Статья: Freelancing is the new normal

4.5 million registered freelancers who have worked 35 million hours in total, as well as 900,000 clients who have posted 1.5 million jobs

it’s really about expanding the awareness of online work and hiring these virtual global teams as an alternative to traditional way of recruiting or building a company

Over the last three years we saw an explosion in non-technical work, everything from data entry to customer service to marketing, SEO, SEM, legal, financial

many people nowadays are looking for freelancers who know their way around oDesk itself and are able to keep a distributed team in order

Managing an online distributed global team takes different set of skills, a different set of tools, it takes a different level of discipline. You do have to be a little more specific, a little more organized

This increased attention from online freelance marketplaces to the Russian market may be connected to recent changes in PayPal’s status in the country

The hot skill you definitely see higher demand from is mobile development

The variety of ways and areas where remote work has become tolerated and even encouraged is widening rapidly

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The Second economy

Business processes that once took place among human beings are now being executed electronically. They are taking place in an unseen domain that is strictly digital. On the surface, this shift doesn’t seem particularly consequential—it’s almost something we take for granted. But I believe it is causing a revolution no less important and dramatic than that of the railroads. It is quietly creating a second economy, a digital one.

In fact, I’m beginning to think of this second economy, which is under the surface of the physical economy, as a huge interconnected root system, very much like the root system for aspen trees.

By a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation, in about two decades the digital economy will reach the same size as the physical economy.

This vast global digital network that is sensing, “computing,” and reacting appropriately—is starting to constitute a neural layer for the economy.

With the coming of the Industrial Revolution—roughly from the 1760s, when Watt’s steam engine appeared, through around 1850 and beyond—the economy developed a muscular system in the form of machine power. Now it is developing a neural system. This may sound grandiose, but actually I think the metaphor is valid.


The second economy is creating for us—slowly, quietly, and steadily—a different world.

Physical jobs are disappearing into the second economy.

The main challenge of the economy is shifting from producing prosperity to distributing prosperity.


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