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Wednesday, June 24, 2015

This startup wants to be the Uber of content marketing

IMAGE: DOUG ROSS/IMAGEZOO/CORBIS

JUDITH BALEA for Tech in Asia

3 days ago

You know how they say there's an Uber for everything? This new platform wants to add to the list.

ArticleBunny, which launched this week, says it stands to have an equally transformative impact as Uber — this time on the way businesses build original and engaging content.

ArticleBunny enables companies to order marketing content in a range of styles and formats from professional writers. Because it's an end-to-end marketplace like Uber, businesses can trust that their projects will be completed on time and to their standards.

It's a departure from freelance websites like Scripted, Fivver and Upwork, where business owners post a project, wait for freelancers to respond and assume the risk of the content being below expectations. ArticleBunny's writers apply and are screened before they start work, while the startup's management takes control of staff, communication, revisions, delivery, and payment.

Content marketing is king

Content is key to optimizing a business' search rankings, increasing site traffic and driving conversions.

Content is key to optimizing a business' search rankings, increasing site traffic and driving conversions. Just as Uber has a network of drivers, ArticleBunny is giving companies access to a content fulfillment team, without the expense of maintaining a full-time content marketing staff.

"We've built a solution that gives people easy access to top creative talent without the hassle of recruiting and managing additional staff," says Lucho Molina, ArticleBunny's head of product innovation.

"As a business owner myself, I know how important it is to maintain an agile content strategy without a lot of overhead. I looked around, but couldn't find a solution that worked for me, so I built it myself," adds CEO Alex Torrenegra.

Inspired by actors

ArticleBunny is one of several spin-offs from the Japan-based company Bunny, a provider of voice-over services. Bunny also has offices in San Francisco, New York City and Bogota, Colombia. It was founded by Torrenegra and his wife, Tania Zapata.

In 2003, Bunny launched Voice123, the world's first online marketplace for the voice-over industry. Voice123 sought to solve a common issue that voice actors faced: Agencies were taking advantage of them and asking them to produce demos that never resulted in clients. Voice123, which now has over 125,000 voice actors, changed the way these actors take on work by allowing them to book online.

In 2012, it adapted the idea to create an end-to-end voice-over market called VoiceBunny. ArticleBunny inherited its model from VoiceBunny, where actors are screened and paid to audition for projects.

"When we created VoiceBunny, we wanted to find a way to bring clients and voice-over artists together. What we designed worked so well, we thought we could use a similar approach to content creation," says Torrenegra. "We've worked hard to make sure ArticleBunny can deliver better content, faster, and in a way unlike any other service is offering."

The team declined to disclose how many companies and freelance writers they have on ArticleBunny so far.

How it works

ArticleBunny allows clients to choose writers based on actual writing samples, not a biography or resume. They can directly book a writer based on writing samples or choose to allow writers to bid on a project through a contest.

The contest approach means writers audition, pitch a proposal and write a sample. Then the client chooses the writer they prefer to complete the project.

Articles are priced per word. Prices range from US$49 to US$236 for directly booked projects, and US$97 to $284 for auditioned ones.

Writers get paid their rates, and ArticleBunny adds a margin on top of a writers' rate. Writers who audition but don't get picked are still paid a small amount for their time.

Article revisions are free as long as nothing is changed from the original scope of the project. If the scope changes, then there is an additional charge.

Like Uber, ArticleBunny has a rating system for determining which writers to keep. It uses an intelligent algorithm that determines who the best talents on its system are, as well as those who are the fastest at producing work.

Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.

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This article originally published at Tech in Asia here

Monday, June 22, 2015

Interviews with Uber drivers reveal inspiring, complicated lives

Alireza, an Uber driver based in Los Angeles

IMAGE: GUTSU

BY SETH FIEGERMAN5 DAYS AGO

Two decades ago, Alireza moved to Los Angeles and began building up a menswear business. Pants, shirts, shoes — all manufactured and sold in the United States. He had loyal customers. He had more than 150 employees. He had a livelihood.

Then "all of the sudden" he lost it all, as customers fled to cheaper stores supplied by products made in China.

"I was losing and I was losing and I was losing. Then I had to go into bankruptcy. We lost everything," Alireza says solemnly to a camera interview while driving.

Uber turned his life around, he says. His situation improved after meeting a female Uber driver at a party, which inspired Alireza's wife to become a Lyft driver and inspired Alireza to drive for Uber.

"The money is okay right now. We can pay our bills. My life is going on right now a little better than poverty because of this job that I have."

Alireza is one of five Los Angeles Uber drivers, all identified only by their first names, whose backstories are featured in an original video series posted this week to Vid.me, an online video community. The personal histories of each driver vary wildly, but the collective message is clear: the next Uber driver you hail may have traveled an incredibly difficult road before taking the wheel.

Camilla Hall, a former reporter for The Financial Times and producer behind the Uber Lives video series, says she came up with the idea after moving to Los Angeles from New York and suddenly finding herself taking "hundreds" of Uber car rides to get around her adopted new city.

"Having been a journalist for many years, my natural instinct is to chat with everyone that I meet. Sitting in the back of an Uber, I just got to chatting and heard all these stories and was so amazed by the things that I was hearing," Hall says. "For the most part, Uber had helped these people come out of a very difficult situation."

In one video, we meet a cross-dressing Uber driver who admits to being "scared shitless" about how passengers would react during the first week on the job. In another video, we meet Biola, a mother of three who left her husband because he was abusive and has been in and out of homeless shelters. Uber, which she says she discovered from a Craigslist ad, made her feel "liberated."

Uber likes to tout itself as a job creator, but that narrative has been muddled by its attempts to squeeze out higher commissions from drivers and refusal to recognize those drivers as employees with benefits.

On Wednesday, just hours after the videos were released, that issue came to a head: California Labor Commission ruled one Uber driver was in fact an employee, not a contractor.

The five drivers featured in the video series may not be entirely representative of the more than one million drivers on Uber's platform, but they highlight the darker side of the gig economy: the bleak backgrounds and desperation of employees who see in Uber a financial lifeline — at least for now.

"Uber often talks about how it creates jobs and these are people who are definitely happy to be in a job," Hall says.

California says an Uber driver deserves to be paid like a full-time employee

A Chinese mobile phone user uses taxi-hailing app Uber on his smartphone in Chengdu city, southwest China's Sichuan province, 24 March 2015.

IMAGE: IMAGINECHINA/CORBIS

BY SETH FIEGERMAN5 DAYS AGO

California just dealt an uber-sized blow to Uber.

The ride-hailing app, whose profitability depends in part on treating its drivers as independent contractors without healthcare or other benefits, is now being forced to classify one California driver as an employee. California's Labor Commission made the ruling, according to a filing this week.

The ruling potentially upends Uber's business model and sets a bold precedent for similar startups in the on-demand economy.

In the ruling, the commission refutes Uber's claim to be nothing more than a "technological platform" that acts a middle man between drivers and passengers, arguing that Uber is "involved in every aspect of the operation," including vetting drivers, tracking user ratings, negotiating fees and more.

"Defendants' [meaning Uber] are in the business to provide transportation services to passengers. Plaintiff did the actual transporting of those passengers," the ruling says. "Without drivers such as [Barbara Ann Berwick, the plaintiff], [Uber's]' business would not exist."

"In light of the above," the ruling continued, "[Berwick] was [Uber]'s employee."

SEE ALSO: 3 things Uber needs to do over the next 5 years

The case stems from a complaint from Berwick, an Uber driver in San Francisco, requesting compensation for unpaid wages and expenses during a two-month period last year. Berwick complained she worked the equivalent of full days as an Uber driver and racked up the equivalent of overtime, while Uber said that as a freelance driver, she should earn only commission.

The ruling determines that Uber owes Berwick $4,152.20. Uber has filed to appeal the ruling.

"The California Labor Commission’s ruling is non-binding and applies to a single driver," a spokesperson for Uber said in a statement. "It’s important to remember that the number one reason drivers choose to use Uber is because they have complete flexibility and control. The majority of them can and do choose to earn their living from multiple sources, including other ride sharing companies."

Uber now has more than one million drivers operating in 300 cities worldwide, with reportssuggesting that the company is on pace to generate $10 billion in gross billings for 2015. The cut that Uber takes, estimated to be around 20%, could get even smaller if the California ruling sticks and were ever applied in other markets.

As it stands now, Uber drivers are responsible for covering their own health care and car insurance as well as gas costs and other expenses. That might change if these contractors are legally required to be treated as employees with full benefits.

One recent survey found that Uber and Lyft drivers spend $965 a month on average for car insurance, maintenance, gas and parking costs.

At least one U.S. senator has already cited the ruling to urge the federal government to weigh re-examining the definition of employees rather than see this matter litigated by each individual state.

“Today’s ruling from the California labor regulators demonstrates why federal policymakers need to reexamine the 20th Century definitions and employment classifications we’re attempting to apply to a 21st Century workforce,” Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-VA.) said in a statement on Wednesday.

On the other hand, if the ruling sets a precedent for other car-hailing services, which have similar contractor arrangements, Uber would potentially have an advantage for having raised far more capital. To date, Uber has raised more than $5 billion in private financing.

The ruling could also set a precedent for businesses like Postmates, Instacart, Handy, which rely on contractors to deliver products and services on demand through smartphone applications.

In the five years since it launched, Uber has clashed with regulators around the world for launching in new markets with proper licenses or traditional safety checks. Certain Uber services have faced banned or temporary suspensions in Las Vegas, Kansas City, New Delhi and Germany, among other markets.