oDesk in the News

oDesk is a different sort of market for freelance developers, designers, and others. By focusing on some extra features, they've positioned oDesk as a place where both hourly rates and overall job sizes are somewhat larger than the industry average (you can check out their oConomy community site for some aggregate information on jobs and rates). To do this, they add things for both buyers and sellers.

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oDesk says it's helped companies outsource more than 1.6 million hours of work completed by more than 47,000 providers in more than 90 countries. And through oConomy, the company is giving the public a chance to browse through data about all of those jobs.

oDesk has just released a new part of their site called the oConomy where anyone can view statistics about the outsourcing activity on oDesk.

Features include the ability to view average working rates, among other data about providers, from around the world on a Google map. You can also view an up-to-the-second metric of how much money has been spent on outsourced projects, as well as graphs of how rates and quality vary over time and providers.

These two companies are a natural fit for one other. Whereas oDesk helps developers from all over the world find clients, and vice versa, CVSDude provides tools that help developers collaborate with each other and share their work with clients. In particular, CVSDude hosts version control systems that enable developers, perhaps located continents apart, to work on the same set of code without having to worry about redundancy and conflicts.

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oDesk, a next generation marketplace for contract developers, has recently seen a spike in requests for Facebook developers.

oDesk offers developers a number of aptitude tests to certify their programming skills in various areas. They've now added a Facebook aptitude test as well. Companies can now sort through developers based on their skill level in creating Facebook applications.

What oDesk does: Enables buyers of services to hire, manage and pay technology service providers from around the world.

Reason for starting business: To allow people to work directly and be able to pick the place they live.

Online marketplaces have traditionally been places for small and medium buyers to obtain services from small and medium entrepreneurs. But Gary Swart, CEO, oDesk feels differently and expresses, "We are getting noticed by bigger players like Motorola and Sandisk. Motorola needed AJAX programmers in Chicago, who they found through our website."

Another change Swart is seeing in the online marketplace area is that buyers are increasingly looking at the time-based work model than agreeing to work for the fixed-price model. "Buyers opt for this as it offers greater flexibility and they have to pay only for the real time that providers work. Through this, both sides are building better and long-term relations."

Global job-matching services such as one offered by Menlo Park, Calif.-based oDesk Corp. are showing that companies of any size can hire offshore IT talent to work on projects.

Aaron Smith operates a small company in Corinth, Texas. He has been using oDesk's online service to find development help and said he works most closely with a programmer in Russia who is paid $15 per hour. A U.S.-based programmer doing similar work would expect hourly rates of $60 to $120, Smith said. Without access to the global talent pool, "we would still be in business, but our software would be far more limited than what it is," he added. "Outsourcing gives us a chance to compete."

oDesk, of Menlo Park, has taken the eBay idea and applied it to tech services. At last, industrial-strength off-shoring from the little guy to the little guy.

oDesk also has some attributes that help it stand out from the pack. It's not just a middleman where service providers and clients find each other. Additionally, the company provides a technology infrastructure that enables sellers and buyers of services to establish long-term relationships with one another. oDesk keeps tracks of hours worked and handles billing and paying. And, so buyers are assured that they're getting what they're paying for.

Not just an online employment service, oDesk is a virtual environment for contract workers and their employers with collaboration tools, a time clock, and monitoring features

CEO Gary Swart describes oDesk as a global marketplace that lets employers hire, manage, and pay at globally competitive rates software developers, designers, and programmers.

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Drive your labor costs with oDesk, which makes it easy to find talented programmers on the cheap.

Need software writers for hire? oDesk runs a global marketplace that lets employers hire, manage and pay technical workers such as software developers, graphic artists, and technical writers. Employers search for workers within the oDesk marketplace based on skills, work history, employer ratings, and pay, and then build virtual teams. oDesk handles billing and payments and supplies collaboration tools. oDesk continues its efforts to improve tools that track jobs and knit together virtual workers from India to Russia ever more closely with the home office.

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The online service marketplace oDesk has just added the capability for buyers to spec fixed-price jobs. Previously, all oDesk contracts were hourly.

"The problem with the fixed price market is that it's not sticky," oDesk CEO Gary Swart told me. Many business relationships that start with one-price jobs evolve into working relationships where the pay is based on the time put in. Swart maintains that competing marketplaces don't foster (or let you manage) that changing relationship; and likewise, until now, oDesk wasn't able to kick off relationships that were best started as single gigs.

There is no question that many companies that require IT support find it hard to locate sufficient talent in their local market. And many developers find it hard to get work in the regions where they live.

That's where oDesk comes in. oDesk is a great equalizer, a matchmaker, if you will. The Menlo Park, Calif.-based online marketplace allows companies to hire, manage and pay remote technical workers around the world.

Silicon Valley based oDesk, which is a marketplace for developers and companies looking for outsourced developer help, seems to be sailing along nicely. Next week they'll announce that $10 million has been spent on outsourced projects to date, and they have 750,000 or so total billed hours. That's up 50% from last November, when we reported that they had reached 500,000 billed hours. oDesk keeps a flat 10% of fees.

Until recently oDesk only allowed projects to be priced on an hourly basis. Two weeks ago they launched fixed price jobs as well, which is something many comments here requested in our previous posts about them. After a month of quiet beta testing, 750 jobs were posted at a fixed price, with an average price of around $500.

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Sosa-Pascual is intrigued by professional networking ventures... That drew him to oDesk, which is serving as a clearing house for engineering talent around the globe.

Jeff Kiiza would never have imagined that he'd be writing code in Perl, PHP/MySQL and AJAX for companies in the U.S., Canada, Australia and Spain - and that he'd be doing it from his home in Cordoba, Argentina.

Hemang Dani is pretty amazed that in the past six months, he has boosted his income to $5,000 per month by working for companies in the U.S., the U.K., Germany and Australia. Dani's projects range from coding "shopping carts" and enabling credit-card processing on Web sites to managing portals as a webmaster.

Dani and Kiiza have jumped with both feet into the global talent pool. Both [work for] Menlo Park, Calif.-based oDesk Corp.'s online marketplace, which links programmers with businesses that need their services.

Bids on oDesk. Contractors vie to fulfill your technical needs.
Whether you need a .NET developer, an Access whiz or a technical writer, oDesk has a pool of thousands of technical contractors from around the world who can do the job for you for a reasonable fee.

Thanks to employee referrals, in- country recruiting firms, global job boards such as Monster.com and Jobster, sophisticated corporate Web recruiting sites and online programmer "marketplaces" like RentACoder.com or oDesk, there are more ways than ever before to communicate and collaborate with skilled individuals who happen to live overseas.

It is our opinion that oDesk fills an important niche in the startup world - helping companies find outsourced development help for projects. This is a service that we've used ourselves and plan on using again.

oDesk Corp., which brokers jobs between computer programmers and companies, says a September write-up on TechCrunch snared five times as many new customers for the company as a BusinessWeek article earlier in the year. When oDesk got funding in September from venture-capital firms, it gave Mr. Arrington -- and a few other bloggers -- the scoop. TechCrunch "has been amazing to help us get visibility," says Jason Chicola, oDesk's marketing director.

"Don't be afraid to try different things - just monitor the results."

oDesk's largely open-source-based platform includes online team rooms that allow clients and hourly employees to check in, collaborate, and monitor work projects.

At the recent Future of Web Apps conference in San Francisco, Michael Arrington (the editor of Techcrunch) listed oDesk amongst a group of companies that are "ones to watch". We are bullish about oDesk's prospects, not only because of the rising demand for good providers but also because of their approach to connecting and managing the relationship between providers and customers.

oDesk is a start-up that provides a marketplace for companies to hire developers online and then keep near unprecedented control over them remotely.

My startup Omnidrive first found oDesk when we needed to find contract C++ development skills to work on a project. At first look, it appears just like one of many other portals and marketplaces that assist project managers to find talent - but upon close inspection oDesk has distinct advantages that make it one of the best and easiest ways to find employee's on-demand.

The recruitment and management service raised its money primarily from Sigma Partners and Globespan Capital Partners.

Part of oDesk's appeal is that it's not just matching those looking for work with those who have it, but also helping employers overcome one of the biggest challenges they face when hiring remote contractors: trust.

A startup called oDesk, which has been in beta for 2 years, has just launched today. It provides a match-making service for home jobs and then uses screen grabs and web cams to prove to employers that work is being done.

Sarah Lacy told me about oDesk a few weeks ago but I haven't had time to check it out until now. While my initial assumption was some kind of Irish IT company (get it? O'desk?) its actually an online marketplace for offshore development talent where engineers/developers/etc can post their rates along with their credentials to take on your offshore work. And people with needs can post jobs for developers to apply to.

I just learned about a company that provides online access to developers and other technical talent -- both domestic and offshore. Before you say, "Oh, that's what Elance does..." hear me out.
This Sunnyvale, CA firm -- oDesk -- offers clients not just access to talent, but also access to a tool that I haven't seen at other freelance help sites.