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Virtual brain bazaar

Kalpana Mohan

Dwarfing the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul is a bustling Internet market where every zany concept is a commodity and every casual passerby, a potential customer.

In the alleys of this virtual bazaar is a player whose USP is intellectual capital. HelloBrain.com (www.helloBrain.com) of Santa Clara, California, introduces an Internet-based virtual marketplace for the exchange of technology solutions an d claims to provide the mechanism for buyers and sellers of high-level skills to engage in such a trade.

HelloBrain, which calls itself an Intellectual eBay, lets companies post software and hardware design projects so that suitable professionals will bid for the contract. Technology professionals can, likewise, post their areas of expe rtise to attract potential buyers.

``The Silicon Valley spends a mind-boggling $80 billions on the creation of intellectual capital and associated R&D activities. We believe that about 20 per cent of this amount will be targeted at outsourced technology and solution acquisition,' ' states Bharat Sastri, the CEO and founder of HelloBrain.

The company is already beginning to make a difference in the lives of some bright programmers in a remote corner of Romania. In January 2000, when Bogdan Putinica and his colleagues read about HelloBrain.com in a local newsletter and logged o n to its site, this Romanian team realised that it could contribute to many of the projects that technology companies sought help with in order to complete the development of their key products.

Putinica's success story is easy to replicate in a country like India where there is a vast, highly skilled pool of untapped resources for the global market. Whether the buyer seeks an image processing algorithm, a credit card processing pro gram, a technical manual or board design expertise, HelloBrain provides the forum for discussion, negotiation and transaction, overseeing every stage of the transaction and maintaining extensive logs of activity.

A company seeking technical knowhow can visit HelloBrain and invite bids to manage the company's entire project or break the project into sub-tasks for various bidders. Buyers and sellers negotiate via the exchange, which, according to the comp any, has been built on a secure platform using layers of encryption and fingerprinting technology.

HelloBrain's employees assert that the company's greatest value is in how it conducts the transactions. Other companies such as Guru and Elance throng the virtual skill exchange market but HelloBrain claims that the sophistication of its trading system, the complexity of its content and the high monetary compensation for solutions and skills put it in a different niche. ``We are not just a matchmaking service,'' states Sastri, adding that HelloBrain's involvement in the transaction d oes not end until the seller (or solution provider) receives payment for his services, which is placed in escrow -- HelloBrain holds the payment in trust for the buyer until the transaction is completed. The buyer deposits the agreed compensation at the commencement of the project.

HelloBrain claims it follows a rigorous process to certify the credit of the buyer and says it has put in place a mechanism to attest for the sincerity of the solution provider, by what Sastri calls a voucher system, where qualified and trusted p eople in academia or in the industry will vouch for the merit of the provider.

HelloBrain releases payment to the solution provider upon electronic delivery of the project through the exchange and receives a percentage of each successful collaboration. The company also guarantees the anonymity of the buyer and the seller.

This, says Sastri, is critical because companies do not want to disclose details of their projects to other companies; anonymity also eliminates bias when the seller negotiates his payment with the buyer; moreover, anonymity shelters a seller who mi ght be a moonlighting professional seeking to add to his income!

The author is a freelance writer based in the Silicon Valley.