One Clear Dot

I’m working on a birthday party invitation/flyer for a friend of a friend. It’s a small, one-time job and we’re doing the whole thing via e-mail. I will even deliver the file electronically. It’s a fun job. I am taking the Cat on a Hot Tin Roof movie poster and putting this guy’s mother’s hear on Elizabeth Taylor, making it match, using her name in the title and adding the party info to a banner at the bottom. In the end, I will charge him a minimal fee and we will be done.

In reality, a LOT of people need small tasks done for them like this: a flyer graphic, an Excel spreadsheet, research, a logo, or maybe someone to look at their Wordpress settings and install some plugins. But, where do you find the help? Lucky for the guy who needed this party flyer, we have a mutual friend.

So, you might agree with me when I tell you how cool the new Microsoft® Task Market website looks like it is going to be. I’ve attached the press release announcing the

Check it out, because as the site shows you, you can get more done faster with Task Market.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Welcome to the launch of the Task Economy. We’d like you to be among the first to experience it, kick the tires, and share your opinions with your readers.

Microsoft® Task Market is a new Technology Preview site that lets people with tasks find people with the know-how to do them – saving time, and improving the end product.

For every person who throws up both hands at the prospect of creating a complex formula in Microsoft Excel, somewhere in the world there’s another person who can make it look easy. For every poor proofreader, there’s an expert one out there who wouldn’t mind making a few extra dollars. For every small business owner who doesn’t have time to do background research on a new business prospect, there’s a talented researcher who could quickly put together a dossier.

The big idea with Task Market is this: create a viable market to get them together and things get done.

Task Market is in the Technology Preview stage. That means that developers at Microsoft Research are releasing the site “into the wild” to demonstrate the potential of the technology, investigate the breadth of user adoption, solicit ideas on how to improve the site and, ultimately, create a market of Task Posters and Task Solvers to help people get their office tasks done.

A Task Market Task is:
• Something that can be done for $20 to $500
• Something that the Task Poster could use help doing
• Something that can be delivered electronically, like a Microsoft Office document.

A Task Market Poster might need help with:
• a specialized Excel formula
• language translation
• letter writing
• an aspect of their accounting
• making a PowerPoint presentation “pretty”
• graphics, charts, formatting or logos
• research gathering
• proofreading
• building sell sheets, listing sheets or simple brochures
• fact checking

Task Market Solvers create profiles of their skills to help Posters assign tasks to Solvers with the right skill sets, and get email alerts when a job arrives that fits their skillsets. Posters can award and pay several solvers for tasks to compare results, and give more work to the ones they like. All without the commitment of a freelance engagement.

Check out the working tech preview at www.taskmarket.com . Who knows. We may be building a whole new economy.

Posted on June 10th, 2008 by onecleardot
Filed under: Design, Gadgets - Toys - Technology