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A flood of conversation about the local on-demand economy has broken out since BIA/Kelsey’s NOW Conference in June. The opportunities and risks for labor and small business, as well as the potential for profit among companies facilitating last-mile logistics for on-demand services, have taken center-stage in a growing national debate. Uber’s expanding reach has brought regulatory scrutiny to this emerging business model and the on-demand economic transformation is becoming a presidential election issue.

With that national conversation comes a wave of conferences that deserve the attention of our readers. We project that, if the local on-demand model can mature to provide improved wages to household labor, it could unlock billions in profits for successful facilitators of that newly priced work. The phenomenon started in the enterprise, where project work continues to increase, and some of the most interesting opportunities may come from startups that unlock the calculus of optimizing on-demand work while offering new benefit options to workers. That may well come from new professional services firms offering highly qualified laborers to the enterprise on flexible terms.

We’re prepping our next Local On-Demand Economy event, which will take place in Seattle. In the meantime, there are sure to be fireworks throughout the Fall and 2016. It will benefit everyone — investors, entrepreneurs, enterprise leaders and people seeking to understand the future of work — to tune in and participate in the local on-demand debate. Here are the events we’ll be watching:

TAP Conference 2015. Button, a developer of an on-demand API for use in apps, and the advocacy group it founded, theondemandeconomy.org, will hold TAP Conference 2015 in New York on October 1. Virginia Senator Mark Warner (D) and entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk will keynote the event. Sessions on the future of local delivery, contextual commerce, regulation and the role of global brands will make this an interesting one-day event. Register here.

Closing the Gap: Solutions for an Inclusive Economy, will be presented in Palm Beach, Florida, December 6th – 8th. Featuring New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and New York University Stern School economist Nouriel Roubini, among other luminaries the event is designed to bring business, non-profits and foundations together with policy-makers to address economic inequality. The local on-demand economy is, we believe, the inevitable product of data networking and rapid progress in logistic management, but it could turn out very poorly for workers. Closing the Gap is invite-only.

O’Reilly Next: Economy, another invitation-only event will feature Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman in San Francisco on November 12 – 13. Ground-breaking publisher Tim O’Reilly has launched an interesting on-demand series on Medium. His recent analysis of Uber is worth a read and we’ll be following Tim’s public thinking closely. You can request your invitation here.

As mentioned above, we are prepping a Seattle event. Are you interested in speaking? Drop me a note.

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