Both myself and @dayleeo have been ‘upworkers’ for a number of years now — we both looked at elance back in the day but were not impressed with it until it changed to upwork, they improved everything across the board and as we have worked our way up through the algorithm the way jobs are delegated to you has increased — loyalty, deliver time, good rankings all helped us progress, another little remote working tool perfect for people who no longer can deal with water cooler chat.
Upwork, formerly Elance-oDesk, is a global freelancing platform where businesses and independent professionals connect and collaborate remotely. In 2015, Elance-oDesk was rebranded as Upwork. It is based in Mountain View and San Francisco, California. The full name is Upwork Global Inc
In the last few days upwork has finally IPO’d and the shares have rocketed nearly 50% higher than at the open on their first day, the shares offered at $15 - certainly one to look out for and if your looking for a good/sure bet, you can be sure that upwork will be one of the established players at that table — as for them integrating crypto payments I’m just not sure yet, like they say they don’t need to raise money, they have that already in the bank.
BUT. .. I will say this for us workers, don’t rest on your laurels and just take it as positive news. I still process this news like any other startup news in that it could be all change for the users in a year from now as soon as the ‘vultures’ get into the business and it’s model.
As for the financials, Upwork saw total revenue increase 28 percent to $107.4 million in the six months ended June 30, with a net loss of $7.2 million.
this is why I believe this is the perfect time to develop the tool set, the services that can run alongside, like a mirror to the existing offer but from a crypto workers perspective, build out what upwork already offer but then build on top of that with features that upwork cannot compete on right now — maybe integrate lighting network, dash, litecoin, super fast blockchains where the turn around for the transaction is quick (and maybe free like steem) so that the freelancers can get paid too.
Also, AI could be really used here to great effect, linking in time work with relevant people wanting to work in an ‘al carte’ style — pushing relevant micro tasks to a user who is willing to do them with the time block they have, maybe those tasks can be timed tasks, do x number of operations in an allotted time as a ‘pool’ of workers — I certainly feel the model would work well for bloggers on the blockchain, especially steem.
Last year, Upwork said 375,000 freelancers earned money working with 475,000 clients.
I think a decentralised distributed upwork style system running as an SMT would make a lot of sense — especially from a promotion point of view for steem projects — finding your influences, setting tasks, getting documentation written all in a kinda mechanical turk kinda way, especially now we have that ‘mana’ bar — that could be your work/life balance bar too with certain projects allocating you a number of resources that you have to hit each week to unlock certain gamification features.
“We have more than 30% of the Fortune 500 now hiring on Upwork. Exposure leads to awareness and additional credibility.”
Whatcha think? I know the market for remote working is vast and I don’t see that many crypto services really pulling it off yet.
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