I’m starting to feel bad for poor old “Traditional industry/sector” everywhere he goes, there’s another Uber, Netflix or Nest disrupting how he used to get things done.

Even his new freelance economy hobby (that’s he’s just trying to look cool) isn’t safe from these new-fangled solutions. Mechanical Turk, Freelancer.com and even Craigslist are all changing the way this new freelancer thingy work, by making it easier than ever to contact and organise freelancers for whatever role or project people require at the time.

But thing is, Traditional industry/sector has spotted a potential problem with all this crowd based quackery the kids are into these days, all these sites and solutions are standalone and completely disconnected from the actual work of the freelancers in question. While Freelancer.com might be the go to place to find a hip website designer (who understands all those “May-May” things) but for established organisations that run their respective workflow through fancy web applications, the resulting to and fro is a rather massive departure from the all-inclusive time efficient norm they’ve become used to.

However it seems the internet’s “Hive Mind” is good for more than just cat gifs. Fresh internet based start-up MyCrowd is aiming to combine talent acquisition with the most commonly used productivity platforms.  Despite being freshly launched, MyCrowd has already polled out integrations between Asana and Basecamp which allows users to request freelancers from within the apps themselves. These new integrations come on top of existing bridges between PowerPoint Google Docs and Optimizely. It’s a trend that shows no sign of slowing down, as the demand for “Better Freelancer tools” keeping growing on the back of a 700% increase in the number of freelance online tasks from 2008.

It’s a no brainer really. If I happen to be a hip and fresh web-design company, it’s a logical to assume I’d have workflow for such projects firmly within my chosen management solution right? That being the case, I’d most likely have to cut and paste project info from site to site when I’m attempting to find a freelancer – not the most efficient way of doing things. MyCrowds solution makes that process simpler and more efficient.

All that said, there are reasons sites like Freelancer.com have been growing at a pretty insane rate. The level of interaction between potential client and freelancer has become so engaging that clients want to research freelancers, view samples of their work and see what other have said about them. It’s the foundation of a fairly solid relationship that many freelancers and employers alike place trust in, trust MyCrowd is risking by attempting to automate what is normally a very organic process. There’s rather large questions when dealing with the situation of wanting multiple proposals for a piece of work, one of the greatest assets of Freelancer.com is that it pulls the actual work away from the process of acquiring on demand labour – this in turn leaves room for the human factor (gut feeling, intervention, personal flexibility).

Concerns aside for the moment, MyCrowd is more than just “doing things more efficiently”, it represents a new way in which start-ups can make open application architecture work for them. Instead of simply sitting on a given digital product, app or service, they can work out new ways to add functionality from within applications themselves and in doing so, create entirely new tool sets for the freelancer on the go!