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Have you ever been out somewhere and thought, I wish someone would bring me a coffee?

Well, now you can turn that thought into reality by harnessing the people power of the strangers you pass by everyday.

There are a few ventures popping up on the web that take advantage of the so called "mobile marketplace." These ventures take the "People are basically good" philosophy of eBay and combine it with the online classifieds aspect of Craigslist, while adding something entirely fresh and innovative.

Now, strangers from your community can be recruited in real-time through your mobile phone or direct through the website to complete tasks, provide services or exchange goods and all it takes is a negotiated electronic payment to the volunteer. Suddenly, you can hire someone to get what you need, or get what you need done, instantly and no cash has to physically change hands.

This is the concept behind the new mobile marketplace, but there are many online options to choose from and slight variations of the concept in each one, so let us help you sort out the three heavyweights in the market and outline the pros and cons of each one.

Related Links:

• Groupthink: Grading Group Discount Websites
• The New Currency is No Currency at All
• How to Sell Anything on Kijiji or Craigslist

When we last left "The Other Four", Aidan Nulman and Yulin Zhang had fought their way back into The Next 36, a entrepreneurial incubator that offers each team $50,000 to develop, research, market and test a business spawned from a mobile application. Plus, mentorship and investment capital the likes of which most start-ups can only dream of. Against all odds, and with the help of their newest recruits, Krista Caldwell and Mindy Lau, they had an opportunity to turn The Next 36 into The Next 40 in the very first year of the program.

They'd won the chance to come back after being rejected during the selection process by flipping the four co-founders' own words and using them against the program. They'd positioned the selected 36 as the market leaders, while they took the position of the eager and scrappy competition ready to knock these leaders off their pedestal the moment their concentration broke.

Determined to simulate the real world for the 36 and challenge them as the real corporate world would, the founders realized The Other Four had a point. After all, what better competition than a group of four working in secret, without the program's help, building businesses at least on par with those who already have the honour of being called The Next 36?

But what exactly were the other four bringing to the table? It remained to be seen whether their idea would earn them a place back among the elite of Canadian universities and that's where we pick up our story...