New Florence. New Renaissance.

Apps for freelancers

But which apps should you have in the first place? Zapier, which integrates with more than 1,000 of them, crunched the numbers for Entrepreneur to find the ones giggers used the most in 2018. Not surprisingly, the biggies, like Google Docs, Slack, and Zoom, all rose to the top. But here are the top five lesser-known apps -- ones that are surging in usage and, says Foster, easy to use.

Entrepreneur

They include Airtable, Paperform, Wave (in vid below), Clickup and Proposify

 

IKEA and TaskRabbit

TaskRabbit is one of the best-known startups in the so-called “gig” economy that links freelance workers with jobs, from handymen to movers to assistants. It has about 60 employees, but over 60,000 independent workers use its platform.

The purchase of TaskRabbit was fueled by Ikea’s need to further bolster its digital customer service capabilities to better compete with rivals likes Amazon, which has stepped up its home goods and installation offerings. The purchase is Ikea’s first step into the on-demand platform space.

TaskRabbit had already struck a pilot partnership with Ikea around furniture assembly in the United Kingdom and also had marketed its workers’ ability to put together Ikea items in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Recode

 

 

Smartphone service, as-a-service

It finally happened: You cracked your new iPhone’s screen—accidentally, of course. Since your smartphone is effectively an extra appendage, you need to get it fixed as soon as possible.

And you do. Within an hour, a technician shows up at your door, and $109 dollars later, your iPhone is back in action.

This is the average experience for a customer of CellSavers, a startup whose mission is to make mobile device repairs faster, cheaper, and overall, just better.

Fortune

 

Pivoting the Uber/Airbnb model

Back to hiring employees and owning good old fashioned assets

“These entrepreneurs are not launching technology companies or even "on demand" companies. They are instead starting child-care companies, retail stores, restaurants, and laundry services that use mobile technology not only for delivery, but as a way to be more efficient at every step of their operations. "You’re seeing models evolve," says Ron Johnson, the former CEO of J.C. Penney and creator of the Apple Store, who nine months ago started a mobile-enabled electronics retailer called Enjoy. "And that’s what you’d expect in a new area of the economy."”

Fast Company

 

 

The Gig Economy

There is no one name—whether sharing economy, gig economy or on-­demand economy—that captures the diversity of this disruption. But it’s clear that the demand for this way of working and consuming is profound. According to a first-of-its-kind poll from TIME, strategic communications and global public relations firm Burson-Marsteller and the Aspen Institute Future of Work Initiative, 44% of U.S. adults have participated in such transactions, playing the roles of lenders and borrowers, drivers and riders, hosts and guests. The number this represents, more than 90 million people, is greater than the number of Americans who identify, respectively, as Republicans or Democrats.

Time (sub required)

click to enlarge infograph

Uber: Beyond rides

As he navigates, he is focused on rollouts of new services like UberPool, which encourages carpooling, and the development of driverless cars. (Uber recently plucked researchers from Carnegie Mellon to get into that race along with other firms like Google, Tesla and Ford.) He’s also thinking about his next big disruptive idea, which could take on the deeply entrenched real estate industry.

Time (sub required)