Press. voanews.com
“Brand strategist” Phil Pallen travels from city to city to meet with
clients, individuals and companies who want to shape their image through
traditional and social media. “A few weeks ago, I was in an airplane for 41
hours of that week,” said the Los Angeles-based marketer and publicist, “and I
actually did a full loop around the world — LA, Europe, Middle East, Asia, back
to LA.”
He recently helped launch a gourmet food truck in Australia, taking a
trans-Pacific flight for the opening. Pallen has no fixed office, but works
from the shared workspaces of a company called WeWork, which has 200 locations
in 50 cities around the world. Other entrepreneurs have created similar
co-working spaces, and they are common in Silicon Valley, the tech hub around
San Francisco where a single shared space can house scores of tech startups.
Charles Du, a software product manager from California who spoke to VOA
via Skype, travels the world as a digital nomad and teaches others about the
lifestyle. He says most of his fellow nomads are also technical workers, but
not all.
“I've met account managers who work with clients remotely, and lots of
marketing people,” said Du. “I’ve met nursing faculty, people that teach for
universities and they conduct their entire classes online.”
An office when on the road
Co-working spaces are also used by accountants, lawyers and other
professionals who do much of their work by computer but need to travel to meet
with clients, says WeWork's director of public relations, Taylor Patterson. “We
have folks who may have their home base in Los Angeles, but travel to London
frequently,” she said, and when they get there, they have office space with
Wi-Fi and other amenities.
Working from the same Los Angeles location as Phil Pallen, actress and
producer Fanny Veliz operates a business called Avenida Productions, which
finances and produces films through online crowd-sourcing sites such as
Indiegogo.
Veliz helps filmmakers get their projects off the ground and says that
her company focuses “on diversity, creating opportunities for people of color
and other under-represented groups in the entertainment business.” She works
wherever she needs to, setting up shop as needed in various parts of Los
Angeles or other U.S. cities, or in Mexico.
Local vs. global
In Los Angeles or New York the limits are disappearing, says an expert
in technology and business. The ability from work remotely "changes
someone's creativity level," says John Maeda, a former MIT professor and
former president of the Rhode Island School of Design who spoke via Skype.
“Local has a harder time competing now with global,” he said, and for a
product or services aimed at a market, for example, in New York, “someone who
lives farther away from New York can create something and sell it in New York
instantly, or in Beijing, or anywhere.”
Working remotely opens new vistas for “knowledge” workers, said analyst
Maeda, while industries such as construction are necessarily tied to a physical
location, and at least for today, the mobility of knowledge work is part of the
digital divide that separates workers.
Internet makes it easy to move
Growing hubs for digital nomads include low-cost resorts such as Ubud on
the Indonesian island of Bali and Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, said Charles
Du, who has worked in both. He has also worked in cities in Europe and Latin
America. He said the challenges include finding housing, friends and new shared
work space in a new location, but that with the internet, it is becoming
increasingly easy. Brand strategist
Pallen says working from various places, he can see “how other people live
around the world, that inspires the work that I do day to day.”