On Tuesday, Silicon Valley based oDesk will announce that they hit a number of milestones and will lower pricing. We first profiled the company in early September and it is our opinion that oDesk fills an important niche in the startup world – helping companies find outsourced development help for projects.
oDesk is a place to find developers to build software, and they allow the project owner to monitor the developer while working via screen shots and a video camera – see the demo here. This is a service that we’ve used ourselves and plan on using again. The only downside that we’ve encountered – projects posted can be seen by the public, and it is a disadvantage for your competitors to see what you are up to (if they are smart enought to check out the site).
oDesk is doing very well, and will announce 500,000 total billed hours. 6,000 developers have registered with the site and 1,000 new projects are posted per month.
oDesk currently charges a fee of 23%, added on top of the hourly rate charged by developers. On Tuesday, they will announce that the fee has dropped to 10% (the change actually already went live a few hours ago).