Sunday, December 20, 2015

Crowdtasking: Disrupting conventional ways of earning a livelihood

Here's a great new business model that leverages on the principle of crowdtasking along the lines of Uber. The Age Melbourne carries the report here and here's a snippet-

Is your mouth watering at the thought of gelato? Just realised it's your mother's birthday?  One Sydney company will take care of that for you. With just the click of a button you'll have ice cream in your hands, and flowers in your mum's. 

Get acquainted with ASAP, the service that will deliver anything from food to forgotten wallets.  The premise is simple. Text your (legal) request to 0437 825 625, they will reply with a quote, then it's up to you to accept their offer. The wait is usually about half an hour per task. 

It's fascinating and highly encouraging to see another step in conventional concepts of earning a living. People no longer need to resign themselves to a career that requires them to be an employee and be enslaved to an employer. Or, for those who wish to run their own business, they no longer need massive capital to start-up or, incur huge franchise fees.

Crowdtasking business models are leveraging on the incredible pervasiveness of smartphones and apps. This connectedness, it turns out, has unlimited commercial possibilities.

The thing that really makes me happy for the our current generation is the great flattening of untethered income earning opportunities. What I mean is the great democratisation of opportunities to earn a living.

You could be a retiree, a university student, a stewardess, waiter, shop assistant or, executive who can just sign up to offer your time, your effort and, your motor vehicle. Immediately you are part of the network that offers a solution. And, you get paid for it.

An enlightened economist once told me that being employed is a modern form of slavery. My corollary to that insight would be that crowdtasking is a form of emancipation.

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