Over the past year, we’ve had the opportunity to participate in the development and launch of the Speak Easy, a place for entrepreneurs, startups, and the folks who support them to work, play, and collaborate. Crafting a brand, web presence, and influencing the structure itself, we couldn’t have been happier to launch the Speak Easy on January 18th.

Taking a cue from coastal co-work spaces like Grind in New York, a group of 8 investors and entrepreneurs (including our own Kristian Andersen) set out to create a gathering place for those active in the startup community. The resulting space is a combination of a 17th century salon, coffee shop, and science lab.

Collaborating with local designers and architects – Nikki Sutton, Nick Allman and Craig McCormick – they transformed a 5,750-square-foot warehouse into a common area office infrastructure, conference rooms, and, in the words of Verge, “a massive opportunity to connect and collaborate with others in the startup community.” Wi-Fi, refreshments, a library and gaming center are just a few of the accoutrements that will be fueling Indy’s creative class as they work at the Speak Easy. Take a peek behind the scenes in IndyHub’s interview with Kristian about startups and the Speak Easy.

The Speak Easy bar, photo by Clay Reinken

The Speak Easy isn’t an accelerator nor an incubator. Rather, it’s a collaborative workspace, where entrepreneurs in any phase of an early-stage startup can work. A membership is required to utilize the space, but thanks to funds from local veteran entrepreneurs, Develop Indy and the CICF, only a nominal annual fee will be required of members.

To learn more and apply for membership, visit SpeakEasyIndy.com.

My Best Friend’s Hair
If you’ve spent a day in Broad Ripple, it’s likely you’ve noticed the abundance of hair salons. With so many options, how do you choose? Enter My Best Friend’s Hair, where consumers can search for stylists based on their criteria (price, specialties, location), and stylists can be found by consumers.

Quipol
Quipol makes it easy to gauge your audience’s sentiment. While not specifically designed for fashion, this flexible tool certainly has a future in it! What better way to explain why, than to show you. Here’s some new glasses I’m considering from Warby Parker (another fashion + tech love story). What say you?

Apparel Media
These guys aren’t from Indy, but with IU as an alma mater and Chicago as their HQ, they’re pretty darn local. What started as a custom apparel printing business, has now transformed into a high caliber solution to help global brands connect with a hyperlocal audience. Companies like AXE have used Apparel Media to get in front of their target (male, 18-24) by co-branding shirts, bundled with product samples or QR-enabled insert cards. (Read more on Forbes)

Roboto Wear
A self described “clothing company with a mechanical heart,” RobotoWear has created a line of robot t-shirts, polos, hoodies and hats, perfect for the tech-minded.

Connect with me to talk fashion (and tech):

• Twitter
• Tumblr
• Svpply

IFC : Fall Trend Report | Image courtesy of Marc McCoy

KA+A recently partnered up with Indianapolis Fashion Collective, in an effort to transform the way that Indy is building its fashion community. The Collective had been operating for a year, hosting special events and creating a member-based network that would support and mentor designers, photographers, stylists, models, and fashion professionals in the city. The big vision was to create a live/work fashion district in the heart of Indy. It was a great start, and the right minds were coming together, but the burden of the dream was growing heavier and not enough people were joining the group to help carry it.

Understanding that in order for fashion to be a noticeable and viable part of Indy’s fabric, KA+A worked with IFC on shaping a new structure, and a new brand to go with it.

We don’t need to convince the city that fashion and a creative class are good for the economy. We need to convince them that enough people in Indiana care about fashion.

Our immediate thought, was to look at Verge, the wildly successful startup tech meetup, that has become a compelling movement for entrepreneurs, investors, developers, designers and more to join. We had the opportunity to work with Matt Hunckler during a re-branding engagement, in which the meetup dropped its Silicon Valley, Hackers & Founders moniker, and forged an original identity – Verge.

What Verge has established is a regular, replicable event that provides space for its members to share ideas and connect to the right people. By facilitating a similar event in the fashion world, our hope is that people would find a business partner, an investment, a new patron, a mentor, a friend, a partner, a retailer, a photographer, a stylist – that people would connect and build things. IFC’s job isn’t to tell them how, but rather, to put all the people in the right room to make things happen in the city.

Individual growth is magnified when it sees itself mirrored in a vibrant community, allowing ideas to organically take root both generally and individually.

With this model in mind, KA+A stripped back member dues, tearing down any hurdles to joining the movement. Instead of chasing down several big projects, we tightened the purpose of the group to curating monthly events that would unite and grow both the consumers and creators of fashion. A feat that could be organized easily by a few people, and often inexpensively with the help of sponsors. Finally, to reflect the new spirit of the group, a new name was given – Pattern. A name that is intrinsically fashion, and also speaks to the recurring events and creating a new mold for fashion in Indy.

When something happens just once, it may be dismissed as an accident . . . but when the same event repeats itself, it is a sign that a deeper historical process is unfolding.- Zizek

Tonight the new Pattern debuts to a sold-out crowd at the IMOCA. A promising start for an inspiring organization that is truly #makingindybetter.

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Want to meet up with Pattern? Visit meetup.com/pattern.
For fashion editorials, musings and trends, head over to patternindy.com.
Join the fashion conversation at @patternindy.
Like Pattern over on Facebook.

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A special thanks to our honorary team member, Benjamin Blevins, for his help spearheading the new Pattern identity. All quotes are his, unless otherwise noted!

Do you remember Del.icio.us? Or Delicious as it’s been simplified to today. I’ve been a longtime user now (since ’07). Their simple, but powerful, tagging system immediately became a trusty aid for me to catalog and organize my project management apps, blog inspiration, gift lists, wish lists, wedding, trips, and more. Delicious was a gateway solution for me (and millions of others) to tame the web and cull it according to my personal tastes.

Quickly after joining Delicious, I discovered other, more specialized apps to help me collect & share the web.

First there was Tumblr: a beautiful, engaging, simply designed and very compelling microblogging tool. Links became alive when you could display them as videos, photos or quotes – providing a sort of beauty and depth that Delicious lacked.

Then I found Svpply, a tool to catalog, share and discover things I wanted to buy. I was doing this before on Tumblr, but Svpply makes it so easy to capture the category (clothes, shoes, media, home goods, etc.) and price of a product. And I can follow other users, search their lists, and find new things that match my tastes.

When I recently took a trip to Paris, I signed up for Duffel, a travel app to collect lodging, restaurants, and activities that I was planning for the trip. Only it’s more than a list; coupled with a virtual cork board and Google Map integration, it is a comprehensive dashboard for easily planning your travels.

Then of course there’s Spotify (pre-cursored by Last.fm), which I can use to build playlists that portray my musical personality and share with the world at any moment what I’m listening to.

These are all wonderful tools, and I use them often. But I feel that despite all of these solutions, I’ve lapped back to my original problem: how to organize my corner of the web. My interests, albeit quite a bit more organized now, are still divided at best. And many of them could happily coexist if given the chance.

With the recent rollout of the new Delicious, I had hope. After being sold by Yahoo, Delicious went back into beta to introduce Delicious Stacks – Playlists for the Web. It feels sort of Tumblr-esque. You can create a stack dedicated to a theme, associate photos with your links, and view them in a grid layout. You can share stacks and follow stacks. It’s easy to see how one could turn back to Delicious as a more appealing place to keep your repository.

But there’s too many other specialized traits of Tumblr, Svpply, Spotify and Duffel that I don’t think I could give up. I love Tumblr‘s aesthetic and affinity for fashion; Duffel‘s integration with Google maps is clutch; no one makes it quite as easy to catalog your shopping list as Svpply; and Spotify is a straight up specialist in music. So Delicious Stacks, while I applaud your leap, I’m not sure you’re the answer to streamlining my collections.

When I think of my dream solution, I think of those folks over at Salesforce. They were on to something with their app store – allowing other people, who can satisfy a niche need better, develop that solution and plug it into their platform so their customers can enjoy a single ecosystem. The platform is key.

There’s a “Gang of Four” warring to create this platform. Google owns information, Apple the device, Amazon the cloud, and Facebook the identity. Facebook recently gave us a glimpse of their strategy at the f8 conference: Facebook Timeline. With the promise of “all your apps in one space” it could be just the trick. I’m eagerly awaiting the possibility!

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Last.fm
Founded 2002
Last.fm lets you effortlessly keep a record of what you listen to from any player. Based on your taste, Last.fm recommends you more music and concerts. (Last.fm)

del.icio.us
Founded in 2003
A social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. (Wikipedia)

The Facebook
Founded 2004
A social network where users can create profiles with photos, lists of personal interests, contact information, and other personal information. (Wikipedia)

Polyvore
Founded 2007
Polyvore is a tool that helps you clip, style and share digital collages of products you find while shopping.

Tumblr
Founded 2007
A microblogging platform that allows users to post text, images, videos, links, quotes and audio to their tumblelog, a short-form blog. (Wikipedia)

Spotify
Founded 2008
Spotify is an online music streaming service. Like a growing number of distribution applications, Spotify uses peer-to-peer technology to stream music to its users. (Spotify Forum)

Pinterest
Founded 2009
A vision board-styled social photo sharing website where users can create and manage theme-based image collections. (Wikipedia)

Svpply
Founded 2009
Use Svpply to keep track of the things you want to buy, or browse a personal feed of products from across the web, curated and filtered by the people and stores you find interesting. (Svpply)

Duffel
Founded 2009
Duffel is place to collect your ideas on where to go and what to do while you’re traveling. Comprehensive, centralized trip-planning dashboard – with tools that enable travelers to drag and drop information on lodging, dining and activities from across the Web, get travel inspiration by viewing other members’ public itineraries, and plan group trips involving multiple destination experts. (Duffel)

The New Delicious
Released in 2011
With Delicious you save, stack and share the web. Instantly save your favorite links, collect your discoveries in stacks, share what you find, and dig deeper into your favorite topics. ( Delicious)

Facebook Timeline
Text Released 2011
Timeline is a new way of presenting yourself on Facebook, that dives deep into your past, but also makes your history dynamic while giving apps a new lease on life and works just as well on mobile as it does the desktop. (Gizmodo)

But there actually may be a third, more exciting value prop to amplifying your list: innovation, or even invention, of products.

The post details the common scenario of proposal writing:

For example, let’s say you have to draft up a contract for a client project, a rather humdrum task. Applying N-dimensional thinking, you decide to transform this task by increasing its overall efficiency (one new dimension), improving the contract template design (a second dimension), and learning a new application that will add value to your general skill set and resumé (a third dimension).

It’s a familiar story, and it’s one that for some of our colleagues, inspired the launch of Tinderbox, a web-based application that helps you create, manage, and track proposals more efficiently.

Task lists just got a little more exciting. What do you get to do today?

After signing up the whole team for paid accounts, I let my other test login expire. I had forgotten about it until today, when I had the chance to see some of Flow’s remarketing efforts.

I have to say, their campaign was pretty compelling (and this is to an already converted customer). They tell you straight up that the app has changed; try it again – for free.

In the world of software, where iteration is key to developing the best product, this is a brilliant move. I’ve tried many apps, where it was just a missing key feature or two, between me and a paid account. Or, I thought it would be good someday, but it wasn’t the right fit, right now. Usually, I stay signed up with their newsletters – but rarely have I felt that I, the non-customer, am being spoken to. I love that this campaign has a clear audience and content that resonates.

Give former users a second chance. You’ve got nothing to lose, and a great chance to win them over.

In a takeaway from The Art of Non-Conformity: Set Your Own Rules, Live the Life You Want, and Change the World by Chris Guillebeau, the Startup Daily recommends creating a “To-Stop-Doing” List:

“Write down all the things you are doing that are draining your energy and are not essential to reaching your goals. Take advantage of the fact that stopping is easier than starting.”

So what kind of things do you need to stop doing? With each new project comes different needs, routines, and approaches. Maybe it’s standing meetings with a certain group of people, coming in earlier in the mornings or working after hours. In general, these are all good ideas – but they may not be necessary for every project. In fact too many meetings may waste time, and working too early or too late may cut into the rest your mind needs to do its best. As Todd Henry describes in his book The Accidental Creative:

“We develop systems to replicate our past successes–or to prevent replicating our past failures–but what we really do is fossilize these processes and create rigidity in our life.”

Another approach, is to plan your “negative space”, or when you can’t do work. In a recent blog, Watching the Creative Clock, Carl Alvianion meets with 5 creative to talk about their work days. One of them, Janna, a freelance interaction designer, discusses how a detailed schedule can actually inhibit her work. Rather she needs to plan her negative space. Whether it’s a deadline, meeting, or event, knowing that she only has until X:00pm to get her work done that day is a motivator.

So when you’re getting overwhelmed by listing out all the things you need to do, remember also to consider what you can stop doing and to set a deadline for the day to adjust your focus.

Miranda July: The Future on Nowness.com.

I love this idiosyncratic solution from Miranda July, an offcut from her latest film, The Future. If often seems like a battle to be productive these days, with all the sources of distraction, entertainment, and information. Todd Henry refers to it as The Ping in his recent book, The Accidental Creative.

The Ping is that little sensation that occasionally prompts me to check my email or social media accounts. It’s the impulse to mindlessly surf news sites instead of doing something productive… it even has a life philosophy for me: “something out there is more important than whatever is right here.”

I use various software apps and online tools to help facilitate my productivity and also the team’s. My main goal is to ensure we have the time, space, and environment to create. I detailed in a previous post some of my methods for doing this, which included: leveraging lists, creating routines, and taking control of our schedule rather than being reactive.

What tools or practices help you to be productive?

When my friend Jenni and I started IndySpectator, we decided to base our business on email. Not a blog, Tumblr, Facebook, or a custom platform. Just plain jane email. Each week we send a few issues to our loyal readers exposing them to new things to love about Indy – food, arts, startups, music, events, and more.

The result has been a very engaged audience, that I don’t imagine we could have gained through a web-based platform. Our readers like us, because email offers the excitement of exclusivity and being the first in the know. No one feels special “discovering” what’s been broadcasted to millions. Additionally we come to our readers, versus having them come to us. Life is hectic enough to remember to read that post and social streams are updated so often that it’s easy to miss a pertinent piece of news.

Email has been good for our business. It’s familiar for us and our consumers, and with simple software like MailChimp we can create and send campaigns with minimal involvement. It’s a repeatable, executable and lightweight model that Jenni and I have been able to manage and moonlight with just a few hours each day.

Email has also been a good source of data. Our audience is a known quantity and the stats from each campaign are user-centric: open rates, unsubscribe rates, forwards, clicks, etc. Amalgamate the results, and we can begin to see our readers’ personalities: behavior patterns, likes, dislikes, and with social integration, we even know what they are saying about us on Twitter and on Facebook. This data is invaluable not only to improve our content and product, but also to quantify and qualify our audience to potential partners and advertisers.

In their recent Email X-Factors report, ExactTarget details the advantages of email as a marketing tool (and in our case, as a product):

• FAMILIARITY
  Because email isn’t new, consumers are familiar with the technology, are comfortable using it, and know exactly what to expect.
• MANAGEABILITY
  Many consumers wait until the evening or weekend to catch up on email. So while they like the immediacy of sending an email message, they appreciate the ability to read or respond at their own pace.
• PRIVACY AND TRUST
  Subscribers have chosen to engage with you, and in return expect that you won’t share their email address and that they can unsubscribe anytime.
• RELEVANCY
  The biggest difference between valuable and non-valuable email programs is whether or not the information provided relates to the interests of the customer.
• EXCLUSIVITY
  Becoming a Subscriber is like becoming a member of an exclusive club, and they expect members-only perks: deals & promotions; early notification – being the “first in the know”; education – keeping informed on topics they’re interested in; and content tailored to their interests.

Download the full report on ExactTarget.com.

The one glaring weakness of publishing our content exclusively through email, is missing out on SEO potential and capturing a new audience through search. Not wanting to compromise the strength of our core email offering, we’ve began to explore a few ways to augment it with online content. Several months ago, we launched an exclusive Facebook campaign – 365 Ways to Love Indy. Each day, we post bite-size things to do around Indy. They’ve been crafted to stand on their own and engage those who don’t subscribe to our email, or to re-engage with our loyal subscribers who are just looking for a little bit more to love about Indy.

Email certainly isn’t new, but it’s potency as a communication tool has continued to prove itself.

Don’t water down your vision in an effort to appeal to a broader market. Proudly Exclude People. It’s a big world, you can confidently leave out 99% of it. The more narrow your focus is, the more passionate your customers will be about you and your business.

This is a hard-learned lesson, particularly as a young business or startup, eager and cash-starved. However, bloating your product with features to win sales, can quickly carry you away from the original vision. You need to “define the world’s appetite.”

But don’t take this as a writ large invitation to ignore these potential customers; you still need to listen to them, but do so critically. What problem are they trying to solve and how can you help them solve it? If you can’t answer this question, it’s probably not a love match and you’ll need to deliver that message with grace. If you can help them, before you add another feature to your list, press on to see if there’s an existing solution, a similar feature, an integration, or another way of approaching their problem that can achieve the same desired results.