Outsource Bulgaria

Vietnam is holding general elections on Sunday.

The ruling Communist party (I mean Workers party!) is the undisputed leader. Less than 20% of the candidates are NOT members of the Communist Party, so the result cannot be that surprising.

In the mean time, courts have put on trial and jailed a number of political activists and journalists. Two of them were occused of attempts to sabotage the elections.

It’s not cleat what these elections will mean for the thousands of businesses who have invested in Vietnam on the promise of a liberlized market. Intel has already committed to build a billion-dollar chip factory.

One thing is certain – whatever the Communists decide to do, they better not scare these investors. China is a good example of a roaring economy with waving red flags.

Outsourcing certain IT functions is one thing, outsourcing local journalism seems quite another. This ad has been generating a media storm:

We seek a newspaper journalist based in India to report on the city government and political scene of Pasadena, California, USA.

Here’s the gist of the story from Yahoo News:

Outsourcing first claimed manufacturing jobs, then hit services such as technical support, airline reservations and tax preparation. Now comes the next frontier: local journalism.

James Macpherson, editor and publisher of the two-year-old Web site pasadenanow.com, acknowledged it sounds strange to have journalists in India cover news in this wealthy city just outside Los Angeles.

Admittedly, this story sounds like it’s Dilbert on outsourcing. I heard the interview he did for BBC and frankly he made his point clear: he feels someone in India will do a better job at watching the local counsel meetings (they’re streamed online) and then summarizing them.

The journalist at BBC who was doing the interview didn’t feel too comfortable with the concept though … I bet he was seeing headlines: BBC outsources news gathering to India!

World of Warcraft has been a million-dollar business for Blizzard but it’s a million-dollar business for companies who sell WoW gold, accounts, and more.

Game outsourcing has been here ever since Ultima Online came out more than a decade ago. Diablo 2 item trading was quite a big business but recently eBay banned the auctions of virtual goods.

BBC has an article on the implications of game outsourcing, here’s a few quotes:

Qin Shen, who works for a company called Ucdao.com, says: “Many white collar workers want to improve their character on their own, but they do not have much time. They need to go to work in the day and they don’t have the energy to improve at night, so they need someone else to play for them.”

But to say this is hugely controversial among the game’s community is putting it mildly. I posted a message on one website asking for people who buy gold to get in touch – and got a number of quite hostile responses.

Eventually, I did find someone who had bought gold.

“I have a life outside of the game that’s certainly much more important, so the few precious hours I do get to play on my game I don’t want to spend doing the same thing over and over again to get in-game money, when I could just buy that and do the stuff in-game that I actually enjoy,” he said.