Coffee and Power Site Aims to Get Jobs Done, Bit by Bit

Now he wants to change the nature of work.

While Second Life is still around, it never lived up to its hype. But Mr. Rosedale, 43, is back with a new business called Coffee and Power, where people buy and sell most any kind of task, like making Halloween costumes or writing sophisticated software.

To prove his point that a work exchange could function, Mr. Rosedale built the software for his new company by hiring programmers from around the world and dividing up the work into about 1,600 individual tasks, from setting up databases to fixing bugs.

“We think it’s the new model for how software will be written,” he said. “It worked so well that we decided to extend it to all sorts of work.”

Coffee and Power has storefront space in a nondescript part of San Francisco’s Market Street where people can drop in and offer to do jobs or hire people for tasks. They can even start working together on the spot. Mr. Rosedale works upstairs, along with a handful of full-time staff members.

On a recent day, the public space had three groups of people making use of the human and laptop fuels behind the company name. The groups were working on software projects, business planning and tutorials.

As with Second Life, the business has a virtual currency for buying, selling or bestowing tasks as gifts. Coffee and Power takes a 15 percent fee for moving the money back into real dollars.

The site has been active since spring with little fanfare. It attracted fewer than 700 transactions, but is now starting to actively solicit buyers and sellers.

“About 25 percent of our site is needs, and the rest is offers,” Mr. Rosedale said. “We’ll need about 10,000 jobs before we know what the final balance is like.”

Other online services have similar ideas — Task Rabbit, Freelancer.com and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk among them. One of the striking things about these services is how inexpensive it is to get something done.

Translation services on Coffee and Power currently sell for $10 a job, and a bike messenger can be had for $15. Much of the time, the people involved are already in these professions and are looking to make a few extra dollars on the side.

Besides putting downward pressure on what people can charge, the low prices also raise questions about the quality of the services. That is one reason that Mr. Rosedale is publicizing that he used cheap labor to build his own site.

He paid about $200,000 to build Coffee and Power, he said, using an earlier version of the service called Worklist. Every step in the development process is visible on the site, including the amount people have been paid for their work. An Australian working under the name Lithium has earned $46,523 since January, for example.

Another test project, called Hudat, is an iPhone application that converts pictures of Facebook and LinkedIn friends into online flashcards. The idea is that a person can review images before attending a party. It cost $2,600 to build, a fraction of what work like this normally costs, and was built in two weeks. The process is open for anyone to see.

“We work on total transparency,” Mr. Rosedale said. “If you don’t want anyone to see what you are working on, this is not for you.”

Second Life, in its heyday, held similar promise. While it became notorious for sexual chatter, it has over the years attracted a Reuters news bureau, now defunct, as well as emporiums of several companies like American Apparel and Starwood Hotels. Cisco Systems also held meetings there. Second Life still exists, but is much quieter now, offering virtual currency, meetings and digital real estate, among other services.

While he is still chairman of Linden Lab, the company that created Second life, Mr. Rosedale talks about that venture in the past tense.

“The problem with creating an immersive 3-D experience is that it is just too involved, and so it’s hard to get people to engage,” he said. “Smart people in rural areas, the handicapped, people looking for companionship, they love it. But you have to be highly motivated to get on and learn to use it.”

Mr. Rosedale, who raised about $1 million for Coffee and Power from investors including Jeff Bezos, Catamount Ventures and Greylock Partners, sees the trend of breaking work into smaller pieces — both in software and for physical tasks — as one that will continue to gain traction.

“I would rather hire a kid in Brazil who is hungry for work for a project than hire a Stanford graduate,” he said.

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