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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In the meantime, I still need to use databases on occasion. When I do, I generally turn to the inelegant and probably inappropriate solution that is Microsoft Excel. I’ve even been known to use tables created in Word. What can I say, I have a deep-seated mistrust of numbers and their attendant programs. As I do to solve most problems, I turned to the web for a better answer. That’s where I ran into Grubba.

Besides having a moniker that sounds like an Aussie nickname for something or other, and a disarmingly eccentric front-end layout, Grubba offers online database services and is meant to operate as a viable alternative to desktop-based solutions like Access. It offers a number of support services for people like me who aren’t necessarily database experts to begin with, too, which is what made it such an appealing choice to begin with. Those services include a selection of one-minute tutorials, a quick start guide, and even a form design service (which incurs a fee, of course).

Using Templates

For me, since I’m too cheap to pay someone to design a form for me, and not experienced enough to know how to create one from scratch, the best way to put Grubba to use was to dive into the ready-made templates offered by the site. It was easy for me to figure out how to get started with a template thanks to the one-minute screencast tutorial provided on the subject. Best of all, I didn’t have to worry about any audio instructions, a pet peeve of mine when dealing with online web app tutuorials.

Grubba doesn’t offer a huge selection of templates, so don’t go expecting anywhere near the depth of choice available in many desktop apps. But those on offer will suit the needs of most casual/light web working end users, especially as each template is fully customizable once created, so you can use one to get started, then change things around as needed.

Form Designer

I set up a recipe book, because I want to keep one for personal use, and because friends of mine are thinking about opening up a bakery/confectioner’s business via our local flea market and the web, and could use a database storage tool for recipes. Using the form designer, you can customize each field by changing its name, making it searchable, changing the input type, deciding whether Grubba should check the input on exit for a specific format, and making it required or not. You can also set row color and add help text, which is great if you’re creating a database for use by others.

During the database creation process, you can preview entry fields or your final database entry form at any time, and the results are impressive. Even users with absolutely no prior form creation experience in any medium should have very little trouble creating completely customized entry forms with very little ramp-up time. And for end-users, the little “i” boxes provide a fairly intuitive way to deliver helpful tips without having to leave the page or open a new window.

Additional Features

For users who are already working with other database programs, and who don’t want to start again from scratch when trying out Grubba, the site offers a data import tool. The tool uses industry standard .csv formatted information to import your data, and you can preview the output before completing the operation. Any major database software supports .csv exporting, so transitioning should be relatively easy. Importantly, you can also export your database as a .csv file if you want to transfer it somewhere else, so it’s not stuck inside Grubba.

You can create new users, and set their access level, although it doesn’t seem as though you can customize user level abilities. You just get read-only, read/write and administrator options, but that really should cover all your needs for basic database applications. There’s also a shared to-do list app built-in, which gives you some basic Getting Things Done (GTD) features you can use in combination with your Grubba databases.

Final Thoughts

If you want a simple and lightweight app to help you create and manage databases, and you aren’t keen on installing yet another system-resource eating standalone app, Grubba is an excellent choice. Not only is it user-friendly and well-designed, it also has a free version that supports most conceivable uses. The free version supports unlimited users, but limits you to a maximum of three forms and 10,000 records. If you need more than that, for $7.95/month you get eight forms maximum, and 25,000 records, plus improved support.

Have you tried Grubba? How does it compare to Access for lightweight database applications?

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Unwrapp is currently in beta, but you can sign up easily from their homepage, and hope for an invite code to follow. It took quite a while to receive mine, but the developers are hoping to release a version for wide public use soon. It can’t come soon enough for me, since I can’t even remember the names of all the web apps I was using last month, let alone be expected to check back and see if they’ve received any significant updates.

My first impressions of Unwrapp were positive, owing to the app’s gorgeously designed user interface. Mac users will feel at home thanks to the site’s simple yet visually rich styling. And it doesn’t hurt that the default avatar I was assigned when I chose not to upload my own was Darth Vader. Sure beats the generic Twitter pic!

You need an avatar because Unwrapp is more than just an application tracking site. It also incorporates aspects of social networking. These features aren’t fully implemented yet, but you can see the reviews of other users, and use their opinions to decide whether or not a particular app is worth your while. You can also view the profiles of other users, and, if you trust their opinion, maybe find new apps by checking out the list of what they use.

Unwrapp’s directory of apps is pretty good, and it includes most of the biggies like Google, but they depend on user submissions for finding many new and more obscure apps.

When it eventually does release to the public, I’d advise web app developers to make listing among their launch priorities, since with public buy-in, Unwrapp could do a lot of your PR legwork for you. That’s especially true for when you release revisions and updates. It can be quite a chore convincing media outlets to cover an app they’ve already seen just because you’ve introduced some new features. With Unwrapp, your updates get some much-needed exposure. New updates are posted in a persistent notification box on the right-hand side of any Unwrapp page when you’re logged in. Clicking on any app listed in that box brings you to a list of all of that app’s updates and feature additions since its inclusion in Unwrapp’s database.

Every app profile also includes a list of other, similar applications in case you’re shopping around for a better alternative, or want to go to a client with a number of different options for consideration. Unwrapp will eventually feature “The Charts” if you’re in the mood for browsing for something new, which will feature app ranking. And of course, you can search by keyword or browse the directory by category if you feel more like digging around.

Sign-up for the beta is free, although if you don’t have an invitation code, you might not get priority acceptance. But if you’re a fan of Go2Web20 or other web app directories and search services, Unwrapp is definitely worth signing up for, especially for its social networking features. We’ll let you know when the full release become officially available.

Have you tried Unwrapp? What did you think?

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Looking around for a solution that would do some hand-holding while helping you set up databases and produce reports, I came across Qrimp (pronounced “crimp”). Qrimp is extensible, and customizable, so don’t get the impression that it would only appeal to hopeless cases like myself, but that is the angle I’ll be using to talk about the software.

After viewing the video demo available here, I set about seeing if I could replicate the same sort of thing using an expense report for my freelancing business covering a three month period. The data recognition used by Qrimps seems solid, since it accurately set up the table using the information I’d copied and pasted from my excel spreadsheet. It automatically knew what was a date, what was a dollar amount, etc. And in form view, data fields were easily rearranged without me having to look at even a scrap of code.

I also played with the live demo, where I went into existing reports to see what else you could do with Qrimp. With the “Oscars” database, you can see how easy it is for the web app to pull live data from external links, in this case IMDB. If you were working with a client, you could pull live data from their own web analytics or reporting tools, and the information would be instantly available, in table and report form.

Qrimp is a good resource for those of us who may have the creative chops or experience to devliver a great product, but who may not have the time, patience, or inclination to organize the numbers that businesses are really concerned with. Pricing starts at $5o per month, but if it saves me as much time and stress as I think it’s going to, it’ll be worth the money.

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