The CEO of GroupTalent, a marketplace for top-tier tech talent, combed through company data and uncovered a rising number of ‘stealth freelancers’ who have full-time jobs but sell their skills on the side. Could this partially explain the mystery of the missing self-employed? Read More »
Collaboration
A quarterly report from Elance indicates that with the lengthy economic crisis in Europe showing no signs of coming to a happy conclusion, workers in troubled countries are increasingly turning to remote work as an alternative to finding jobs in their stressed home economies. Read More »
If you imagine that online freelancing is mainly the preserve of male techies, it’s time to revise your understanding. A new survey of the sector by consultancy Zinnov reveals women make up 55 percent of the online labor pool, along with other insights. Read More »
Along with some impressive new growth numbers, online labor platform Elance offers GigaOM an exclusive sneak preview of its predictions for the future of work online. Get ready for widespread remote work, commonplace use of the human cloud and global guilds for independent workers. Read More »
Elance recently introduced video chat to its users as a new feature embedded directly into the site. That will allow employers and contractors to have face-to-face communication without having to open a different application or video chat client. Read More »
From the rise of sites like Elance and oDesk to the opinions of researchers and anecdotal evidence from knowledge workers, evidence is mounting that the future will feature a lot more contract workers. Now another survey is supporting the rise of the gig economy. Read More »
As in-house counsel charged with procuring outside legal services, corporate lawyer Nick Cronin saw how inefficient the process of sourcing professional services could be for businesses. He decided to do something about the problem, and niche online labor platform ExpertBids was born. Read More »
Imagine a future where you could take over the body of a robot from home and use it to do work at your office. Even better, when you finished your tasks, what if another remote employee could “beam in” to the same robot to get their … Read More »
The economy might not be booming but online labor platforms sure are. Last month, oDesk announced impressive growth and today rival Elance is doing the same. Elance says this is great news for US professionals who can export their services abroad. Is it really? Read More »
No segment of the economy looks exactly buoyant right now, and small business hiring is no exception, but what does that have to do with the future of work? Plenty, suggest new reports showing that tepid hiring, is partially down to rise of freelancers. Read More »
When it comes to piecing together a career as an independent worker, online marketplaces like Elance and oDesk can seem like all upside. But is this the whole story? A small business consultant suggests these sites present an often overlooked problem for freelancers – lower prices. … Read More »
I’ve been given a sneak peak at an Elance study that investigates the attitudes of “millennials” to work, their careers and job searching. Perhaps the most interesting finding in the study is how positive the millenials are about freelancing as a career choice. Read More »