The market

According to the "Freelancing in America study" presented by Freelancers Union & Upwork, 2017 witnessed a rapid growth in the independent workforce which is adapting quickly in a fast-changing economy, especially the 4th Industrial Revolution - 71% of freelancers shared that they obtained more online jobs over the past year. In fact, freelancer is projected to be the main workforce in just a decade.

Specifically, there are 57.3 million people working freelance in the U.S, contributing $1.4 trillion to the economy. That is an increase of almost 30% from the last year.

Regarding the European market, 16.1% of the human resources are freelancers. From McKinsey's data, the figures were 25% for Spain and 26% for U.K. Those numbers demonstrate the same global trend: freelancing is on the rise worldwide. In general, the industry market size is expected to be $50 billion in 2017. Talao aims to earn 10% share of that.

The problem

But that rise is also being constrained by many problems, stopping it from fulfilling its true potential.

Data Ownership

Speaking at a micro view, participating on freelance marketplace like Upwork or Fiverr means that you are sacrificing your data to earn the right to access to tasks and jobs inquiries. And what can the platform do with your data? Selling to advertisers? Analyze and then open an HR agency? Whatever they do, you obtain no benefits from it.

Looking at the macro scale, when being a part of any work marketplace, you are also investing your reputation into it, meaning that you do not control it fully. In fact, it is highly affected by the platform's performance. Just imagine that one day, that platform collapses and then you lose all the credits, achievements or profiles you have built on it. Feel safe now?

Unbalanced power between freelancers and companies

Whenever a dispute on a freelance marketplace take places, how can an individual person like a freelancer can have enough resources to legally fight against giant firms to earn their right back? The marketplace might promise to help you but, at the end of the day, that's your benefits, they won't spend much to fix it willingly.

Résumé falsification

On the other hand, the benefits of companies and firms hiring freelancers are also threatened since the main source for them to check the talent's information is on the site, which might be fake or misleading.

Fairly speaking, there are other sources to verify it, yet it costs the employer a fortune to do so. 46% of resumes is projected to contain at least one discrepancy between the information provided and what the company finds out during a background check.

High Commission Fees

First, objectively speaking, Intermediate platforms like Upwork or Fiverr are establish to connect supply and demand in the freelance needs. And that's reasonable for them to collect some money to maintain the operation as well as growth.

Yet that's not comfortable for freelancers to lose 10-15% of their earning to those "evil" companies. And true, it should not be like that. Intermediate parties that are not adding much into the value chain should not take up much profits in it. That is not fair compared to what buyers and sellers have paid.

The solution

Talao aims to establish a peer-to-peer business platform to directly connect supply and demand in the freelance industry by tokenizing it their TALAO digital token buitl on the Ethereum network, solving al the fore-mentioned problems and prodiving the community with the first secured, global, fair and fully decentralized Talent Marketplace charaging 0 commission fees.

Data Ownership

A secured blockchain vault called Professional Reputation Vault is proposed by the Talao team to safelys store all the professional credits, achievements as well as certificates which are only accessible by recruiters when consents are given.

Résumé falsification

At the same time, that companies can have a worry-free mean to verify their candidate's infomartion thanks to the Reputation Vault, leading to a lower cost of background checking and a higher efficiency in doing so. All the statistics in the vault are presented in details by the Talao team in their whitepaper which I highly suggest you read it to further understanding this innovative model.

Unbalanced power between freelancers and companies

With all the information is stored on the Ethereum blockchain network, transparency is highly maintained and no manipulation can take places. Moreover, whenever dispute take places, all the written evidences are there being accessible and immutable to be verified, protecting the lonely talents from the intimitating power of giant firms.

High Commission Fees

As mentioned above, Talao will have 0 commission fee, encouraging freelancers to join the Talao DAO and get their share of this half a billion dollars for their contribution. The Talao decision-making system is made up of smart contracts to propose, vote and finally to change data used by the marketplace, the Reputation Vault and the DAO itself. All decisions are supported by Talent reputation.

The potential of Talao is actually more than what I have described, the business model they propose is comprehensive and helpful for such an industry.

Team

The Talao team consists of the high-profile early supporters of the Internet - and now, blockchain technology, proven by their achievements of several successful IPOs and many other leading companies.

Especially, their CEO - Nicolas Muller is an experienced expert in the industry of talents since he has been directing his platform connecting specialists and giant tech firms called eMindHub.

Talao has a human resource growing plan from 20 full-time employees in 2018 to 60 people in 2023 - Half in Paris and the other half working abroad.

Advisors

Social Media Presence

Regarding the most populated social media for cryptocurrency - Telegram - Talao's marketing team has established a strong and healthy community on this network with nearly 14k members.

Their performance on GitHub is quite good as well. This is, in my assessment, a strong plus since not many blockchain projects could deliver this section - updating the technical development on such an open-source code platform - for some reasons. Talao's update on GitHub does not only shows their confidence in the project themselves but also the necessary transparency needed in such a fragile world like cryptocurrency.

On the other hand, their social presence on a quite popular platform like Twitter or Bitcointalk is not equivalent to their potential. Having joined this network since 2016, they should have acquired more followers than just a few thousands. I am not sure if this is their strategy to not to start putting effort on marketing in such a bear market or so, yet I highly suggest them improve this situation gradually before the market pump quickly so that they would have a loyal community

Partners and Clients

Talao is one of the very few blockchain projects that have established quite a number of business partnerships before ending their fund-raising events. And they even have already had the very first clients.

Token Economics — Token sale

Token Symbol: TALAO
ICO: 4th July 2018 - 29th July 2018
Price: 1 ETH = 1,000 TALAO
Platform: Ethereum
Accepting: ETH
Minimum investment: 10 ETH
Soft cap: 5,000 ETH
Hard cap: 24,000 ETH
Country of Origin: France
Restricted country: USA
Whitelist/KYC: require both KYC & Whitelist

Being the platform fuel, TALAO token is necessary for most of the functions in the network: marketplace services functionalities, DAO utilities, Reputation Vault management. Users can either safely deposit their TALAO tokens thanks to the protocol stacking function written in the smart contract or transfer to the talent's wallets with the transactional function

Talao team has a reasonable allocation of the raised fund, most of it is distributed into the software development which is also the core value of the project. Sales, Marketing and management all have a fair enough proportion to run the company smoothly at around 16-19%.

Most of the tokens are for sale - 67%, meaning that the team is not holding a large enough amount to manipulate if that is the case. That is saying most of the power would be spread out into community's hands as well.

Recommendation for further reading:

https://medium.com/@talao/fusion-and-talao-are-teaming-up-to-provide-new-financial-services-for-100-million-freelancers-a8478e39003c
https://medium.com/@talao/dr-luc-julia-vp-of-innovation-at-samsung-and-former-apple-director-of-siri-at-apple-joins-talao-39f5354d8be1
https://medium.com/@talao/talao-partnering-with-fusion-and-daostack-to-achieve-widespread-adoption-and-blockchain-synergies-8919f119c44e
https://medium.com/@talao/talao-token-sale-details-3caa9d9c8dc8
https://medium.com/@talao/francois-davy-talao-advisor-partner-at-bridge-point-e5c73c8412cc
https://medium.com/@talao/talao-partners-with-koreas-kmong-to-deploy-the-talao-protocol-to-250-000-freelancing-talent-in-f2f9b4f21916

Links

Website
Whitepaper
Bitcointalk ANN
Telegram
Twitter
Facebook
Reddit
GitHub

Citations:

https://blog.freelancersunion.org/2017/10/17/freelancing-in-america-2017/
https://s3.amazonaws.com/fuwt-prod-storage/content/FreelancingInAmericaReport-2017.pdf
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/08/why-the-future-of-work-could-lie-in-freelancing
https://www.creditdonkey.com/resume-falsification-statistics.html

Author: Bitcointalk username: rueisnax (a.k.a. Vincentle — Le Huu Quang Vinh)
Profile link

Disclaimer: Statements on this site do not represent the views or policies of anyone other than myself. The information on this site is provided for discussion purposes only, and are not investing recommendations. Under no circumstances does this information represent a recommendation to buy or sell securities.

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