Seed funded by Accel and Battery Ventures, Loosecubes is a workplace sharing community with a focus on co-working. Unlike Liquidspaces, which primarily matches people with work spaces, Loosecubes founder Campbell McKellar tells me she wants to move beyond providing an area with wifi and match people with people.
Loosecubes will be launching a redesigned site and product next week and but wants to help people come together in advance, and thus is holding a Co-Working Un-Conference in Austin tonight until 11pm at 301 Colorado (Colorado and 4th). To further drive this “bringing people together” thing home, LooseCubes built the HTML 5 app Instant Jelly especially for the SXSW occasion.
Taking off of Amit Gupta’s idea of a “Jelly” (a formalized work-together) Instant Jelly in an HTML5 mobile web app which allows you to create spontaneous co-working events by opening ij.lcub.es in your smart phone browser, plugging in your Twitter handle and the When, Where and Theme of your event.
Aside from the events being tweeted out from the @instantjelly account, you can also tweet them out yourself using a unique RSVP link. The app then allows other people to request invites to your Jelly, which you can then deny or approve.
Continuing on the Jelly theme, Campbell eventually wants to make LooseCubes more like a social network for co-working than a real estate listing service like eVenues.com, and hopes to keeping adding social features after her services relaunch next week, so people can check out the social aspects of a space before you sign up.
For example, people with industry designations could fan a page and people could evaluate the site based on the profiles of the people who friended it like, “Oh these people are like me they’re all writers.” “Finding a place to work in a hotel lobby is a lot different than having someone work with you for the day,” says McKeller.