WoNoJo.com: Ready for Pajama Enterprise?

It's been exactly six months today since Pajamanation first revealed its idea of pajamaworking to the public. This soft launch or beta period has garnered well over 2000 subscriptions to Pajamanation microjob exchange, providing us considerable feedbacks and lessons which we will carefully adopt for our next major release of Pajamanation.com.

As anticipated, 90+% of our members who joined us from well over 200 cities around the world (including over 20 cities in Malaysia) are microworkers who want to get paid to perform fractional work assignments offered by corporations and micropreneurs. Pajamanation is now closer than ever to break the 5,000 members mark, in time for our planned global launch, which will enable Pajamanation.com to offer micropreneurs a very effective platform to crowdsource their microjobs.

At Pajamanation Malaysia, we're committed to offer the best work crowdsourcing platform for our members. Besides recruiting talents (i.e. professional microjob-based workers), we are readying to offer training to pajamapreneurs and microbusiness owners.

Pajama Enterprise vs. Pajama Workers

What do we mean by microbusiness (or pajama enterprise as we'd like to call them) anyway? What are their differences compared to pajamaworkers?

As mentioned earlier, pajamaworkers are the service providers -- those who perform the microjobs at home, and deliver to companies or individuals they've contracted with. The other half of the equation are the enterprises that outsource the microjobs to home/pajamaworkers.

The United Nations defines a micro enterprise in Malaysia as a business entity with an annual sales turnover of less than RM 200,000 and is employing no more than five employees. Similar definitions are offered by agencies like SMIDEC or business-centric NGOs. Most of the micro enterprises are sole proprietorships, partnerships of 2-4 individuals, or a family-owned proprietorships & private limited companies (Sdn Bhd).

Why Less is More?

Why Micro Enterprises then, instead of Small & Medium Enterprises (SME) or large corporations and government agencies? Wouldn't the bigger ones be able to outsource more work? After all, the 4000+ large organizations (Less than 1% of all total active business entities in Malaysia, contributes to 94% of national GDP (compared to only 60-70% in Australia, Japan and Germany) [Tan Sri Nor Mohamed Yaakop, Minister of Finance II, 12 SEP 2005).

Because the 500,000+ SMEs provides 65.1% employment in Malaysia, and 80% of those SMEs are micro enterprises (UNDP Report, 2007). Plus, during the past whole decade employment agencies for both full-time jobs and part-time/freelancing employment have only been able to offer jobs/freelancing contracts to 10% of job/work seekers -- if Pajamaworkers are to rely only on SMEs and large companies (private and government-linked, i.e. GLCs), 90% of them will not get any work assignments and thus will be forced to stick with more secure full-time employment for residual income, which are also hard to find nowadays!

In order to provide more work for pajamaworkers, we need to aggressively tap the power of the 400,000+ existing micro enterprises, as well as establish more pajama enterprises out of the pool of potentially millions of pajamaworkers, starting with the ~3.5% unemployed labour in Malaysia today (Datuk Wira Dr Fong Chan Onn, Minister of Human Resources, 2007) -- with tens of thousands of them being fresh university/college graduates, or degree holders.

The Pajama Work

As you can see at Pajamanation.com, there are 150 categories of work that Pajamaworkers can perform. So, what kind of work can a Pajama Enterprises and SMEs offer?

Although the kind of work can be just about any fractional work that business entities do on daily basis, our initial focus would be to take advantage of what today's Generation C offers the best:-

C – Cusp
C – Caring
C – Control
C – Content
C – Channel
C – Criterion
C – Celebrity
C – Cynicism
C – Character
C – Credibility
C – Connected
C – Consensus
C – Collaborative
C – Code (internet coding)
C – Community/Communication
C – Creativity/Creative/Creators (also "Creative Class")

==> Sum-ed up to "Creative Content (CC)".

Consider that ICT especially the web and mobile platform are your best tools for production, business operation and marketing -- the complete business cycle of starting up, run and sell!

So, what can you ideally produce? Try books, magazines, online/offline (news/journalism) media, product design/engineering/prototypes, marketing materials, sales quotations, translation works, graphics etc.

What kind of services can you get for your business operation? Try accounting, clerical, market research, business consultation, online/offline media setup & maintenance, articles, project/marketing planning, photography, online/offline marketing, sales, and the list goes on -- you should know what your business needs better!

Note clear enough? Here are samples of our pajama entrepreneurs/enterprise:

lukaso from Indonesia who is a "31 years old, with a technical and business background. I studied at the University of IST Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Graduated in B.Sc. Computing"

1oasis from Malaysia who specializes in "business acumen & project engineering/management"

Here are some samples of microjobs offered by several business consulting marketplaces:-

wilfred from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Organisation : SME
Description : Wilfredstudios.com Small Budding website design firm based in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia. We've got grand ideas and sky high passion in creating the best designs for websites.

Project Title : PSD -> Joomla template

Project Description : PSD of website provided with layers (design provided is close to traditional joomla layout, should be easier) needs to be converted into joomla template, compatible with Joomla 1.0.x
Additional Description (2007-06-18): Just a quick one... the payment is in USD 25 - USD 100.... equivalent to about RM 100 - RM500

'Challenger' from Florida, USA (27jun07) at iFreeLance.com:

Category: Graphic Design / Multimedia
Subcategory: Banner Ad Design
Title: Website header for blog
Work Location: Offsite
Project Phase: Bidding
Duration: 6d, 22h, 18m
Bids: 1 [already received at least one on the 1st day]

I need a Web header for my website www.argumentender.com . It's going to be a blog where I compare similar products. The idea I am going for is the ArgumentEnder to be in a font that appears to be for a main event boxing match and maybe a pair of boxing gloves on a hook. Underneath the "Argumentender" would say...Where the gloves come off.. Maybe a couple spotlights on each end of the banner shining on the entire banner.

Or the task could more specific, instructionally for a web design work, eg. by rw123 at GetAFreelancer.com:

The task you will be bidding on is as follows:
You will take one (1) PSD file and convert it into CSS/XHTML. I expect that you will be communicating with me a lot to ensure the right template is being created.

I will send the file that needs to be converted when we are discussing the project in the PM.

Please only bid if you have designed complex CSS/XHTML templates in the past (I will request your portfolio as proof).

It is also very important that you have experience in coding boxes with rounded corners using only CSS and WITHOUT using javascipt.... I need to see examples of this that you have created because my design uses many boxes with rounded corners of different heights and widths. These boxes will have text dynamically added from my database and therefore they need to be flexible.

The winning vendor will have experience in creating similar websites, will provide instructions on how I can edit the templates you have created, and set up the pages so I can easily make changes myself to the layout, fonts, text, menus, etc

The backend of this site will be written in Python with a mySQL database so my developer will need to be able to easily edit your pages to insert the necessary code.

This will be an going project and if I am happy with the initial results I will have lots of other work for the winning bidder.

It is important that the code is clean and organized and friendly for SEO (as well as supporting all major browsers and w3c compliant).

If this first project is a success, we can start working on the other pages.

I look forward to working with you.

And a microjob that may require the pajamaworker to have a double/'second life' as requested by wdb from Belgium:

Organisation : SME
Description : Storefront (shop) in second life (full service)
Project Title : Second Life establishment
Languages Required : English
Project Description : We want to open a mortgage bank in second life to give mortgage loans for people who want to develop properties on second life virtual grounds.

Start Date : 2007-06-18

How can Pajamanation Malaysia help Pajama Enterprises?

We offer optional consultation and can procure cost-cutting services to help you deal effectively with pajamaworkers and even potential customers.

For a start, our sister company 1oasis.net can help you operate more professionally on the Web with your own domain name and affordable commercial email and web hosting:

YOUR OWN EFFECTIVE ONLINE BRAND: We believe that today, having a professionally-matched domain name and web presence is a MUST for every business and organization, both big and micro. By using a URLs like www.jaring.my/yourcompany-name and www.free-web-host.com/your-brand-name or email domain like @streamyx.com, @pd.jaring.my, @hotmail/yahoo/gmail.com, @somebody-else-company.com etc., instead of advertising your own brand, you are advertising other people's brand every time your website receives a visitor or your sent emails get read by the recipients.
A RINGGIT SAVED IS RINGGIT EARNED: Do you know that many companies in Malaysia still pay as much as RM100/year for a full year registration/license of domain name? Even the more savvy Internet users are still paying an average of RM50 for a .com domain name. Did you know domain names actually RETAIL from as low as under RM10/year (for .info & .or) and .com/.net starts from under RM30/year! Why pay more? Consider that many enterprise will end up registering more than one domain (Many companies own ten or more domain names to protect their valuable brand names and their variations), and with every RM 10 or more saved per domain, that would add up to considerable savings EVERY YEAR! The money saved can perhaps be channeled for other marketing activities or to promote the website itself.
RELIABLE WEB HOSTING AND E-COMMERCE (NEW PLANS JUST UNVEILED ON MONDAY, 25 JUN 2007): Did you know that many companies in Malaysia are paying as much as RM100+/month for hosting space well under 1000MB? 1oasis.net offers secure hosting on both Linux and Windows platforms with storage between 1000 MB (1-GB) to 10,000 MB (10-GB) and monthly fee starting from under RM10! (10% of what some local hosts charge!). And instead of a one-price-fit-all package, an option where you may end up paying for more disk space, email accounts, MySQL/MS SQL database accounts and bandwidth that what you'll actually need or optional premium features like IP address, SSL certificate and e-commerce / site builder, 1oasis.net offers ala-carte options -- PAY ONLY FOR SERVICES THAT YOU NEED.

Need help with any of these online business tools, or need assistance on how to market your brand and/or products online? Our pajamaworkers are ready to help you! Or you may contact us directly.

Tune in for more upcoming services for pajama enterprises and pajama workers...

Read more about glocal crowdsourcing:-