Mancx To Take On Elance By Pivoting to Coworks
Mancx, the business Q&A site has pivoted to Coworks, an online freelancing platform with a social recommendation twist to it. According to the company, the decision to make the switch was not because Mancx was not working as expected, but because the market was simply too small, whereas the online jobs market is expanding at an incredible pace.
What differs Coworks from the likes of Elance and Odesk is that they are not trying to offer you a choice from hundreds or even thousands of freelancers. Instead, they focus on your social networks to find freelancers that your friends and connections know and are willing to recommend. Basically they want to digitalize “word of mouth”.
Dream Broker Has Grown To €1.5M In Revenue In 5 Years With Elance
Editor's note: This post is part of a series of posts published in co-operation with Elance, the leading source of outsourcing talent in the world. Elance is also supporting our ArcticEvening Helsinki on June 14th.
Elance is helping us with ArcticEvenings in the region and in return we want to highlight how they're helping startups with quick access to talent. On Thursday, Elance representatives will also be present at ArcticEvening Helsinki and therefore we want to highlight a Finnish startup they are working with.
Dream Broker is an online video software company started in 2007 that focuses in video production and distribution. They are a video platform for companies and organisations where open systems such as Vimeo and YouTube don't work. Their service can be used for software tutorials and support, staff competence development, change management as well as communications to name a few functions.
The company has strong growth and in 2011 did almost €1.5M in revenue.
We talked to Ari Heljakka, the Chief Strategy Officer about how they use Elance and how other startups could learn from their use cases for it.
ArcticEvening Copenhagen Gathered Enthusiasts Far And Wide
ArcticEvening Copenhagen was organised last night at the to-be-emptied Nokia premises just out of the centre of Copenhagen. The evening was full of interesting discussions and presenters included Kristel Verhasselt of Magento as well as Jussi Koskinen of PayPal. Our main event was a fireside chat with Tommy Ahlers who made my job as an interviewer extremely easy, sharing a lot of advice to the audience with just a few questions.
As said, the event was held at the Nokia Campus premises, a place that will be emptied by the end of June. The space looked eerily empty already, but its future isn't as bad as one might think. In September, a university will be taking over the facilities and in doing so Nokia is also donating millions of DKK worth of gear to the university.
Vivino Scaling To Go Global Through Outsourcing
Editor's note: This post is part of a series of posts published in co-operation with Elance, the leading source of outsourcing talent in the world. Elance is also supporting our ArcticEvening Copenhagen on May 31st.
Vivino is Denmark-based startup that is looking to change the way people enjoy wine around the world. According to one of Vivino's investors, Niels Vejrup Carlsen of SEED Capital, the global wine market is four times that of the music industry and Vivino is aligned well to take on that market. The company raised a round earlier this year from SEED Capital in Denmark to go global with their new mobile app.
The new version of the mobile app allows users to get information and recommendations on almost any wine. The app already boasts a database of more than half a million bottles. The app is free and available for Android and iOS -based devices.
The Vivino app works so that once consuming a wine, you can take a photo of the bottle and then register it into your library, where you can rate it and remember it the next time. The website also has social extensions allowing you to follow the most savvy wine enthusiasts and see what they are enjoying. Each wine in the system is also ranked within the winery, region as well as globally.
Nordics Lead The Way In Online Hiring
Editor's note: This post is part of a series of posts published in co-operation with Elance, the leading source of outsourcing talent in the world.
One of the biggest challenges in scaling a startup to the next level is in finding the right talent and help with both those small, everyday things as well as larger projects. Even though the Nordics and Baltics enjoy a more moderate salary level and better chances at retaining talented individuals than the US, there never seems to be enough good people around. However, one area that has been overlooked by many is the possibility to outsource tasks here and there to the human cloud, as Elance puts it.
