At the GigaOm Net:Work conference on Thursday, Fabio Rosati, President and CEO, of Elance and Trevor Blackwell, the Founder and CEO of Anybots discussed how this future is now. Elance is a consultant-based freelance organization and its resources use Anybots to virtually be on-site for customers. “Our workers commute two to three thousand miles to work in seconds,” Rosati said.

These “white collar” robots, controlled by a freelancer, can handle front lobby greetings, business deliveries and more. Because the human workforce doesn’t work 24 hours a day — and robots generally can — Anybots can be used by multiple people at different times, allowing for economies of scale. Blackwell mentioned this as the “Zipcar approach” as idle robots could be tapped into as needed.

But using robots to crowdsource work isn’t just about saving money or spreading out the workload: Even a virtual presence may be more important than a caller in a conference.

Panel moderator, Thomas Vander Wal, Principal and Sr. Consultant, InfoCloud Solutions and, Analyst, GigaOM Pro, recalled a recent encounter with an Anybot in the office. “I was on the phone,” he said, “and an Anybot was in the room, as were other people. I was so focused on the robot and people that I forgot we had someone on the phone.”

Photo by Pinar Ozger.

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Robot avatars might be a ways away yet, but fractional employment — the idea of slicing professionals’ skills into smaller units and using technology to make a profit selling these bundles of hours or services — is increasingly becoming mainstream. Just look at the success of start-ups from TaskRabbit to Elance and oDesk.

This ability to purchase part of a professional’s time has obvious advantages for companies and individuals striving to be agile, but it is also impacting the ability of small organizations to afford expensive skills in small doses, including tiny operations in some of the world’s most remote regions.

Remote collaboration and “fractional” employees are part of the future of work not only in the corporate world, but also in the world of small NGOs (non-government organizations) in developing countries. How so? If you want to see these changes in action, you could do a lot worse than study the work of Minnesota-based Jay Haase and Wire Car.

Meals for Access

A former IT guy in the States with previous job titles like software engineer and large-scale database front-end developer, Haase decided to put his career on hold to give back as a Peace Corps member in Namibia. While he was serving there, a woman he met who worked with vulnerable children and orphans learned about Haase’s tech prowess and used her cooking skills to bribe him into developing a simple database for her to use to track her work.

“It’s hard to build a database. I didn’t really want to do it,” Haase admits, but his friend was persuasive. “She would make these deals: ‘You can come and stay at my house for the weekend. I’ll cook for you all weekend and you can just sit and program.’”

The end result was a simple, flexible database that allowed small organizations helping people in need to report the impact of their work to the donors who hold the purse strings, winning them more money to assist more people. Haase kept improving the database and started giving it away to other small organizations helping vulnerable people across Africa (and even one in New Orleans).

That was good for him – he ended up getting hired to build a national database of vulnerable children by a large organization in Namibia based on his work – but he found that many of the organizations he gave the database to still struggled to make the most of it.

“Even for an Access database, things go wrong. The machine gets a virus. Stuff happens,” Haase explains, citing a snafu with a memory stick at one NGO that erased months of work. “You still need IT support and the problem was I couldn’t really support them. They’d be calling me from Zambia and there was nothing I could really do.” The solution to this issue came, ironically, not when Haase moved closer to his client organizations, but when he returned to Minnesota.

Further away but closer than ever through the cloud

Back in his chilly home state earlier this year, Haase had an inspiration. By putting all the data in the cloud, he could support organizations in far-away Africa better than if he were there himself. Basing his services in the cloud means he can offer remote assistance, advice on more sophisticated queries and daily back-ups.

Haase says helping an increasing number of organizations is simplified by having everything online and amounts to a tiny monthly payment to the site’s host and the occasional trouble-shooting email or Skype chat with organizations. This enables him to offer the service at low or no cost depending on the size of the NGO and use the project as a calling card to help him win larger, more lucrative projects.

“That’s what the social entrepreneurship is,” he says. “A lot of organizations do that. They do one thing that can make money so that they can use that money to do some other good thing.”

Not all the small organizations that have the original database can afford an Internet connection to access the new cloud version – in fact, only about half can – but that percentage is still leaps and bounds ahead of what it would have been only a few years before. “In Namibia it’s just being possible now,” Haase says. “3G is really prevalent. You can get Internet almost anywhere in Namibia, relatively fast Internet, but that’s only happened in the last year or so. I think it’s probably similar for other countries like Kenya or Ethiopia.”

The ripple effects of tech

People in Namibia “go gaga” for Internet according to Haase, flocking in such numbers to get online when free internet was offered from one to five in the morning that connections became unusable in the early hours.

That’s good for a newly Facebook-mad populace, but also good for small NGOs. Previously, they faced a simple conundrum, summed up neatly by Haase: “Organizations are trying to help a lot of people. They get money to help those people, and they have to do reports on what they did with that money. The reports are getting more and more complicated every year, so you really need a database. And in a developing country where there are not many IT people, how do you get a database?”

The answer is the same combination that’s changing work in the developed world: new ideas that allow workers like Haase to slice and sell their services differently, cheap cloud computing and increased connectivity.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Manuel Ebert, CC 2.0.

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Updated: The release will be generally available on August 17.

The “work graph” approach

Wrike is built on the idea of the work graph, like the social graph, as a key organizing feature of the tool. What’s new in this release is the flexibility and the speed. Wrike’s customers are managing up to 70,000 tasks and 5,000 projects. In the demo I saw, users could switching instantly between across task lists, spreadsheet view, timeline (Gannt chart), list of backlog tasks (tasks without set due dates), folders (attached files), and activity streams. The work graph approach means tasks can cross projects, similar to how your friends can cross circles in Google+.

I asked Filev how Wrike was in terms improving work. He replied that Wrike is more of a:

[M]anagement solution — geared more toward managing organizations and people — than just project management. Top down and bottom up. Project management works in ivory tower to create plans for next quarter and then sends those plans to “resources” (team members). In another approach, people do the work, and then managers try to figure out what is going on and aggregate.

We combine both. In our case we shoot toward real time enterprise. Real time visibility to work.

Wrike at work

Filev told me about how The Project Management PrepCast, a five-person startup, uses Wrike as a “unified collaboration, coordination and management platform for the virtual team.” The founder, Cornelius Fichtner, is a certified project management professional with 18 years of experience. His challenge was that running a startup with multiple projects is very different than running a project. The work graph came to the rescue. Cornelius is able to provide foundations, but his team can also create tasks and share them “up” then update tasks on their own — with much of it happening through Wrike’s email integration (which many users may find more convenient than visiting the Wrike site). This is crowdsourcing project management work, empowering project management where the work itself is happening.

Wrike provides an excellent platform for modern transparent and more virtual organizations. Sharing is flexible and can include everyone or just some of people on the project. Wrike can also take on underlying workflows that are very connected and complicated, but reduce the clutter through filters and search tools. Slicing and dicing seems to happen instantly and is reflecting the real time nature of the work.

The Wrike approach is responsive to the needs of people and the modern organization: Complexity can be managed, work can be shared, and transparency supported — all at blazing speed.

Image courtesy of Flickr user aresauburn™

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As a freelance expert, should you jump in, or are you ringing your own industry’s death knell?

Having built an expert crowdsourcing site for the past year, I’m convinced these sites don’t have to commoditize expertise. Quite the opposite, I think they can give it direct value.

Freelance experts’ hourly rate typically includes three basic transaction costs: customer acquisition, customer retention and work performed. Take freelance graphic designers, for example. First they need to find customers, which requires sales and marketing investment and time. Once they have customers, they have to maintain them, whether it’s answering the phone, reporting on progress or dealing with billing and collections. Sometimes very little of a freelancers’ time is devoted to doing real design work. Typically, these people became freelancers because they love design, not because they love managing overhead.

The new expert crowdsourcing sites eliminate most of the overhead costs by bringing customers and experts together and automating service, support and billing. The freelancers perform work and get paid directly for their expertise. While the hourly earnings may appear lower than traditional freelance work, once the transactional costs of being a freelancer are removed, the hourly fees for direct work can be about the same. The upside is that the time freelancers spend finding and managing clients can now be applied to actually doing the work they love.

The critical issue for freelancers is to find sites that allow them to earn more for their work than they could on their own. Some crowdsourcing sites are approaching this point, especially sites that offer a collaborative compensation model. One such example is uTest, where top software testers are earning as much as $5,000 per month — many while working primarily during evenings and weekends. uTest has had a number of testers from the U.S., the UK, Russia and India report that they are currently earning more from uTest than their full-time jobs as testers.

The collaborative model is an evolution of crowdsourcing incentive systems. In the early days of crowdsourcing, companies issued requests for submissions. Potentially, hundreds of participants could respond, but only the one or two “winners” collected any prize money. Considering all the work the “losers” did, this model heavily favored the project sponsor over the people doing the work. More recently, crowdsourcing companies have adjusted to models that pick multiple winners (with payment distributed among them) or have moved to collaborative models in which each contributor to a final result is compensated.

When uTest’s testing experts work on a new software release, they each get paid for every bug they find. Some find many bugs, some only a few. Chances are high that most earn something but those who do excellent work earn more. uTest is built upon a meritocratic reputation system: Testers who get rated highly by customers get paid more, get invited to more projects, and get paid more for their work. Conversely, testers who don’t satisfy customers earn a poor reputation, and don’t get invited to future projects. True expertise is rewarded.

The per-bug payout rates uTest experts earn can rival the effective earning rate they would make freelancing on their own. In this model, project sponsors win as well because they get exactly what they want: a comprehensive and collaborative testing result from many participants, and a payment system that is based solely on performance. With software, “more is better” applies, and uTest’s ability is to provide multiple test engineers provides better coverage than any one individual.

While it’s moving fast, the crowdsourcing industry is still young and the underlying models are evolving quickly. The industry is stratifying into two distinct types of crowds: curated crowds of experts and general crowds that enjoy participating. In the participation model, the crowd may accept limited or no monetary compensation as reward, participating is reward enough. For expert crowdsourcing sites, the long-term sustainability test is simple: “can a freelance expert make a better living being part of my crowd than on their own?”

I believe that expert crowdsourcing does not by definition commoditize expertise. In fact, if done right, it focuses everyone on what matters most: the results of expertise.

Niel Robertson is a three-time entrepreneur and CEO of Trada Paid Search, a crowdsourced paid search marketplace. You can find Niel on Twitter at @nielr1. He will be talking about “The Human Cloud: The Elastic Workforce in the Enterprise,” at our Net:Work conference in San Francisco on Dec. 9.

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Here are some ideas for tasks that can be crowdsourced, and links to sites that can help you with those tasks. Note that some of the sites mentioned can be used for several different types of crowdsourcing, and not just the tasks mentioned here.

Technical Tasks

• Translation. Need something translated, without having to rely on Google Translation to do the trick? Try MyGenGo.
• Transcription. Have audio files that need transcribing, such as a podcast? Try CastingWords.
• Photo tagging. Looking to get photographs tagged or classified and support a good cause? Try the nonprofit crowdsourced labor site Samasource.
• Keyword optimization. Looking for SEO help? Try Trada.
• Data verification. Have a long list of business information, like a contact list or URLs, and need that content verified? Try the CrowdFlower self-service site (CrowdFlower CEO Lukas Biewald will be speaking about the future of work and crowdsourcing at our Net:Work conference in San Francisco next month).
• Website testing. Looking for usability testing for your site? Try Usertesting.com.
• Beta testing software. Need some skilled beta testers to test your software or go through your code? Try TopCoder.
• Article writing. Need some content for your website or blog? Try SquadHelp.

Creative Tasks

• Logo design. Looking for a logo for your company? Try Prova.com.
• Business card design. Need a new business card layout? Try Guerra-Creativa.
• Print and online ads. Want a print ad or an online banner ad? Try 99designs.
• Website design. Need a new website interface design? Try crowdSPRING.
• Product development. Want to see if your cool product concept can become a real product? Try Quirky.com.
• Brand names and taglines. Looking for a new name for a company, product or service or a clever tagline? Try NamingForce.
• Video. Need a video produced? Try Tongal.
• Packaging. Need packaging for a new product? Try BootB.
• Creative campaign. Running a campaign and need a winning idea? Try IdeaBounty.
• Quick ideas. Need some fast, inexpensive input? Try IdeaOffer.

Whatever your need, crowdsourcing can help you get work done and tap into crowds of talented and skilled workers willing to perform work in new ways. Keep in mind that the work can vary in terms of quality. Most sites that charge for services have some kind of refund policy if you are not 100 percent satisfied, but read the fine print.

What tasks have you crowdsourced? How did you go about it?

stock xchng image by lusi

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Last month saw the launch of CrowdFlower, an interesting venture that applies Dolores Labs’ Labor-as-a-Service platform to the non-profit “micro employment” foundation Samasource.

We’ve previously covered web-based labor and outsourcing services — notably Shorttask and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk — that match-make workers and tasks, and I’ve been critical of the unsustainable payment levels for most of the tasks on offer, often at compensation levels lower than minimum wage.

CrowdFlower puts a new spin on this concept, by assigning tasks to workers in the developing world and from communities that really need opportunity. Though the level of compensation for a typical task is still below normal levels in the developed world, the payment goes to communities where the money appears to be having a very positive impact.

Drawn from Samasource’s base of impoverished women, young people seeking opportunity and refugees, CrowdFlower’s workers are trained to undertake a wide range of computer-based tasks such as audio transcription, application testing, remote virtual assistance and data entry.

With workers drawn from Cameroon, Kenya, India, Pakistan, Ghana and Uganda, it’s likely that their English is of a good enough standard to mean that communication shouldn’t be a problem, and feedback mechanisms are available to rate the outcomes of worker’s tasks.

Mobile Altruism

CrowdFlower is accompanied by an iPhone app, Give Work, which adds another dimension to the service. With Give Work, iPhone owners tasks can also undertake tasks and donate a little of their spare time. Each task you complete via your iPhone is also assigned to a trained refugee in Africa, who is then paid for both their work and yours.

As I write, the task I elected to undertake was to compare images of sneakers an select the pairs that matched my tastes. This took me around 45 seconds, and I’m hoping my trivial efforts will go to help someone in the developing world.

It’s easy to see something like CrowdFlower as form of “digital colonialism,” but it appears to be having a very palpable impact in the communities and lives of the workers employed by Samasource. In essence, this venture is creating an entirely new culture of web workers with potentially promising careers, as well as re-balancing the inequalities between those with opportunity and those without, though it’s worth noting that it isn’t clear that all tasks are always allocated to workers in need.

CrowdFlower’s enabling a laudable mission, with tangible benefit to society. It’s a venture I’ll be keeping a close eye on as I publishing some work tasks of my own. Read more about Samasource in “Samasource: How African refugees are scoring Silicon Valley Internet jobs.”

Are you working with an innovative charitable crowdsourcing project like this? Tell us about it below.

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However, early on, many companies were not monitoring the site and not addressing the complaints. In fact, one of my rants was actually addressed by a former employee of the company in question.

Now I’m finding that GetSatisfaction is becoming a key tool in troubleshooting all of the technical – and vendor – issues that come up in my web work.

First, I had to make sure that I was accessing the right forum to vent my frustrations. Then I had to decide if I had a question or was announcing a problem. GetSatisfaction prompts you to provide as much detailed information as possible to expedite the process of getting a response and appropriate answer or recommendation.

My latest GetSatisfaction interaction occurred when I discovered that a Firefox Add-on that I was trying out – Power Twitter – wasn’t working well for me. In addition to a few bugs that were driving me crazy, my typical twittering flow was being interrupted by the app. Granted, I knew the app was in beta, but when I realized it wasn’t for me at this time, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to remove it from my browser.

My first thought was tweet it so I put out the question “How do I remove Power Twitter from my browser?” The recommendations that initially came in were telling me to download an application cleaning software to remove it. This didn’t sound right to me. Then I noticed a tiny T3 at the top of my Power Twitter’d Twitter page. Clicking on it led me directly to the company’s GetSatisfaction page. Smart. Very smart.

I posted my quandry in the company’s support forum, and gave my question a catchy title (per GetSatisfaction’s recommendation): “How Do I Kill Power Twitter?” Okay, maybe I was a little harsh. But it got responses from other users. The trick was to go to my Firefox menu: Tools > Add Ons > Extensions > Uninstall.

To be honest, the first person to give me the above solution was on Twitter, and the tweets came in within about an hour of my initial question while the GetSatisfaction responses were hours later than that. Still, I’m impressed that a company would have the foresight to build in a link or button to get users – beta or otherwise – straight to their GetSatisfaction forum. While I didn’t hear yet from an actual employee of the company, clearly harnessing the combined knowledge and experience of customers is working.

You may also want to use GetSatisfaction to make suggestions and recommendations to a company for their product or application, especially if you’re a beta user. Sending your ideas to a company directly may get lost in the ether while posting it on GetSatisfaction creates a permanent record which has obvious value.

Companies can benefit from paying power users of their products to monitor and participate on their GetSatisfaction page. Or GetSatisfaction could build in some kind of payment or “tipping” process for very helpful members. The helpful advice and solutions are really worth the money.

Have you been getting satisfaction from GetSatisfaction.com yet? What other ways are you getting great customer service?

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On the one hand, it definitely generates healthy competition, and companies stand to win out in a big way when service providers and freelancers are openly vying for your dollar. We’ve looked at some examples in the past, like 99 designs, a site where designers enter competitions to win contracts.

InnoCentive has a different take on crowdsourcing.

Their focus is not as narrow or specific as that of 99 designs. Instead, they offer a broad reaching problem-solving approach. InnoCentive lets organizations create “Challenges” that “Problem Solvers” can then submit potential solutions to.

Challenges are organized both by discipline and by pavilion (targeted, sometimes sponsored challenges clustered around general issue sets), and are posted by clients, which are either private companies or not-for-profit organizations. Each Challenge listed features a brief summary, the reward, type, and deadline, and in most cases, the Challenge poster, referred to as Seekers throughout InnoCentive.

The rewards are tempting, and lend a Wild West vibe to the whole enterprise. Freelance web workers and consultants might find the amounts, and the freedom, a refreshing change from the usual CRM and RFP drudgery. It’s definitely a democratized system, especially at this early stage in its development. And with rewards ranging from $5,000 to $1,000,000, there’s money to be made. Partial awards are also available, at the discretion of Seeker organizations.

Downsides? As with all crowdsourcing ventures, the potential exists that you could put in lot of time and get little or no return. But there are apparently winners, and not infrequently either, as seen on their list of awarded challenges.

Awards seem to cluster around the physical and health sciences, but there are contracts available for IT, network, and design professionals as well. If you’re looking for a side project, or you’re confident you can compete internationally, InnoCentive might be the place for you.

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