It’s useful if your contractors, outsourcers, or off-site employees are paid by the hour and you’d like to track what they’re doing with that time.  On the other hand, if you pay for performance (i.e. by the job or by the milestone), then this probably isn’t really going to be useful to you.  Especially not at $299/year/user.

TransparentBilling works pretty simply.  Each person to be tracked is given a login and downloads a small app to their computer. When they log into TB and your project, the software activates and records screenshots in 3 minute intervals, uploading them to the site onto a secure server.  It also records averages in keystrokes and mouse movements during those three minutes to give you an idea what the person might have been doing in between screenshots.

From the manager’s perspective, screens can bring up productivity numbers, Gantt charts, task-related discussions (handled by TB), and more.  A timeline of screen shots for any given period can be looked at and feedback can be left on any point in that timeline so the employee knows what you may want to change or do differently.

Having worked in and worked with freelancers, contractors, and outsourcing agents, I can tell you that in some circumstances, TransparentBilling might be just what the doctor ordered.  Most of the time, however, freelancers aren’t interested in this kind of micro-management and will rebel.

Again, though, this is something that specific types of projects or business models may require and this option is one of the better ones I’ve seen recently.

He’s calling it Appsterdam.

Now, when most of us think of Amsterdam, we think of things akin to Harold & Kumar or Half Baked.  Turns out, there’s more to this most famous of Dutch cities than just hints of legalities that aren’t so legal elsewhere.  At a recent meeting of developers that congregated in the city, Lee made his case for the new developer’s Mecca.

“I became disillusioned with the way the United States was going in general. I myself had no health insurance and no way of getting health insurance as a self-employed person.” Lee told them. “So I decided to spend a year traveling around the world and talking to developers and looking for a place to live. I went everywhere. Big cities like Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia but also Argentina, Taiwan, Cambodia. The conclusion I came to was that Amsterdam was the most livable city in the world. Even the stray animals look fat and happy here.”

He sees the idea as a sort of independent label club for non-mainstream, independent application builders.  Sort of a contrast to the Hollywood-like atmosphere of Northern California’s Silicon Valley, Appsterdam would be the underground New York record label hangout for developers.

Beyond just a Meetup or annual conference, Appsterdam would be a whole community wherein people can exchange ideas, bring their families together, and more.  Think of it as a Google Campus for the indie app developer.

Lee’s ideas have legs and a lot of buzz in tech circles is making it fly.

Regardless, the business networking site is a real threat to Facebook’s virtual ownership of the social networking sphere.  So FB is fighting back.

A new Facebook app called BranchOut came alive last week,  in that time exploding from about 33,000 users to well over 800,000 and growing fast.  Could it kill LinkedIn?

It could give it a run for its money, at least.  BranchOut’s main advantage is that it’s riding on the Facebook platform, which has an estimated 700 million users worldwide.  It allows users of FB to have access to a business and professional networking service through their already-established Facebook account.

The little app startup has tried several schemes to get noticed over the past year or so, but only recently has it seen its userbase finally begin to go viral.  Mainly because it’s dropped the cheesy marketing attempts (things like “would so-and-so in your company be captain of your softball team?”) and redesigned itself to be more professional and (hence) useful.

In other words, the app changed its focus from lame “battle app with a professional twist” to “professional network plugin” and is now suddenly getting noticed.  All without any change in their marketing spending, according to the startup.

So how far will this app get?  It could go far, but only time will tell if it replaces LinkedIn as a professional networking option.  A few more functionality upgrades will be needed to do that completely, but for core networking, it’s definitely on the right track.

The idea of the site is very simple.  Writers can join for free and offer services to buyers that they are allowed to suggest.  For example a writer can offer one or more blogs to be written on a certain subject (or on any subject) for a set fee.  Other categories include web articles, ebooks, email copy, press releases and research.

In addition buyers can suggest jobs they would like to have completed, to allow writers to create a job for them.  The site is a simple marketplace but its design makes it very accessible and it does stand out from the other markets online today.  The absence of bidding facilities means that writers can provide a set service at a set price.

Every writer also gets a profile page which can include links to other websites they own online.  All their jobs and services can be listed on this page to make it easier for potential buyers to work out whether a particular writer offers the service they are looking for.  There is also a facility to contact the seller to request a specific job if need be.  The site is only just starting to fill up with work but it looks set to be a good bet for the future for many writers.

It is called Clickworker and it has been designed to be beneficial to both freelancers and companies looking to outsource work.  The idea is simple and will appeal to companies with lots of small pieces of work that need completing.  The whole job is sent to Clickworker and is then broken up into individual tasks.  For instance a company may need hundreds of small descriptions for a website.  Each one will be a separate task and can be taken on by an individual Clickworker.

The site is very well designed and could be another nice income stream for freelancers.  They can use the site in between other work they take on, and with no required amount of work to be completed it is easy to fit in whenever it suits them.  The companies using Clickworker will also benefit from being able to get large jobs completed far more quickly than they would by enlisting the help of just one or two freelancers.  They can also leave all the planning to Clickworker, safe in the knowledge that they will get the completed job returned to them very quickly.

It may be early days for the site but things are definitely looking very encouraging.  We will keep you posted.

The first of these is perhaps the most interesting, since the website has been voted the Best Employment Site of the Year.  In a year when lots of people have been looking for online work in the wake of job losses, cutbacks and salary freezes, Freelancer.com has certainly done well to capitalise on the situation.

The second award they won was the People’s Choice award from the same category.  This just goes to show the depth of feeling that site users have about the website, since it has provided them with work – and apparently plenty of it – during recent months and years.

According to the chief executive of Freelancer.com, Matt Barrie, the award was accepted “on behalf of our 2.5 million freelancers.”  No doubt not all of those freelancers are active on the site, but enough of them are to have made a real difference to the outcome of the awards.  There have been many changes for the better on the site in recent times, leading to other branches of the business opening in other parts of the world.  The US, UK and Australia are just three of the areas where it has now become much easier to get work, thanks to the efforts of the website called Freelancer.com.

Now there is a new entrant to the field called Ajeva. The main difference between Ajeva and all the other similar sites that already exist is that Ajeva will take no fees of any kind for their services. The site already has plenty of work listed in various sections, including writing, design, multimedia, admin and many other areas. It’s easy to sign up to use the site, from the point of view of a provider or a buyer.

One thing to note about Ajeva is that some listings take you through to other sites. One notable example was a range of requirements leading through to ODesk. However this may be done to beef up the range of jobs currently available. There are certainly plenty of individual jobs requested from individual buyers on the site as well.

On the surface Ajeva seems to be everything that a freelancer online would want. It gives you the chance to keep all the cash earned from a freelance job, rather than giving a portion of it away for fees or charges. It will be interesting to see how many freelancers use the site, although it is normal for most people to use more than one anyway. It probably won’t dent the business being done elsewhere.

It would seem that the initial months of 2011 have seen a huge increase in the demand for UK freelancers from the US and other countries as well.  The rate of clients from the US specifying a wish to work with UK based freelancers has gone up by over 700%.  Demand from India has gone even higher than this, with the figure approaching 800%.

People Per Hour is not the best known of all the bidding marketplaces available for freelancers to use online.  But since it is a UK based website it does tend to attract a lot of freelancers who are based in the UK.  This means it is an ideal place to find British freelancers, whatever the reason for doing so may be.

This data flies in the face of the traditional model of Western businesses outsourcing work to other countries.  It seems to have been partly triggered by the recession and the reduction of regular roles within businesses.  It will be interesting to see whether it continues into the future, but UK freelancers will no doubt hope it does.

Now it has added a forum to its list of achievements, and it is designed to help those who work online or who are looking for freelance work in this area. It has been named Tycoon Talk, and although the name may suggest something a little different it is an ideal place to go to discuss many freelance issues.

Typical areas worth noting on the new forum include the Content and Writing Tycoon section and the Blogging forum. While not all sections will be pertinent to or useful for everyone wanting to make money online, most people will find something of use in the forum. It appears to be very active already and it also benefits from having two sections dedicated to outsourcing on Freelancer and freelancing on the site respectively. Anyone who is new to the website will doubtless find plenty of useful information in these two sections alone.

With the recent development of the Freelancer website to reach out to more of the world, the addition of the forum is a common sense step to take. Furthermore it is easy to join and may provide those who are new to Freelancer with the help and advice they need to succeed.

Some freelancers have even found work via the site, by using keywords to find appropriate tweets of interest. While some freelancers constantly tweet updates on the site, others use it only occasionally. But there is no doubt that it shows how important social media sites of all kinds can be to people who work from home.

Home working can be an isolating experience. This is probably why people of a similar ilk find each other to connect with on social media sites like Twitter. It would seem that creative individuals in particular enjoy the challenge of linking up with like minded people on Twitter. The limitation of having just a few words at your disposal to compose a message with obviously appeals to the creative types among us!

Make no mistake though: Twitter is just the tip of the iceberg. A recent report stated that a writer from the US updated her Facebook account some sixty times every single day. It acted as a way to connect with people instead of talking with workmates.

It would be hard to imagine the internet world without social media now. As we can see, freelancers in particular would miss it in more ways than one.