Have a pile of recipes accumulating in a notebook or drawer? Need to oust your siblings as the favorite daughter or son? Want to create an attractive book of recipes? Well, WeWork Labs NY member Cookbook Create can help you with all of these needs – and more.

Cookbook Create, founded by Anna Curran, is an online platform that helps you publish and print custom cookbooks. By uploading your own recipes or borrowing recipes from your family and friends, you can easily use its web-based tools and pre-designed layouts to make a print-on-demand cookbook. The ability to personalize the book by adding photos to the templates enables you to tell a story through food.

Read More

On the last Wednesday of each month, five of the 120 or so companies housed in WeWork Labs NY demo their products to a packed room of entrepreneurs and investors. This Demo Day gives WeWork Labs members an opportunity to learn more about their community. It’s also a chance for the presenting companies to share their stories, what they’re building, and compete for the chance to win a great prize. With five exciting companies presenting their products, a variety of Dean and Deluca sandwiches and fruit, and plenty of beer and wine, why wouldn’t you attend?

If you didn’t make it out, you missed Jeremy Kagan of Pricing Engine trying to bribe the crowd with vodka served from a crystal skull and test tubes filled with M&Ms. You also didn’t hear Ryan Charles of Consmr admit that his favorite shampoo is Pantene Pro-V. Yes, we’ve all been wondering how he keeps that dreamy jet-black shine…

Here are descriptions of last night’s demoing companies, starting with the winner: Pricing Engine.

Pricing Engine is a self-service digital advertising platform for small- and medium-sized businesses. The platform allows you to create an advertisement and deploy it to multiple channels with a single click. Think of it like one-stop shopping. As of now, the available channels include Google AdWords and Bing Ads, but the team will soon add display and social channels such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

BuzzBuzzHome is a Toronto-based company that helps people find new construction homes. Use their website to see contracts, floor plans, property images, and analytics. Unlike other real estate sites, BuzzBuzzHome cuts out irrelevant details by letting you customize the information you see. Users can also follow developments and conversations of other users. Oh, and make sure to check out their blog.

Consmr is a mobile app that’s, “Kind of like Yelp for products,” as founder Ryan Charles describes. It lets you instantly pull up crowdsourced product ratings and reviews. It also provides accurate product recommendations. Instead of generating recommendations by using a user’s browsing history, Consmr also uses your history of ratings and reviews.

Cookbook Create creates print-on-demand versions of original recipes. Just log in to your online account, add recipes of your own (or request recipes from family, friends, and other users), and create your book by using pre-made visual themes and digital layouts. Best of all, it treats recipes as structured information so you don’t have to fuss over making sure your recipes and images fit the layout.

Estimize is the first open platform for financial estimates. Members of the top hedge funds and asset management firms, independent analysts and investors, and corporate finance professionals and students represent its community. The collective knowledge of its users is 67% more accurate than the Wall Street Journal’s estimates. The platform also offers well-visualized data analytic reporting as well as custom reporting so you can enter your own estimates.

WeWork Labs is a community filled with hundreds of brilliant people. Meeting them all is hard to do, let alone keeping up with all of their companies and side-projects. So, save yourself some time and just check out next month’s demo day.

// Jon Chang is a WeWork Labs member, a writer, marketer at Pricing Engine, and a summer marketing instructor at Explo at Yale. His personal site is at www.jonchang.net.

Hi WeWorkers! Devin here, back again to talk about a few cool features in another one of our awesome buildings - SOMA!

One of the first cool design elements we added to this space was finding a great source for reclaimed Barn Wood just north of San Francisco in the great state of Washington.  We used this as panel siding on the 6th floor and then more of it is ran vertically in the lobby downstairs.  I really love how the red tint of the old barn paint comes through to give it a subtle tint.

Right above the wood in the lobby on the 1st floor is our super amazing custom WeWork SF wallpaper designed by my very talented friend and former schoolmate Dan Funderburgh.  Dan is pretty much the master of wallpaper design and has been doing custom work like this for a while in addition to a ton of amazing fine art work and other design.  We had it all printed by our local friends at Flavor Paper in Brooklyn who have worked with Dan pretty extensively in the past.  He has a huge talent for taking traditional design and working in little modern touches that may not even be noticeable at first glance.  The SF paper is networked by a web of Golden Gate Bridge towers, with pictures of bikes and trolley cars mixed in amongst subtle “WeWork” type, and even vines that end in little network CAT5 terminals!  

The last highlight we’ll go over today is the lighting on the 6th floor which was all supplied from another Northwestern purveyor of fine design, Schoolhouse Electric.  Based in Portland, we have been using their light fixtures since the first building in Soho.  They custom build every shipment to order and feature classic design, an amazing selection of options and finishes (check out those awesome hand painted glass globe shades!) and all in a decent budget!  They have recently expanded thier repertoire to furniture, decor and other items so be sure to check out their site.  Everything has a really great mix of classic industrial charm with modern style.  We’re proud supporters!

— Devin Vermeulen is WeWork’s Creative Director.

If you haven’t already noticed, the walls in our WeWork spaces are getting a makeover! In the spirit of street art and un-commissioned public works, the WeWork design team has been hitting our locations to create one-of-a-kind art installations on the late night.

Although we don’t have to jump any barbed wire or run from the 5-0, we create installations after dark in hopes that you leave work in the evening and return the next morning to find a surprise art piece. So far our communities in Soho West and Hollywood have seen the most action!

Make sure to follow along on Instagram by following WeWork and #Guerillamakeover, or by exploring all of our locations in person to see the latest work! 

When WeWork’s MPOWERD started work last year, their goal was to create a source of light that was durable and affordable enough to brighten the darkest corners of our planet and fundamentally change the lives of people living in ‘energy poverty’.
 

The Founders of MPOWERD have been connected through long-term friendships that span 15+ years and several countries. Two of them Jacques-Philippe and Jill Van den Brule, have a strong connection to Haiti where Luci was born. Jacques-Philippe is Haitian American and Jill spent 2 years living in Haiti working for the UN after the earthquake. When MPOWERD started working in the WeWork office in 2012, they had 6 passionate co-founders, a prototype of a solar lantern, and a dream of ending energy poverty worldwide.

By combining cutting-edge solar technology with thoughtful design, MPOWERD has created a light source that has changed lives around the world, but which also fits beautifully into your home.

Today, their Luci lantern is being sold around the world and their office is filled with researchers, graduate students, engineers and sales experts. Luci has appeared at major events, from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to the World Economic Forum in Davos, and she has been featured in more than 30 press outlets, including CNN, ABC News, Woman’s Day and the Los Angeles Times.

In early 2013, MPOWERD launched a Buy One Give One model, and now, with each Luci purchase, its NGO partners help send a Luci to someone living in energy poverty in a developing country. MPOWERD’s significant traction in just the last 6 months have put the company on a path that will allow them to continue to scale-up, including the development of new Luci designs and additional products so that they can bring solar justice to the world.

MPOWERD has shown on a small-scale that Luci can literally brighten the world and they are now running an Indiegogo crowd funding campaign in order to scale production up to bring costs down, find and supply more ‘buy-one-give-one’ partners to maximize Luci’s impact on people living below the ‘energy poverty line’, and continue R&D on the other world-changing products in their pipeline.

MPOWERD is hosting a #GetLuci Happy Hour in Soho West (175 Varick Street) this Wednesday at 6pm in the 2^nd floor lounge.  The lounge will be transformed from WeWork’s newly designed film floor into a fully integrated Luci experience.

 
You can show your support for MPOWERD in a few different ways:

Pledge to their Indiegogo campaign

Tweet about the campaign and follow @mpowerdinc

Like them on Facebook