Pod Works, the Mini Work Stations

With a mobile phone in hand, gone were the days when we had to look for coins to make calls from a public phone booth.  So, what is going to happen with British Telecom red phone boxes that have gone redundant?

Bar Works Inc, a New York based company, is fitting out these phone booths with plugs, printers/scanners, WiFi and ethernet connections to create mini work stations for people on the go. The idea is that it can be very expensive to pay for cups of coffee just so you can have free internet access in a noisy cafe, when you are out of town.

Now you can pay a membership fee of £19.99 so you can have the privacy to work in a Pod Works any time, day or night, in the location you are heading to, that is, if a link to an APP confirms that it is available there.  To top that up, you will get free tea and coffee from its hot drink machine.

Pod Works will launch in July, 2016 and only in London, Leeds and Edinburgh.

This got me thinking.  Why does it take someone from USA to see value in UK's iconic looking red phone boxes?

Maybe reading, "HBR's 10 Must Reads on Innovation" by Harvard Business Review, which includes the article, "The Discipline of Innovation", by Peter F. Drucker will help us to discover how we can create wealth from the abandoned and save the environment along the way.