Blog - TechHub

Aug 25th

If it's Not Core to Your Business Outsource it.

Introducing Freelancer.co.uk, a new TechHub Member.

Saif Bonar, UK Country Manager. The following blog post was written by Saif.

I'm a fairly new member of TechHub and wanted to take the opportunity to introduce myself to others in the community, so jumped at the chance to write this blog when invited by Elizabeth. I spent my first few hours here last week working and then at the monthly drinks. I'm looking forward to participating in the community, gaining from the experience of others, meeting new people and I'm also determined to give something back. Initially I'm offering any TechHub members in the UK free Gold membership at the Freelancer.co.uk website for 3 months. This is worth £60 and reduces commissions you pay on projects to 3% as a freelancer and zero as an employer.

Freelancer.co.uk is the British arm of the world's largest micro-outsourcing marketplace. Our goal is to be the Ebay for Jobs. We have over 2.7m users worldwide including 100,000 British freelancers and 40,000 UK businesses. We are already the biggest UK platform for outsourcing projects and we have ambitious plans for growth. Freelancers and small businesses can tap into our marketplace to either get work or to get work done. With over 400 project categories ranging from graphic design and SEO to financial and legal support TechHub members can find someone to plug any skills gaps they need on budget and on time.

We recently launched in the UK and are currently running our second marketing push, which includes 500 branded London taxis. As part of this we are also running a competition which is open to TechHub users who can win £1,000 in credit to get work done through the Freelancer platform. All you need to do to enter is grab a photo of a Freelancer Taxi and post it to our Facebook page.

A big part of my role is working on PR and securing exposure for the Freelancer brand in the UK. Given the current economic climate its been a real challenge convincing the media that Freelancer is not only about jobs going from the UK to the developing world. Another challenge has been keeping up with a fast growing global tech business. Our HQ is in Sydney and I work closely with the Comms manager in New York, so the hours can be quite manic sometimes (team meetings at midnight on a Sunday) but, it's a great experience and in only a few months in post I have already been to the Webby Awards in New York and grown the UK side of the business by almost 40%.

The space we're in throws out lots of opportunities to comment on areas such as economics, employment, technology and outsourcing. Its been quite strange going from an ad-hoc blogger to writing articles for Management Today and seeing my opinions and comments in print everyehwere from Business Computing World to The Drum. Only last week my comments on a Labour Market Report from the CIPD and KPMG found that 30% of companies and 54% of public sector organisations were published in niche websites aimed at CFOs. Sadly, the news was that 34% of UK employers are expecting to make further redundancies in 2011. While this is a blow for the UK jobs market, it's a great opportunity for those affected by redundancy to either follow their dream and turn their business idea into a reality, or to turn to Freelance and focus on doing what they do best while maintaining a more positive work-life balance.

We have big plans in the months ahead and are hoping to introduce a number of changes to the Freelancer platform which will make it much more useful for Freelancers and contract workers in the UK, who until now have struggled to compete with off-shore providers. If you are a Freelancer and haven't yet tried Freelancer.co.uk, you should and my offer of 3 months Free Gold Membership is a great way to get started.

Finally, Miguel asked me to include my best bit of advice for start-ups and entrepreneurs.... If its not core to your business, outsource it.

TechHub Members Special Offer: As an initial gesture to the TechHub community I am pleased to offer any TechHub members three months free Gold membership on Freelancer.co.uk - this dramatically reduces the fees you pay and will provide you with a good opportunity to try out our platform. (Gold members pay no fees on projects posted and just 3% on any money earned).

If you're a TechHub Member and would like to blog about about your company or product email miguel@techhub.com. Look forward to reading your story!

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Jul 28th

TechHub Helps Connect Student to Exceptional Opportunities

By Miguel Garcia

Chris Alexander is a TechHub Annual Member and current intern with Kusiri, a young but thriving startup near TechHub. As with any new venture into the startup world, there are many unique and exciting challenges that meet the intern. This is Chris's story, his past and current experiences and his drive to learn quickly and become a part of the best working environments available.

Every year for the past four years, I have embarked on a quest to find an internship at a tech company for the summer between academic years. I'm a programmer at heart and have always taken vacations as an opportunity to expand on the development work that I do in my spare time, in a full-time role.

My first placement was at Huddle, a Bermondsey (and now Old Street and San Francisco) based collaboration startup who has appeared in the news recently. My next was at TweetMeme, the Reading based social sharing and filtering company who pivoted into DataSift during my 18-month placement there. Both of these were distinctly different from what I've been

learning on a day-to-day basis in my Robotics degree, but neither as different as the company where I have found myself this year.

Called Kusiri, this 2 year old company based just down the road from TechHub in EC2 provides enterprise-grade software to global banks and international financial service providers. The Kusiri CAMRA product provides search federation, allowing organisations to easily integrate existing internal and external databases, websites and search servers into a single unified search interface and query language. It is available as software for existing corporate infrastructure; in a SaaS cloud configuration, and on clustered and single-server appliances.

I met the founders of Kusiri at a TechHub networking event and was intrigued by what is a completely different industry to what I’m used to. A startup that sells to corporates is a very different beast to consumer web startups which we are all used to hearing about from Silicon Roundabout and the Valley; from my perspective, it presents challenges not only on a technical but also a non-technical front.

From a technical perspective, development cycles are generally longer - turning around security-approved absolutely bug free releases takes time. There are other issues that come with conforming to client policies, for example getting all of your code working with specific archaic versions of Windows in the deployment - something startups in other sectors can simply

(and wisely) choose to ignore.

However, there are new challenges that have nothing to do with code that come from working in the City. A background in consumer web won’t get you far here: meetings are peppered with acronyms I’ve never heard of, names that sound like something I should know but definitely don’t, and stories that I can’t relate to. “A lot of money” also has a completely different definition in this world.

This placement has also given me an opportunity to learn about an entirely new industry from the people who have lived and breathed it for years, imparting their considerable knowledge in the area so that I may learn, improve, and (eventually) fit in. There are of course the usual startup perks - bean bags, office cats, and large amounts of caffeine - that we never

do without; we may be in the City, but we’re still a startup through and through.

Hope you enjoyed Chris's story. We would love to hear more stories like these from our Members, so if you have something special you would like to share with your community email miguel@techhub.com to get started.

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