Trend Spotting: Global Services Exchanges and Capitalism 2.0

I have been watching the trend for a while … the amount of outsourced business being transacted on the various services exchanges around the world is HUGE. We have done story after story on this trend. Here is a summary of the links: eLance, oDesk, Freelancer.com & vWorker (these two have recently merged), CrowdFlower, CrowdSpring, etc.

Our latest addition to the series is Envato, bootstrapped to $10M by Australian entrepreneur couple Collis and Cyan Ta’eed.

Needless to say, I am extremely bullish on the trend, and expect to see this industry developing to huge scale, funneling, potentially, hundreds of billions of dollars of global GDP and supporting numerous small entrepreneurs.

The other encouraging element of this trend is the rise of the million dollar freelancers. Some stories: Ignacio Galarraga, Srish Agarwal, Sanjay Dange. In each case, solo entrepreneurs got started on these exchanges, and then used the platform to build sizable businesses using them as launching pads.

My read: the combination of services exchanges and million dollar freelancers would become an important piece of the Capitalism 2.0 puzzle.

This segment is a part in the series : Trend Spotting