akbar's blog

As I was talking to my colleague about how a modern job site should be like – the conversation moved into a very innovative direction. We have seen regular job search sites like, Monster, Dice which cater to a wide array of needs. But if you see ads on those sites, you would observe they mostly deal with full time jobs. That too, they consider a ‘person’ as an entity. Wouldn’t it be cool if you drill it down to a ‘skill’ rather than a person? Let me explain. On the other end of the spectrum, you would find Craigslist which also has job openings, but more informal and cheap options. There too, a lowest level you can drill down to is a ‘person’.

So, here is an idea about a job search engine which would treat ‘skills’ as an exchange commodity. And looking at how fast Globalization is changing the world, I really don’t care if the skills are from India, Estonia, or Ukraine. So, a person who wants to get a project done will approach this ‘job site’ and go through a step by step process to describe his needs. So, for example – I need a project to be done in 2 months – the skill sets I am looking at are: C++, Oracle, Javascript and Adobe Photoshop. Now to find a person who has these skills would be very difficult. But to find people who have these skills individually is easy. So, I can also select my budget for the project and how much share I am willing to give it to C++ skills when compared to Javascript skills.

The second step would be – the intelligent job search agent would look at all the skilled people registered at the site and look at their conditions. Like if I am a developer then I would say – I can only work for 30$/hour rate and I can only spend 20 hours per week. So, look at the project – the site would intimate all the relevant skills people and show them how much share of monies they would get for that gig.

It’s like you are assembling a dynamic team which is based in any part of the world and who can spend certain amount of their time for that particular skill set.  An intelligent algorithm would also keep other candidates(developers) in queue, in case the first round of people default or say No.

Using this site, a Javascript programmer can spend all his time just doing a Javascript on different projects and make money out of it. I kinda vaguely remember that I sort of have come across something like this – but can’t put my finger on it now. But I do think, it’s about time we look at job market rather as skills than people. I am pretty sure that this won’t work out in a full time employee job situation. This is cool and useful to people like me who wants to be traveling and  still keep making money through computer gigs.

Here is an idea I was thinking about. I am planning on to have a creative idea every day of my life. A major one every week and a minor small improv every day. So, the idea goes. It’s for people who are learning a new language like me (learning Arabic). It would be a site which would create a visual flash cards for the words you want to get translated. It’s not what you imagine, let me explain.

1. The user types in a word he wants it to be translated in some foreign language she is learning. For example, “Book” and I am trying to create a visual flash card for me.
2. The program would then fetch the translation for that word. Which would be “kitab”. Or in Arabic – كتاب
3. Then the program would go and fetch a CC licensed images for “book” from Flickr. This is what you would be seeing.
4. Now the user can associate this Arabic word with the image she would pick.
5. And it gets saved into the user’s learning queue, which they can look at it anytime they want to.
6. To add a community touch to it, you can pick out the most selected image for any given word by other people. Something like what Amazon would do suggesting a book.
7. So, over a period of time, with enough users – the site would have established a very certain amount of images which represent a word in any particular language.
8. Now to take it to a next level – Say I have collected these 200 words with best images that match them and I want to print them and carry them so that I can read it on my commute to my work. Bingo, the site would generate a “xml” of your learning queue and you can take it to Ink2 (disclaimer – I work at Ink2) and upload your xml and get a print of all your flash cards.
9. Now let’s take it to another step. You must have heard about Google Gears. So what you can do is to make this app offline and sync it to the main server when it connects online. Meaning a user can create his own visual flash cards queue locally with her own photos and then sync it up with the server.

Now, I need to get back to put this idea into action and convince my boss to see gold in this! 😉