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Local On-Demand

News and publishing: Inverse scale?

56 percent, 36 percent, and 30 percent — the share of large, medium, and small news organizations that have experienced lay-offs since January 2017, according to Pew. These are interesting numbers that describe the inverse scaling problem in news. After the New York Daily News cut half its staff yesterday, New York is facing a […]

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Local On-Demand

Gig Fairness Is Critical To U.S. Economic Success

Information asymmetry has been the basis of the Gig Economy to date. Marketplace providers know so much that the worker cannot possibly negotiate a better deal. Consequently, we see that millions of people who earned far more as full-time employees are now scraping by on one-third or one-fifth the pay they used to earn when […]

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Local On-Demand

Kindly Care Raises $4.5 for Caregiver Marketplace

Kindly Care is taking a marketplace approach (e.g. “the Uber of…”) to home caregiving. This is a category ripe for the on-demand approach. Like Uber, Kindly Care will take 20 percent to 25 percent of hourly wages and handle all the financial transactions and tax “arrangements,” which seems to hint at tapping Medicare and other […]

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Local On-Demand

BMW’s Seattle On-Demand Ride Service Goes FTE

BMW’s new ReachNow Seattle-centered service experiment turns on quality and differentiation of service. But it also will use full-time employees contracted from a local vendor. Differentiation of service relies on more than commodity workers, it involves an eye for customer preferences — ReachNow includes in-app preferences, such as “Quiet ride” and air temperature. These preferences […]

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Local On-Demand

How To Win The 95 Percent Of Retail Amazon Doesn’t Own

Amazon has captured half of U.S. e-commerce revenue, according to eMarketer. Not coincidentally, Jeff Bezos became the richest living human the same week. So what’s left to do with online sales? Almost everything. Jeff Bezos knows this, which is why he pushes Amazon into so many new markets. There is, however, a limit to virtual trust. Bhaskar […]

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Local On-Demand

How Gig Economy Consolidation Happens

Postmates is working with Instacart, a competitor, to deliver groceries in the Bay Area during peak-demand times. Here are two home delivery companies, who probably have overlapping workforces (many giggers use several marketplaces to keep work flowing) with largely unique customer bases (if standard brand thinking holds and consumers do gravitate to single-brand relationships for […]

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Local On-Demand

Gigging Gains Influence At Full Employment

Gig work is gaining credibility, according to Inc.com, and it is changing the expectations for regular full-time employees who see the flexibility of gig work as a benefit they would like to use, too. As I’ve written for Gig Economy Group, every company faces new demands from workers, ranging from workplace flexibility using excellent technical […]

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Local On-Demand

Autonomous Economy? Not So Much, Yet

Eager to replace people your business processes? Uber is reconsidering its approach to autonomous vehicles after racing ahead with the project in Pittsburgh, the Bay Area, and Arizona, where a fatal accident with an Uber car raised serious safety questions. The company is laying off 100 autonomous car operators after one of them was found […]

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Local On-Demand

The Gig Economy Is Bigger Than We Admit

Quartz@Work provides a solid analysis of why the United States cannot agree on how many gig workers it has, which I’ve covered elsewhere. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts only people who dedicate themselves to gig work, not the millions who work a side gig along with a main job.  The Federal Reserve gets the […]

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Local On-Demand

Gallup Intros The Real Future of Work” Magazine

Gallup, the surveying organization, has launched an intriguing new publication, The Real Future of Work. A data-intensive publication, the first issue addresses European workers’ sense that they will be able to keep up with automation and how workplace assessment programs align with corporate and personal goals.  The publication is worth downloading for its clear charts […]