals. One is in Oakland, one in San Mateo, two in San Francisco and one at Lake Tahoe, he said. The freelancers are in Utah, Denver, New Jersey, Washington, DC, and spread around the world. "There is nothing more free than being a Web worker," Malik says. The Starbucks model If you could split the Web workers into two main camps, you could say that one camp plugs in at Starbucks, while the other chooses independent neighborhood cafes. Starbucks offers a more corporate culture, and is a popular place for business meetings. Executives who travel a lot often prefer Starbucks, knowing they can find many branches in whatever city they go to. They also pay for the Wi-Fi, through Starbucks' partnership with T-Mobile. Yet many of the scrappier startups, particularly those who have not taken funding from venture capitalists, prefer the ethos of the independent cafes, where the music is a little louder and the Wi-Fi is free. Ritual: the scene Ritual Roasters in San Francisco's Mission District is in many ways the epicenter of the bedouin movement. Ritual, on Valencia Street near 21st Street, is almost always packed with people working on laptops. There's the time someone buzzed through the cafe on a Segway scooter. Rubyred Labs, a hip Web design shop in South Park, had its launch party there. Teams from established Web companies such as Google Inc. and Flickr, a photo sharing site that's now owned by Yahoo, meet there. "You'd never know these guys were millionaires," said Ritual co-owner Jeremy Tooker. The founders of Web video startup Dovetail Television were meeting there one day, griping as usual about how hard it was to find talented programmers. "I'm looking around and there's gotta be 50 people with laptops," said Brett Levine, 31, a co-founder and the company's lead programmer. None were actually hired, but it cemented in Levine's mind the notion of where the talent pool lies. Kennedy, the self-professed bedouin who has worked at blog aggregator Technorati and at tech giant Microsoft but who is now working on his own idea of developing a new more personal way to search the Internet, is a regular at Ritual and blogs about it often. Or when they were talking about redesigning their Web site, I was able to give advice." Tingley moved to San Francisco when his wife took a job at a law firm. com, which he said will "monetize user-generated video." As for why they're there, Kelly said, "I'm visiting with my friends instead of being locked up in a big building in the South Bay." And he added, cheekily, "If you bring a flask, you can tip it into your coffee and your boss isn't watching you." Tingley, at the next table, turned around and asked, "Can we be in separate articles?" com that claims to "track the hottest news in the blogosphere," spends about 10 percent of his time at Ritual, but the crowds have driven him elsewhere. His favorite at the moment is Coffee to the People on Masonic Avenue. When you enter, you have no doubt you're in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. The coffee drinks have names like Flower Power, the menu includes a vegan blueberry cornbread. At one table, a woman with an open laptop talks on her cell phone, while the man reading a paperback next to her keeps a hand over his ear. "I have a home office, but I just get cooped up," he said. Burton arrives at 11 am, and his lead engineer, Jonathan Moore, 30, arrives a few minutes later. Burton has a double latte and a cupcake, and starts explaining how his site uses "wisdom of the crowds" algorithms to scrape the hottest news from the blogosphere and upend the mainstream media. As he talks, Gallagher joins in, and advises, "Lower your voice. I already know the ins and outs of your business plan from the last time I was here." That is an occupational hazard in the bedouin workforce. Kennedy also said he has equipped his laptop with a firewall that's always on and e-mail and instant messaging encryption. He said it's fairly easy to sit in a cafe and start "sniffing the network, see what sites people are accessing, get an idea of a site that hasn't launched yet, see people's e-mail logins and passwords." Bedouin history Using a cafe to run a business is nothing particularly new. Venerable insurance firm ...
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