The Wall Street Journal has an article on
Outsourcing your life about how ordinary consumers are starting to use offshore labour for personal tasks to save time. Because this service work is so much cheaper, and our lives are getting more competitive and complex, this trend is sure to grow.
1. Education: Have personal teachers give your kids them quality one-on-one time. There'll be no need for the tutors to factor in travel time. And larger companies will be have much more specialised staff, not only by subject but by learning style.
2. Babysitting: Ok, maybe a Russian mother on a screen won't help much with a toddler, but at least you could watch the watcher. They could be an extra set of eyes to ensure that the kids are ok and call you when there may be a problem.
3. Adult education: In the information age, we miss out primarily because we don't understand. Having a relevant person on-hand at any time to explain anything would be pretty useful.
4. Shopping: Consumer purchases are quite complex these days. What you see in your local store is a tiny proportion of what's available on the web. Technology purchases makes the complexity of the decision limited only by your capacity to understand the product.
5. Counselling: It's a big step to leave the house to seek professional help. Many people are ashamed and combine it with laziness, you have hesitation. But in your own comfortable environment, many people may seek a sympathetic or helpful ear for $2 an hour. You probably won't even need to book. You just get someone straight away when you're at your most vulnerable and open at 3am Saturday night. The fact that your counseller is not western can be a plus. The pitch: Get timeless spiritual wisdom from a land untouched by modern life (except for offshoring and the internet of course).
6. Video editing: The amount of video and photography we generate these days has not been matched by increased patience in your friends to consume them. To retain people's attention, you'll need some human touches.
7. Writing: We all have to do it but few of us do it well, and the best of us still need a second opinion. Right now I'm thinking how nice it would be if I could paste this to an Indian on Yahoo Messenger for a thorough proofread.
8. Events: What is a event planning but a series of phone calls, invitations, emails and delegation of tasks? There's a place for a meetup.com with a more human touch.
Now of course there are limits to how well a consumer can define their problem and how culturally aware the individual service-provider is, and how motivated the service-provider is at home (particularly in Indian homes, where distraction is a way of life). For now, it's mostly one-on-one but whole new industries will be forming. Each of these could be commodified into specialist industries and managed like upmarket call centres.
But what about trust? New companies will build their reputations upon it.
What about privacy? The incentive for developing countries to develop and enforce law that meshes with western legal systems will be too big to ignore. It will happen.
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