CTV News Ottawa

Updated: Thu Oct. 08 2009 12:05:29 PM

ctvottawa.ca

You love your cell phone, you love applications, you're always at the app stores to see what's new, how would you like to get paid to do this?

You need to check out Mob4Hire. The Calgary-based company is the world's first company bringing together the people developing new apps with everyday folks who want to test them and get paid. You register on the Mob4Hire site and then developers post their requirements. They need people with certain phones running on certain carriers. They need to see if their app will work with various combinations of phones and carriers and with 750 different carriers around the world there's a lot of testing. If you meet the requirements you bid on the project and propose how much you're worth. If the developers agree you download their app and start testing. You file reports on the app and the better you get at testing the more you can charge.

Mob4Hire started in 2007, released their beta in early 2008 and they are taking off. In four months they've more than doubled the tester count to 23,000, plus almost 1,000 developers in over 100 nations. It's truly is a web-based global business or as the CEO Stephen King calls it "a micro-multinational" . He tells me "our timing was perfect for this service and we are now in the centre of the hurricane, running a thousand miles an hour." A tester can make about 40 dollars for a couple of hours work but remember, you have to pay any data/air time costs. Mob4Hire averages 29 percent as a broker fee.

Mob4Hire is in the sweet spot, phone apps are very, very hot, but testing to see if an app works in a variety of nations is expensive, slow and complicated. Mob4Hire solves that problem with a creative application of what's called Crowd Sourcing. King sees several other possible business possibilities as his crowd of testers grows. The apps business is predicted to triple in just 5 years to 25 billion dollars.

So if you like to be on the edge of the mobile explosion... Mob4Hire may be just what you need.

With a report from CTV Ottawa's Paul Brent