BusyBee – Review

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By: APPLUNA LLC

Version #: 2.1

Date Released: 2011-02-17

Developer:

Price: 0.00

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Whether you’re an iPhone and degree holder in between jobs, an iPhone-wielding professional looking for a moonlighting gig, an iPhone-addicted bum finally lifting a finger and stretching a brain muscle to try to put an end to your multi-slacking days through freelance work, or simply a person within reach of an iPhone and looking to sell services related to any or all items from your well defined set of skills, you’re likely to find a suitable solution to your under/unemployment quandary in BusyBee.

BusyBee is a native, location-service iPhone app dedicated to a special sort of job-hunting in the present (to borrow Steven Jobs’s term) post-PC era. As its name suggests, it functions as a virtual hive for individuals for hire and potential employers/customers alike.

Reading through the brief help pages accessible from within the app behind, of course, a standard ‘i’ button, you’ll find out what the app sets out to do in an inviting, albeit a tad grandiloquent, mission statement: BusyBee is purportedly "the world’s very first app that pulls together an entire ecosystem built primarily to facilitate all work-related solutions." While its claim on primacy among the thousands of apps in the market it occupies is a tricky thing to prove, that it at least delivers on its promise of offering work solutions in the age of iDevices and e-everything is easy to see.

The landing page of BusyBee consists of a grid of four squares labeled Find Bees, Messages, Connections, and Profiles. It’s probably best to start with the Profiles section, where you can choose a hive-wide username and specify your location, your special skill if you’re looking for a job or the skill you’re interested in if you’re looking to hire, and your rate of compensation. Note that you can create as many profiles as the skills you want to sell or bank on, so you can have a profile as an employer looking for a blogger and a separate one as a plumber for hire. After you create at least one profile, you can now get busy with the other sections of the app.

Find Bees lets you walk your fingers through a comprehensive list of skills ranging from the more common areas of expertise of content writing and Web design to the less tech-savvy ones such as animal care and food service. The list makes it apparent that far from being an app that pertains to full-time or part-time job opportunities, BusyBee also offers solutions concerning short-term and often localized types of work, such as house repair or proofreading a college paper.

Tapping on any of the skills on the list leads to another list of sub-skills that lets you narrow your search. When you’re done choosing you’ll see a page — or hive, as it’s called here — of profiles of available "Bees" and "Bees" looking to hire. You can further narrow your search by choosing a range, enabling you to bypass the default worldwide setting and only see the profiles of Bees from just within two miles of where you are to as far as a thousand miles. This is particularly useful for those whose chosen skills are largely dependent on the distance between employer/customer and employee/service provider.

The Messages section, appropriately named The Buzz, is naturally a message center of sorts, a communication hub between and among Bees, while Connections simply shows two recommendation lists: Bees you recommend to others and Bees who recommended you.

Currently the app suffers from intermittent crashes and interface hiccups, but I trust that with BusyBee’s huge potential for helping both sides of the 21st-century job market as well as those in the middle, the first of many improvement updates to the app is just around the corner and a mere buzz away.