ReadWriteWeb

In the last few months, we've focused from time to time on design and how it affects startups. One of the larger issues that comes up that goes hand-in-hand with design is the copywriting that accompanies that design. The importance of carefully crafted wording can not be understated; after all, the words are what actually speaks to your audience when they visit your site. Copywriting is as much an art and a skill as design is, and that's why the crowdsourced design network crowdSPRING is now including copywriting jobs for bids on their site.

Chances are, if you've called customer service to enough companies, you've come across a representative who works for a call-center which has been contracted to handle a comapany's account. Large corporations that don't want to employ their own agents and maintain their own facilities will often outsource customer service to a third party, which at times can mean a company in another part of the world. Bangalore, India was famously portrayed for its role in call-center outsourcing in the Thomas Friedman book The World Is Flat, servicing many large American companies. But tools like outsourcing or crowdsourcing are not always beneficial to every breed of company.

Crowdsourcing is the outsourcing of work to a large community of people. The size and quality of Wikipedia and open source projects like Linux and Wordpress are a testament to what crowdsourcing can accomplish.

But what if you do not have a community ready to show up for work? Luckily there are Web services like Mechanical Turk and LiveWorks that can help broker tasks with people who will do them for money.

It looks like the startup trends of 2009 are getting the resources they need to become lucrative businesses in 2010. Labor on demand provider Crowdflower closed a $5 million dollar Series A this morning from Trinity Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners. ReadWriteWeb named the elastic workforce phenomenon a major trend in 2009 and we caught up with one of Crowdflower's happy customers to see how the elastic workforce is helping startups thrive.

In the earliest days of the Internet, getting an .edu email address and signing in to Pine for the first time was a rite of passage for many college freshmen. Now, however, virtually every new college student got an email address before even graduating from primary school. Because of this, a number of schools are now considering phasing out email hosting for their students altogether. According to a recent report (PDF), 20% of American colleges already outsource their email systems to commercial providers, and more plan to do so in the future.

This is the second in a 3-part series, by Bernard Lunn, on the new Web. Part 1 was The Whatchamacallit, Post Recession Phase Transition.

Recessions change consumer behavior, drive weak businesses and models to the wall and enable new businesses and models to thrive. This recession is likely to have a greater impact on Web ventures than past recessions for two reasons: