Trend Spotting: Global Services Exchanges and Capitalism 2.0

I have been watching the trend for a while … the amount of outsourced business being transacted on the various services exchanges around the world is HUGE. We have done story after story on this trend. Here is a summary of the links: eLance, oDesk, Freelancer.com & vWorker (these two have recently merged), CrowdFlower, CrowdSpring, etc.

Our latest addition to the series is Envato, bootstrapped to $10M by Australian entrepreneur couple Collis and Cyan Ta’eed.

Needless to say, I am extremely bullish on the trend, and expect to see this industry developing to huge scale, funneling, potentially, hundreds of billions of dollars of global GDP and supporting numerous small entrepreneurs.

The other encouraging element of this trend is the rise of the million dollar freelancers. Some stories: Ignacio Galarraga, Srish Agarwal, Sanjay Dange. In each case, solo entrepreneurs got started on these exchanges, and then used the platform to build sizable businesses using them as launching pads.

My read: the combination of services exchanges and million dollar freelancers would become an important piece of the Capitalism 2.0 puzzle.

CrowdFunding: Trends and Opportunities

If you follow the technology startup industry, you have surely spotted the CrowdFunding trend by now. Made popular by KickStarter, numerous CrowdFunding sites have cropped up. We recently introduced you to Rock The Post, a site that works on a ‘donation’ model, whereby, the ‘crowd’ of investors funds projects, including causes like liberating Egypt. Typically, incentives include discounted early access to products, or the opportunity to be a part of something significant.

Currently, in the United States, only the ‘donation’ model of CrowdFunding is legal.

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Outsourcing: Ross Kimbarovsky, Co-Founder of CrowdSPRING (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: It’s not that simple. Video is a much more complex thing because producing a video is a lot more expensive and cumbersome than producing even a skeleton logo design.

Ross Kimbarovsky: Precisely. There are a lot of factors involved. There’s the cost. There’s pricing. There is capability. There is our comfort level with presenting the customer with enough choice. >>>

Outsourcing: Ross Kimbarovsky, Co-Founder of CrowdSPRING (Part 4)

SM: You mentioned naming projects. If you’re getting 100 different names, how does the payment work? There’s no more work to do after the naming is done.

RK: The wrap-up for naming projects is simple. When you pick your favorite name, we pay the person who recommended it. So that you understand, we are sensitive to intellectual property issues both in simple writing projects like naming and in complex projects. It’s one reason why we work with more big brands and agencies than all of our competitors combined. >>>

Outsourcing: Ross Kimbarovsky, Co-Founder of CrowdSPRING (Part 3)

SM: So, you said half of your over 109,000 [freelancers] are from the United States. What other countries do you see a lot of representation from?

RK: We have a very strong representation, obviously, from English-speaking countries. We have strong representation from Canada, from the United Kingdom, from Australia. We see a lot of designers from Asia, Malaysia. We see a lot of designers from India. But generally, we see a varied mix. So, if we were to look, for example, at 2011 and the winning designers in our projects, there are probably between 75 and 100 different countries represented in terms of winning designers from those countries. >>>

Outsourcing: Ross Kimbarovsky, Co-Founder of CrowdSPRING (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Today, you’re about a $10 million a year company, right?

Ross Kimbarovsky: Roughly in that range. We’re a private company, so we don’t disclose.

SM: A range is fine. Now, you said 109,000 designers and freelancers from various nationalities. Talk a little bit about which nationalities are represented. >>>

Outsourcing: Ross Kimbarovsky, Co-Founder of CrowdSPRING (Part 1)

We’ve covered outsourcing sites before, like Elance and Freelancer.com, which are open to all kinds of freelancers, from telemarketers to virtual assistants to graphic designers to bookkeepers. But some, like Chicago-based CrowdSPRING, specialize. CrowdSPRING dedicates itself to serving the needs of creative individuals, like graphic designers and writers, and those who need their services. Founders Ross Kimbarovsky and Mike Samson wanted to create an outsourcing environment, using a crowd sourcing model, that would safely open the world to new possibilities rather than limiting small business owners, or whoever needed creative services, to people in their own countries or communities. >>>

Creating Paradigm-Shifting Insights Through Co-Creation and Crowd Sourcing

By guest author Soren Petersen; cowritten by Tina Santiago, Tanja Aitamurto, Richard Spencer and Dr. Jaewoo Joo.

Coming up with creative ideas that can change mental and technical contradictions into progress and profit are among the toughest challenges in business today. Without previous mental or technical references from which to extrapolate we rely on inspiration and intuition when applying new processes. The key to success is operating with a comprehensive combination of systematic and random searches, the alternative being to rely on “old-fashioned luck.” >>>