Do you want to do ten different things today, but only have time to do eight? Well, why not employ the service of a personal assistant. You can even do it virtually via a service like Fancy Hands which provides personal assistants in the cloud for a low monthly fee.
Whether you need to book a table at a restaurant or do research on web site optimization, Fancy Hands claim they can do it. The service has more than 100 people employed in the US and England who can perform almost any quick task for you. Deadline can be within minutes, at any hour of the day. You can send them 15 emails with task requests per month for $30. An algorithm sorts the tasks and routes each one to the most appropriate employee.
Ed Zitron of Forbes has tried out the service and describes the experience like this:
"I had them do research for me – actual things that I’d usually do myself that were neither time-sensitive nor crucial to me breathing on a minute-to-minute basis.What came back were several well-written, surprisingly-detailed reports that were far beyond a base-level Googling. In essence, they became an extra pair of hands – what one would expect, but not usually get, from a service such as this."
Supposedly Fancy Hands is quite simple to use. You sign in via a Google account to register. From then on you email requests to a generic FancyHands email box. All your tasks are organized on a dashboard behind login at the Fancy hand web site.
Via @boetter
Take a walk. Take a picture. Get paid.
Gigwalk is an iPhone app that seems to suggest peer-to-peer is not a thing of the past. Gathering tiny parts of information from many users into a whole detailed view that a company can act on is basically the business model of Gigwalk.
Gigwalk's first customer has been TomTom maker of navigational equipment. The company knows that there will always be errors in its navigation that even a workforce of a 100.000 people would not be able to detect. The mistakes are annoying to customers, but not nearly fatal enough for the company to invest millions in fact checking every inch of every street in the world. But what if TomTom could pay someone on a street for taking a few pictures and emailing them in. That would be a game changer. And Gigwalk is counting on that.
All iPhone owners can download the app and sign up for little Gigwalk assignments. But don't expect to get rich quick. According to CEO Ariel Seidman a high earner will get 50-100 dollars a month.
There is so much location based hype going on the tech world these days. I actually think Gigwalk is one of the more promising launches and look forward to following this peer-to-peer-location-based-picture-taking service in the time to come.
