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futuramb:

The digital economy: Jobs of the future | The Economist

Even the Economist is commenting on the emerging “virtual” economy which is facilitated by the diffusion of Internet access and all the platforms and virtual worlds that provides a global collaboration framework.

It is important to note that this is still in a rather early phase and I would think that we are just entering the first rapid increase of a hype curve. This means that the visions and promises will most likely crash soon. The phenomenon will however not die but pick up in it’s own natural growth pace and most likely become a major disruptive economical phenomenon.

According to the World Bank’s research, gaming-for-hire services alone—such as earning WoW gold to sell on to rich, busy foreigners—was a market worth $3 billion in 2009. As a comparison, the study notes that all the coffee growers in the developing world combined earned just $5.5 billion for their labours. Another growing source of cyberwork is crowdsourcing: for instance, Amazon farmed out the job of eliminating duplicate pages on its e-commerce site to large numbers of casual workers, who got paid a few cents each time they spotted one.

This has developed into a new line of business for Amazon, called Mechanical Turk, which brings together people seeking online piecework with employers looking to farm out tasks. The infoDev report reckons there are now around 100 such online labour exchanges: there’s now a word for them in Chinese, witkey. Some crowdsourced tasks are long and complex, and require special skills. But many are simple and quick, and the software tools needed to perform them are provided for the worker—this sort of task is known as “microwork”.

thecravingproject:

Nutella cookie sandwich

mm

lickystickypickyme:

By feeding them mixtures containing dyes, researchers have helped silkworms spin fluorescent, coloured silk.

SILK WORMS THAT PRODUCE vibrantly coloured and luminescent silks have been created by scientists in Singapore. The resulting fibre offers a cheap way to circumvent the dying process and may even have medical applications.

“The new, more environmentally friendly method allows us to integrate colours into the very fabric of silk and does away with the need for manual dyeing,” says Dr Natalia Tansil.

The process “provides a green alternative method of dyeing silk for the silk industry by reducing the vast amounts of water and dyes used in the labour-intensive conventional dyeing process.

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marrypotter:

Carmel Ocean Avenue by Michael Cina

Barren to fertile God can do