Coffee & Power, From Linden Labs Founder, Puts A Jolt of Creativity Into Crowdsourcing

Wade Roush1/4/12

At http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2012/01/04/coffee-power-puts-a-jolt-of-creativity-into-crowdsourcing/?single_page=true

After building a vast virtual world with a complex internal economy sustained by the labor of more than a million active users, what do you do for an encore?

For Philip Rosedale, the founder and former CEO of Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, the answer was to try to recreate some of the same dynamics in the real world.

Coffee & Power, the San Francisco crowdsourcing startup that Rosedale founded in 2010 with former Linden Lab colleague Ryan Downe and former Accenture consultant Fred Heiberger, is all about making it easier for people to do small chunks of creative work for one another, and get paid for it. Transactions are initiated online, at a website where people can post small jobs they need done or are willing to do. But most of the actual work happens offline—and there are even two physical Coffee & Power "workclubs," in San Francisco and Santa Monica, where members can meet to collaborate or deliver services. (...)