I’ve long been a fan of the CrossLoop screen-sharing application as it provides an easy way to remotely provide support to clients, friends and family. Its straightforward setup and secure interface make it a great choice in a crowded field. However, its usefulness has been limited somewhat, because it was only available for Windows — a situation being remedied today by the availability of CrossLoop for Mac.
A compelling reason to use CrossLoop is the innovative Marketplace, which is a great place to find and offer tech support services. With thousands of registered support experts, you can get help with just about anything you can think of. The CrossLoop folks facilitate the connection and transaction, and handle the payment processing. The latest figures released show over 5 million sessions have been conducted through CrossLoop. With the Mac version available, support providers can now offer their services to Mac users, or use their Mac to provide services. As more households are switching to Mac, or going multi-platform, being able to support everyone makes a lot of sense. Obviously, for Mac users needing support, this also makes the full Marketplace of support providers available to you.
In the CrossLoop community, the demand for a Mac version has been loud and strong. With this milestone reached, they can now work to appease the Linux crowd.
The CrossLoop client is a free download for Windows 2000 or later and, now, for Mac OS X 10.4 or later. Costs for using Marketplace services vary, depending on the services required and choice of provider.
Have you used Crossloop for screen sharing? Does the availability of a Mac version make it an option for you?
ShortTask is a marketplace for tasks, aiming to match-make “solvers” and “seekers”: people who have time to complete brief tasks and people who need small tasks completed.
In many ways, ShortTask is similar to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) service. Like MTurk, ShortTask is seeking to address tasks that aren’t large enough to necessitate the hiring of a contractor or part-time employee. This marketplace is largely oriented around activities that can be completed from home — ideal for web workers — and currently numbers around 61,000 available tasks.
Activities include transcribing audio and video files, annotating images, copywriting, commenting on blog posts or online forums, data entry and online research. Seekers simply publish a task, set a payment level and deadline. Solvers can explore the site and select the tasks they’d like to complete. ShortTask takes a 10 percent commission on each transaction. Read the rest of this entry »
Bizual, as Mashable noted in a recent profile, is a new web service that purports to help small businesses and freelancers attract new customers as well as find new suppliers — essentially a marketplace for matchmaking special offers from suppliers with potential customers.
As cofounder Elliot Jacobs explained, Bizual users sign up (the service is currently in an invitation-only beta test phase) and create “Bizual Offers” that offer incentives on their own products and services. Members can also take up offers from other Bizual members. Read the rest of this entry »
A few weeks ago, LimeExchange launched its online outsourcing marketplace to the world. The service is essentially a social network for freelancers, service providers and entrepreneurs that helps service providers matchmake themselves to buyers looking to outsource activities within those service categories.
Though marketplace services such as Guru and eLance have ably served freelancers and web workers for some time, LimeExchange seeks to differentiate itself from its predecessors by moving service marketplaces beyond simple matchmaking of buyers and sellers, to eBay-like reputation and feedback metrics that help users understand the prior reputability of their collaborators.
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CrossLoop’s free secure screen sharing application has always been an extremely handy way to provide remote desktop support, and the opening of their new Help Marketplace adds a whole new layer to their service.
By allowing you to build a profile of your skills to share with the public at large, CrossLoop now becomes a viable outlet to promote your business and services beyond friends and family.
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Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
