Crowdsourcing links piecework with freelancers competing to work for pennies →

This is casual labour reduced to its most basic form, as individuals from Calcutta to Calgary face off in a virtual jobs game where low cost and speed trump education or experience.

“The whole industry is in very early days,” says trailblazing Australian entrepreneur Matt Barrie, founder of Freelancer.com. “We are on the verge of transforming society and how we run business.”

As the 70 per cent of the world’s population not currently connected gets online, it will grow an army of low-wage freelancers who are doing for the service economy what low-wage factory workers did for manufacturing.

Customer service, software development, writing, marketing and design are just some of the sectors ripe for this revolution.