ReadWriteWeb

Coffee & Power, the experimental "meta-company" that lets remote workers hire each other for small jobs, has decided to drop its virtual currency in exchange for regular old U.S. dollars. The change will have no impact on functionality or in-progress jobs; it's simply intended to make Coffee & Power easier to adopt. Existing balances in the virtual C$ will be automatically converted to US$.

Coffee & Power was founded by Second Life creator Philip Rosedale, whose interest in virtual currencies built a thriving economy in that virtual world. But for Coffee & Power, whose users do real-world work, Rosedale thinks a real-world currency will be easier to understand.

How long have you held your current position? If you answered less than two years, you are not alone. It seems that turnover could be IT's biggest challenge in the new year: keeping talented developers. Network World's Carolyn Marsan writes this week about the topic and it is well worth reading her story.

This isn't a completely new problem. In 1980, I took my second job, about two years after I started work at a consulting firm in Washington, DC. My father was not happy about the switch. He was working as an accountant for the same place (and ended up putting in 30 years by the time he eventually retired, yes complete with gold watch that I have somewhere). He thought it was too quick a transition. What would other employers think? Little did I know I was starting a trend in the tech field lo these many years ago

Coffee & Power has opened its first official workclub in Santa Monica, CA. It's the first expansion of the "meta-company" outside the San Francisco Bay Area. The new workclub is hosted in the offices of Sparqlight, an app for making business workflows more automated and social. The expansion wasn't even Coffee & Power's idea; after hearing about the site, Sparqlight asked to be involved.

Coffee & Power is an online network for connecting people together to hire each other from small jobs, or "missions." They can be anything from software development to chauffeur service to costume design. Workers connect via the website and, if they so desire, meet in real-world workclubs like Sparqlight. The workclubs also offer a place for virtual workers to get things done. As the movement grows, not only are workers stepping up to help each other out, but building owners are actually volunteering their spaces as workclubs.

According to a public post from Jarkko Oikarinen, creator of the trusty chat protocol IRC, Google+ Hangouts will now let you conference people in by phone for free. You can use Hangouts with extras to dial in anyone in the U.S. and Canada. It allows anyone with a phone number to participate in a Hangout right alongside the people on video.

Smartphone users have been able to use the Google+ mobile apps to Hangout on video since September, but now there's no video necessary. Hangouts are now an easy way to hold a meeting, even for people away from their computers. It could be used just for fun, but it's also another reason why Google+ Hangouts are a great tool for work.

OK, this isn't working anymore. Too many people either don't have a job or the ones that do are predominantly dissatisfied. We've been talking about networked organisations and distributed work for decades, but productivity gains have been dim the past ten years. Everything worked just well enough to not think about structural changes. We tried to apply collaboration and fancy search platforms like new paint on a crumbling house that could be fixed.

But because neither renovation nor innovation did catch up at the speed of our economic development, we crashed. And that's, like with every disrupting event, a tremendous opportunity. It forces us to rethink, because it pushes us beyond the tipping point we tried to avoid for so long.

The latest invention from Second Life founder Philip Rosedale launches today, and it's no virtual world. Coffee & Power is an online marketplace that lets people buy and sell small jobs from each other. It's also a network of real-world co-working spaces, called "workclubs," where users can meet to make arrangements or just stay and work.

Coffee & Power is what Rosedale calls a "meta-company," a framework for doing business with no managers or middlemen, all arranged through a website, an iPhone app and the workclub. The site, the app and the first workclub on Market Street in San Francisco all go live today after a rapidly developed beta period starting this summer. Workers of the world, take notice: this San Francisco startup wants to make each of us the boss.

The increasingly digital world in which we now not only live, but also work, gives rise to a whole new set of questions about professional etiquette. When working from a public cafe, is it rude to jump on that conference call? Should you friend your boss on Facebook? Is using emoticons weird?

These are a few of the questions asked in a survey published recently by Harris Interactive and Intermedia. The survey found that 66% of respondents thought connecting with one's boss via social networking sites like Facebook is inappropriate (presumably, LinkedIn is another story).

About 20% of information workers report that they have conducted work-related activities from a mobile device while driving. That's just one of the findings reported in a Unisys and IDC survey on the consumerization of the enterprise, released today. The survey has a number of expected findings - employees are using their own devices for work, IT sees mobile support as a priority, etc.

But the survey also puts some numbers on the current "always on" nature of work in the post-PC era.

Is there any truth to the belief that U.S. tech jobs are outsourced to India at least in part because Indian developers are better skilled than U.S. workers? According to GILD, a company that combines professional social networking with games that assess skills, there are some areas in which Indians beat their counterparts in the U.S, but there are others in which Americans excel. GILD examined the results of over 1 million assessments taken by over 500,000 developers with an average of 2-3 years of experience.

Employers want workers with hands-on business intelligence experience and experience working with large data sets. We've looked at the demand for business intelligence and data skills before, so this isn't surprising. But students aren't learning those skills in college, according to a survey commissioned by the Business Intelligence Congress II, which is co-hosted by data warehousing vendor Teradata and the Special Interest Group on Decision Support, Knowledge and Data Management Systems.

Of the 129 schools polled, only three had BI or data analytics as an undergraduate major. That's probably not, in itself, a big deal. But schools that want to prepare students for the workforce will need to do better at providing opportunities for students to gain experience working with business data.