Are there dinosaurs among us? If a new joint report from Regus and Unwired called VWork: Winning Strategies at Work  is to be believed, yes. The report on the future of the office in an age of increasingly agile work surveyed 600 businesspeople along with several heads of global real estate and will be released next week. Of course, the lumbering beasts it identifies aren’t giant reptiles, but instead traditional corporate buildings, which the report claims are underutilized, inflexible and a bad fit for the work of today.

But like the dinosaurs, which scientists tell us live on as chickens, the office building of the past is unlikely to become completely extinct, but rather to evolve to meet the demands of new kinds of workers, driven by technological advances and a desire for a lighter, cheaper real estate footprint. So what will this new paradigm look like? To find out, we spoke with Bob Gaudreau, Executive VP of Regus and Philip Ross, CEO of Unwired, about the changing meaning of the office in a wired world.

Jessica Stillman: One of the models for the future you explore in the report is the idea that employees will be allowed to buy their own office space. Can you explain how you envision that working?

Philp Ross: One of the core corporate drivers in the move to agility is a reduction in the cost of real estate. It’s a move from providing a container for work that tends not to be used towards a future where it’s on-demand — that work places are aligned with how people actually want to work.

We found that only 45 percent of desks in offices are used at any one point in time today. So what we’re doing is aligning the idea of “buy/bring-your-own,” which is beginning to get traction in the IT world, with the idea of just provisioning work, so that companies give their employers a stipend, a budget, and the budget is for all aspects of the provisioning of work to suit them and the way they work.

Bob Gandreau: We’re seeing it happen already. Companies like Yell in the UK had 20 properties that were sitting vacant 70 percent of the time. So what they did is they gave everyone a membership to be able to use any of the Regus locations, and these people can go into the location where they want, when they want and work how they want. It’s not totally the worker buying his own, but it is companies giving them a sum of money and allowing the worker to pick the right work setting depending on what the worker needs. What that means for Yell is they’re saving, I think, £1.5 million or 40 percent of all their property costs by working in a much more agile way.

Jessica: If you go super lean and cut back severely on space at traditional offices, how do you plan usage so if everyone wants to use the space, they can?

Ross: It’s a very important point. We identified only 12.3 percent of people want to work from home, but you can also see in the research that people want a very short commute. So I think what we’re identifying really is that people want to work locally. We’re seeing this kind of new hybrid model where there’s a bit of working from home, a bit of working from the corporate office, but also this move towards third space — new spaces that are in the community — and that’s a very exciting trend.

In terms of load-balancing the corporate building, we’ve seen it done around the world. We profiled companies like Macquarie Bank in Sydney who built a kind of on-demand, real-time building. Companies are looking at this to provide places to work, not desks or cubes, so that there is always somewhere to work and also reallocating space based on the work that people actually do, which is moving more and more towards collaborative work, not just working solo in a cube. Again, we found that not only are 55 percent of the cubes empty at any one point in time, people report they can’t get meeting rooms. So I think what we’re seeing is a wholesale reallocation of space in the corporate center, and that also looks like a 20-25 percent of reduction of space at the same time.

Gandreau: In the old days you might see 10 percent of the space as meeting room, lounge and collaboration, now it’s 20-30 percent of the space, because it becomes a destination for people to come together and do that kind of work, which is where the good ideas come from.

Jessica: So-called “third space” seems to play a big role in the future you’re imagining, but are they up to the task today? Are there enough quality spaces available, and if not, do you predict a big boom in the industry?

Ross: There is a mixed range out there – there are some very good ones and some very mediocre ones that don’t quite meet the needs of the corporates. You can see them meeting the needs of the freelancers, the contingent workers, who go in with their Macbook Airs and have a coffee and they’re online, but they don’t meet the confidentiality needs and other services needs that they will have to respond to if Fortune companies adopt third space. I see them becoming, perhaps, more like an airport lounge with tiers of membership where platinum cardholders can get advanced services with teleconferencing, privacy and other facilities. I think it’s got some way to go from the kind of café society to a much more sophisticated offering of the future.

But if we see a huge change, a sea change, in the way that big corporates are working — if they do reduce their property footprint by 30 or 25 percent — we’ll see tens of thousands of new workers looking for someplace to work, especially in their communities, but no that hasn’t yet been provided for.

Gandreau: I see it happening before our eyes when you go out in the community. I was just back at my alma mater in Boston and I went to the library. In the old days, you couldn’t talk in the library, right? Now there are white boards and students collaborating, so I see more and more third spaces appearing in the places you’d least think they’d appear. Another place I’ve seen them, and Regus has looked at locating, is shopping malls. People are actually meeting in shopping malls. They’re naturally occurring in the places where large groups come together – sort of like the piazza in the old days. If you were in an Italian village people would go to the piazza and it was a beehive of activity. Third spaces are the piazzas of the modern century.

Jessica: Your report very much focuses on the cost savings of agile working and shies away from more holistic arguments, including commonly sited things like quality of life and environmental benefits. Why did you make that choice?

Ross: Over the years a lot of chat has been around about touchy-feely, nice-to-have issues around this, but corporates want to see the bottom line. They want to understand the impact on their business — how they can reduce costs, how they can improve efficiency. They are hard-nosed. We’re coming out of a climate of recession. Money is king. Doing more with less is top of the agenda.

Technology trends, the drivers from cloud to devices to connectivity, are enabling us to look at agility from a very different perspective, and in the report we’ve identified this idea of the agility dividend — how we can measure and monetize this, because I think what we found is companies are saying, we want to look at this but how do we present this to the board? The dividend looks at three key areas: reducing costs of real estate, a happiness dividend in work-life balance and improving the working lives of people, and the productivity dividend, making us more effective. If you sit back and look at this picture, it’s a no-brainer: there are lots of other spin-offs from environmental benefits through to the quality of life. We have to monetize it. We need a figure to produce a compelling business case to the CFO and the COO.

Gandreau: Our challenge has been for years to put a number to it. Once you can put a number to it, it becomes a really compelling argument. Once you have the bottom line, the flexibility you get by working in a more agile way just becomes the gravy. But it all starts with the numbers.

Image courtesy Flickr user Rich Anderson.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• Making Coworking Corporate-Scale
• The Future of Workplaces
• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

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Europe is to grasp a gigantic boom within mobile broadband subscribers, nearly doubling people over the subsequent day, an additional report has predicted.

While it is completely just to state that the excitement as well as novelty of mobile internet has worn off somewhat, the gsm association, people who create the description, has made out we now how can expect “explosive development” which result in mobile broadband – both here held within uk as well as inside europe.

Back within 2009 as soon as mobile broadband first reared its head on the broadband scene, specialists envisaged different countries looking portable broadband crazy – even washing the face to the density regarding replacing fixed-line broadband products.

Unfortunately which help in the users, they’re these days consuming the words. When mobilt bredb¥nd is a favourite alternative for occupied businesspeople, Customers on the go, in addition to the ones people who simply how can’t msn without the world wide web after away as per house, the accuracy is that slow speeds as well as awful transactions in some areas have stopped it from acquiring the fame which has been predicted.

The technological just didn’t develop given that without delay since we all expected, but an extraw tech breakthrough is on the horizon, and it is such type of that’ll result in the novel surge inside subscribers, says the gsm association account.

Currently, the a number of mobile world wide web organizations utilize a technological named hsdpa (which stands which result in superior speed downlink packet break through). Such type of jobs off the back regarding the 3g effects (an identical technology which your mobile phone makes use of to join to the world wide web), however thankfully it goes quicker instead of an iphone!

The 3G network supplies a variety of uk subscribers theoretical speeds about nearly  .2mb/s, but really, here is never the circumstance. the actual speed regarding your mobile broadband depends on how close you are to your nearest exchange point, best ways a great number of other people are a variety of attempting to make use of it all together, in addition to whether or not there are many even a small obstacles (exchanges, trees, pylons) within mean.

Luckily the spanking innovative technology is they say that merely round the corner, having hspa+ (high speed packet infiltrate, at the same time called evolved hspa) as regards to to hit our dongles. Such innovative group can offer theoretical speeds of nearly 2mb/s.

Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress came and went, and didn’t amount to much in the way of US cellphones. The rest of the world got some seriously nice gear, though. Here’s the best of the best of the out of reach.

HTC Legend

Why You Want It: It’s like an HTC Hero, except with Android 2.1, an OLED screen, and a brushed-to-perfection aluminum body, which may be the most stylistically interesting design choice HTC has ever made.
Why You Can’t Have It: European availability starts in April, and this phone could see a later US release date like the Hero did, though HTC hasn’t given any indication that this is true. Here’s the thing: Remember how Sprint uglified the original Hero? I wouldn’t put it past them, and more generally HTC, to tone this thing down (read: ruin it) in the unlikely event of a US release.

Alcatel OT980

Why You Want It: It’ll be a cheap Android handset in a totally under-recognized form factor. Some may see it as a knockoff of the Pre, but I just see it as a nice little messaging phone, without the restrictions of a dumbphone OS.
Why You Can’t Have It: Have you ever seen an Alcatel handset in real life? Didn’t think so. This one’s coming in May. To Yur-ope.

Motorola XT800

Why You Want It: It’s got the brains of a Droid, without the keyboard. Plus, it’s got support for dual SIM cards—a rarity in Android phones—and HDMI output.
Why You Can’t Have It: It was introduced alongside an explicitly Chinese-only phone, and Motorola has made no indications that a North American release is coming. And even if it did, a dual-SIM international phone without a keyboard might be a tough sell to carriers, which usually market travel phones to businesspeople.

General Mobile Touch Stone

Why You Want It: Remember the HTC Touch HD2? The one with the orgasmically beautiful hardware, and categorically disappointing software? This is pretty much that, with Android.
Why You Can’t Have It: General Mobile made their name selling knockoff phones. While the Touch Stone isn’t a knockoff phone at all, it comes from a company that doesn’t—and will probably never—have a foothold in the US.

Acer beTouch E110

Why You Want It: When Android phones are available for free on contract, this is what they’re going to look like. The specs on this thing are underwhelming, so it might not be accurate to say that you’d want it for you, but you might want it for your tweenage kid.
Why You Can’t Have It: Acer currently has no plans to bring the beTouch stateside, and Acer’s other phones don’t exactly have a history of showing up in the US unannounced.

The Puma Phone

Why You Want It: The first phone designed entirely around a sporting lifestyle. Oh, and it’s got a solar panel!
Why You Can’t Have It: Initial launch plans have it released in Europe in about two months, with further availability TBD. US prospects aren’t great though, since Puma doesn’t have nearly the brand power here it does in the UK and elsewhere. (Fun fact: British people pronounce Puma like “Pyoo-mah.”)

LG GW990

Why You Want It: It’s the first phone with Intel’s Moorestown chip, and the first with the hybrid Maemo/Moblin OS, called Meego. And seriously, come on with these specs: A 4.8-inch screen at 480 x 1024 pixels? A 1850mAh battery? Intel’s Atom-based system-on-a-chip? This phone is pornographic.
Why You Can’t Have It: Let’s face it: It’s a tech demo. The Korean market tends to be more receptive to over-the-top phone like this, which is why they’re the only ones getting it for now, and even there, not for another half a year. Can you imagine a Verizon or an AT&T picking up something this absurd? And can you imagine how much it would cost unsubsidized?

Samsung Wave

Why You Want It: Its Bada OS may be underwhelming, but it’s a nicely spec’d phone with a couple game-changing features: the first “Super OLED” screen, which doesn’t look like ass in direct sunlight. It’s also the first handset with USB 3.0, which is, you know, fast.
Why You Can’t Have It: UK availability starts in April, and Samsung hasn’t even bothered to include a “further markets will be announced by x” blanket statement. It could happen, but don’t bet on it.

Toshiba K01

Why You Want It: It’s essentially the TG01 with a slide-out keyboard, which makes it the thinnest slide-out-QWERTY smartphone of its kind. (Its kind being massive, massive phones.) It’s a proud, final signoff for the entire category of ultraspec’d Windows Mobile 6.x phones.
Why You Can’t Have It: The TG01 never made it stateside, and there’s no reason to believe that its keyboarded followup will either. And besides, this phone is a lustable piece of hardware, but with WinPho 7 on the horizon, it’s hard to recommend buying a 6.5.3-based phone.

Sony X10 Mini

Why You Want It: The Xperia X10 done had itself a baby! An adorable little baby! You get the full Sony Ericsson Timeline interface overlaid atop Android, in a much more compact package. And it’ll probably be cheap.
Why You Can’t Have It: The X10 is taking forever to make it to market here, and other miniaturized phones, like the N97 Mini, don’t seem to fly with American carriers. Accordingly, Sony Ericsson hasn’t said a thing about a US release.

Samsung i8520

Why You Want It: Ignore everything else: This phone has a built-in projector. Ha!
Why You Can’t Have It: Samsung’s science fair project is going to be very, very expensive, and besides, it won’t even be available in Asia and parts of Europe until Q3 of this year, with a wider release possibly in the cards. Possibly.

Texas Instruments Blaze

Why You Want It: Look! Look at this thing! Two 3.7-inch screens, the OMAP 4 chipset based on the ARM Cortex A9, three cameras, a keyboard—this thing is outright insane.
Why You Can’t Have It: It’s developer hardware, so it’s not even meant for wide sale. I suppose you could buy one if you wanted, but unless you engineer cellphones or write mobile OSes for a living, you really shouldn’t.

Edifier surprisued us with a set of cool portable speakers in a tube that you can carry with you anywhere you go. The kit comes with a carry case and power adapter.

Edifier MP300 Plus – The portable audio system for IT LIFESTYLE

Winner of the internationally acclaimed 2009 red dot design award for best product design, the Edifier new MP300 Plus is a sophisticated and cost-effective portable audio system that delivers high quality sound to any notebook, PC and MP3 player.

Complete with a 9W subwoofer for extended bass response and two spherical speakers with metal weave speaker grills, the Edifier MP300 Plus simply plugs into any notebook, PC or MP3 player to deliver users a maximum listening experience, incomparable to competitors on the market.

Sealed with the red dot design award for 2009, the Edifier MP300 Plus is recognised for its high quality design and innovation in terms of form and function. The competition is the largest and most recognized design award in the world with 11,000 product submissions from 61 countries.

The Edifier MP300 Plus is size efficient and is available in matt black or brushed silver, making it perfect for small living spaces and practical for almost any décor. The system also comes with a protective carry case, making it ideal for travelers, businesspeople and storage purposes.

Edifier MP300 Plus features include:

Bass-ported and brush finished 9W subwoofer
Spherical speakers with metal weave speaker grill
Padded and compact carry case
Universal 100-240V power supply
Simple to use satellite mounted controls for on / off and volume functions
Colours: matt black and brushed silver
Weight: approximately 1.5kg

Another day, another e-reader. Toady’s is the Plastic Logic Que, which is pronounced like the letter that falls between P and R. I, however, will henceforth pronounce it like the Portuguese word for “what,” and the European Portuguese pronunciation at that. (Sorta sounds like “quh.” It’s a movement!) Plastic Logic seems to be aiming it at the business market, which I don’t think we’ve really seen before.

What does it do? Well, Timmy, it e-reads all sorts of stuff, including Microsoft Office documents and books from Barnes & Noble. Note that you don’t need to use a stylus like that IREX reader.

The weird thing is that, yeah, Plastic Logic doesn’t seem to want to compete, so to speak, with the Amazon Kindle. The Que is for businesspeople, by businesspeople.

Other goodies:

• 8.5×11-inch touchscreen display

• 3G (provided by AT&T), Wi-Fi

• Ability to edit said Office documents on the device itself

There’s no price and there’s no release date yet. Plastic Logic will have more to say at CES in January, which means it won’t be out in time for the holidays.

Basically, Plastic Logic is just saying today, “Hey, we have an e-reader, too, Mr and Ms. Businessperson. Check back with us at CES and we’ll have more info!”

And no, there are no photos of the front of the Que, just that side angle nonsense. Plastic Logic is toying with us.

Here’s the full press release, if you’re interested in reading such things.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Plastic Logic revealed today its plans to unveil QUE™ (pronounced “Q”), the first proReader designed for business professionals. Premiering January 7, 2010 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (Central Hall of Las Vegas Convention Center at Booth 11840 anchoring the e-Book Techzone), QUE is an essential tool for busy professionals, providing access to a dynamic ecosystem of content.

With QUE, Plastic Logic is expanding the eReader category, which to date has focused on leisure reading devices and casual users. QUE is designed to simplify the multi-faceted lifestyle of the modern businessperson, and to quite literally lighten their workload. In addition to connecting its users with their business and professional newspapers, books and periodicals, QUE supports the document formats business users need (including PDF, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents) and features powerful tools for interacting with and managing the content.

“The QUE brand stands for a premium reading experience,” said Richard Archuleta, CEO of Plastic Logic. “The QUE proReader enhances business performance and gives you a competitive edge. More than an eReader, QUE means business.”

Extra thin, lightweight and wireless-enabled, QUE is the size of an 8.5 x 11 inch pad of paper, less than a 1/3 inch thick, and weighs less than many periodicals. The innovative QUE proReader features the largest touchscreen in the industry, an intuitive touch screen user interface, and provides access to a file cabinet’s worth of documents, plus your favorite—and most necessary—publications.

QUE stands out in a crowd because it’s a business reader, but it’s also unique for its shatterproof plastic display. This exclusive technology from Plastic Logic, along with E Ink Vizplex® technology produces an outstanding reading experience. Its battery can last days, instead of hours.

QUE users will be able to connect to content and download wirelessly via Wi-Fi and AT&T’s 3G network, the nation’s fastest 3G mobile broadband network. The QUE store will offer the most significant collection of business reading available on any eReader. The store is powered by Barnes & Noble, the world’s largest eBookstore.

Full product specifications, availability and pricing of QUE will be announced on January 7, 2010 at CES.

The QUE for CES starts at http://www.QUEreader.com.

An Apple expert and hacker has shown that the iPhone, in all its various forms and moltings, is child’s play to compromise. This comes despite assurances from Apple regarding the 3GS’s encryption feature. Bad news for businesspeople of the 21st century, who have glommed onto the iPhone and its service halo like no other device. The wonder-phone has certainly changed the way smartphones and other devices are made, but this isn’t the first time Apple’s security measures have been described as being seriously lacking.

It seems that with a little creative coding, or access to an insecure computer, the iPhone can be cracked wide open. The encryption doesn’t really even enter into the equation, since you can just have the phone read off the information you want. There hasn’t been much of a reason to hack iPhones yet — you might get a few Facebook passwords, or some contact info, but now that the phone is gaining traction in the business world, there may actually be something worth stealing on them. And it’s not very hard to do. I like this quote: “I don’t think any of us have ever seen encryption implemented so poorly before.”

The vulnerability lies… well, I can’t tell you exactly. “A little bit of free software” is what Jonathan Zdziarski used in a demonstration for Wired, and I assume it’s not being described exactly for the same reason you don’t print the components of napalm in the Sunday paper. Regardless, it’s a quick and easy process (involving jailbreaking and installing a SSH client) once you know how to do it, with specific data available in just a few minutes and a full disk image in under an hour. If a large business has deployed thousands of iPhones as their official device (which is certainly happening), you can bet there are trade secrets and company files on there somewhere.

Whether the risk is worth the convenience of an all-iPhone business network is up to you. But if I had my powerpoints and investors’ balance sheets on a device proven to have a, shall we say, porous perimeter, I’d reassess — not that I’d ever keep my critical information on any current phone, with the possible exception of the President’s. Personally, I’ll stick with Sneakernet 1.0 for my highly secure data mobilization needs.

Apple’s unprecedented success with the iPhone has increased their liability and their vulnerable surface area. Zdziarski isn’t a black hat, so I’m sure he’s talked with Apple about this, but the fact that he’s going public with a serious security issue just days after the earnings call that launched a thousand posts suggests that Apple isn’t taking it seriously enough.