It seems that with so many people unemployed and looking for work there is a real need for an effective and simple training program to turn displaced workers into competent virtual assistants and stop the flow of those jobs to other countries. If anything the displaced workers could be viewed as a resource for new needs and not a problem. The implementation of this has been greatly reduced by the "Do no evil" folks at Google.
Where 4 years ago such a task would have been a large scale undertaking with lots of software licensing issues - Google's suite of zero-footprint apps makes deployment a non-issue. All that is needed to start is an Internet connection and a web browser (use Firefox please). With Google adding Voice to their suite of services they complete an environment that would allow any reasonably competent typist to become an effective virtual assistant.
Google offers:
- Voice - GoogleVoice
- IM/Virtual Calling/Webcam - GoogleTalk
- Word Processing/Spreadsheets - GoogleDocs
- Calendaring - GoogleCalendar
- Web presence/Domains - GoogleApps
- Public Relations - Blogger
- Research - Google and Google Maps
Using these tools (Voice is yet to be released to the public), someone could rather quickly become an effective admin person to a highly mobile worker such as a sales person.
Right now the freelance market is rich with web designers and people who can do HTML pages. The American mindshare of where Virtual Assistants are is India, with American VAs being an expensive proposition. An effective training package could help bring that to a middle ground making it more affordable for more people to use America's unemployed.
Let me say in closing, that I am an Earthling and I think ultimately we should be approaching problems on a planetary scale and NOT providing this idea as an "America First Idea." My thinking here is prompted by something more basic. I have many friends who have lost their jobs in the past few months, so I am thinking more of them than blind loyalty to an arbitrary division of a planet.
Ultimately, I still believe in the viability of SecondLife to even disintermediate even travel but I need the Lindens to catch up with my vision and what they are trying to create is no small task, often limited by the available bandwidth and the power of desktop computers.
The idea of training American Virtual Assistants in the Google Way needs a big push. My experience is American Institutions are slow to adopt and implement. Perhaps, a new venture exists here. Workbook?
Plus with the feature rich Google Voice creating an opportunity to forward your phone to your virtual VA, maybe we should write Google and encourage them to hurry up.
Please comment and let me know what you think.
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