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Comment by rmATinnovafy | Hacker News Reader

Interesting experiment.

Are you sharing the data?

I'd be pleasantly surprised if he (and oDesk, by extension) were to share this data. They're very profitable, and this type of information might offer them a competitive edge. Moreover, it appears as if they're also fervid believers in intellectual property law's "right to exclusion" applied to ridiculous vague quasi-inventions, viz. http://www.google.com/patents/US20060284838. Luckily, this is only an application, and its longer-than-typical prosecution history will hopefully prevent them from trolling too much, thanks to prosecution history estoppel.

Re: oDesk data - what do you want to know?

I regular post data from oDesk on my own blog (I work at oDesk w/ these folks: https://www.odesk.com/info/l/research/): http://onlinelabor.blogspot.com/.

And there's the "oConomy": https://www.odesk.com/oconomy/ There's also lots of info available via the API.

if anything, odesk is among the most open companies i've ever seen (note, I don't work there). They publish lots of data in oconomy and in blogs.

I think Greg's idea is really interesting. It takes advantage of a distributed economy and gives experts the chance to make a few extra bucks. One of the things that will be really interesting is how they will curate the experts on the site to make sure the 20 minutes are with someone who can actually add value.

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