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http://ideasproject.com/transcript.webui?id=2346
(...)
"Routing Burger King Orders to Montana or Bangalore
"Then, in the mid zone, you have enterprises like LiveOps. LiveOps is a firm where to apply to work as a contractor for it, you endure an approximately fourteen hour test, administered completely over the Internet, by a computer, to you, through your computer. It makes sure you can be set up with all the equipment you need, a headset, a microphone, a camera, and all that on your computer. Then, it tests your reading comprehension, your alternate language skills, so it is not just English, all that kind of stuff. About 3,000 people, a week, apply to work at LiveOps. About 30 stagger out the other end, having survived this sort of vetting. Then, they get interviewed by a human and if they succeed, they are now in LiveOps.
What that means is that day in, day out, any time; they can kind of jack in at their home and say, "Alright, I'm ready for work". Then, the work they are given is scaled to their own skill levels. They might find themselves taking orders for Dominos Pizza, for about 20 minutes. They get bored with that and they unplug, and they are given a new set of scripts. Suddenly, they are the American Red Cross and they are taking donations or assisting in families finding one another after a hurricane hits New Orleans. Then they jack out of that and they see another menu of things they might be asked to do, where they just transform into different characters, associated with different organizations. If the kid in the crib nearby starts crying, they can unplug after their call, and then be offline.
"You can start to make it so that it is actually rational to have somebody placing an order at a Burger King, through a speakerphone outside the restaurant, in their car, and that order is getting routed through the Net, to who knows where, Montana, Bangalore, you name it. The person takes the order and then hits send and relays it back to the restaurant, where the person inside prepares it and hands the sack of food over to the car, two minutes later. It is cheap networks that make that a rational thing to do...."
