Last year at the Churchill Club Top Ten Tech Trends event, Steve Jurvetson predicted that we would see a flood of companies taking advantage of the aging population. As baby boomers retire, a huge generation of well-educated retirees will be spending lots of time at home, but connected.
Add to that an emerging labor force in the developing world and the new ranks of unemployed in the developed, and you have a lush crop of potential workers rich for an entrepreneur’s harvest.
Having worked at two startups in the Valley, I’ve seen lots of hot-potato labor-dumping; the visionaries get a great idea, the motivated team members jump in to execute… and find themselves occupied with mounds of plug-and-chug that leaves their market knowledge and education under-utilized.
Enter CrowdFlower, which launched yesterday at TC 50. The company lets anyone submit repetitive task descriptions that have clear instructions, stick a price on it (CrowdFlower suggests pricing based on time requirement per task—and it’s cheap) and a labor force from around the world stands at the ready for work. It means that Mr. Independent Contractor starting a business from his bedroom can outsource to India—or wherever—for cheap labor on the spur of the moment.
On the other end of the financial spectrum, Sprowtt is proposing a crowd-sourced solution to the funding drought that’s just beginning in the global Silicon Valley. Taking a page from the Obama campaign, which is fabled to have raised over a million micro-donations of $200 or less, Sprowtt is making it possible—technically and legally—for individuals to help fund green tech companies. They have a number of solutions for big and small donors that work within the existing regulatory framework to allow do-gooders to give to worthwhile—but profitable—companies.
I’m not sure when we scrapped the notion that companies should also provide a charitable service to society and instead divided the world into socially conscious non-profits and “greedy” for-profits, but I like the old way–the two ought to be a false dichotomy. Cool that Sprowtt thinks so too and is making it possible for “the people” supplement our global innovation resources.
