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Freelancing is the new normal: oDesk and the future of the workforce marketplace

The Next Web

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… We’ve reached the point now where if a job can be done in front of a computer, somebody’s doing it on oDesk.”. Another tip from inside oDesk is to be patient with raising your rates.

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Lessons Learned: The lean startup

Startup Lessons Learned

But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste. I am heavily indebted to earlier theorists, and highly recommend the books Lean Thinking and Lean Software Development. The lean startup is an application of Lean Thinking.

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Lessons Learned: Just-In-Time Scalability

Startup Lessons Learned

We wanted an agile approach that would allow us to build our software architecture as we needed it, without downtime, but also without large amounts of up-front cost. After all, the worst kind of waste in software development is code to support a use case that never materializes. Take a look and let me know what you think.

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On deployment

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, September 2, 2008 On deployment My favorite question to ask a software development team is "how do you do a release." The mechanical steps, the culture of how its done, how they evaluate success, how they cope with failure. You can tell a lot about a company from their deployment flow.

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Lessons Learned: Customer Development Engineering

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 Customer Development Engineering Yesterday, I had the opportunity to guest lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at the Berkeley-Columbia executive MBA program. Ive attempted to embed the relevant slides below. How to listen to customers, and not just the loud.

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Twitter Link Roundup #215 – Small Business, Startups, Innovation, Social Media, Design, Marketing and More

crowdSPRING Blog

These posts and videos are about logo design , web design , startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! 4 Surprising SEM Stats Every E-Commerce Marketer Should Know | Search Engine Land – crowdspring.co/1kD9ZHH. 30 Examples of Packaging Designs that Scream “Buy Me!

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Lessons Learned: Throwing away working code

Startup Lessons Learned

This builds on a lot of great thinking that has come before, like the agile movements insistence that only the creation of working code counts as progress for a software development team. Ive told the story of how this desperation turned us on to Google AdWords in SEM on five dollars a day. Pretty soon we ran out of friends.