@antje – One nice thing about this round of funding is that we didn’t have a pressing need for more capital, but taking the money does give us more flexibility to accelerate growth towards our vision of changing the way the world works. oDesk is growing faster than we ever have before as more and more companies use our service to build and manage global teams.

Lumping oDesk in with outsourcing project marketplaces really misses a key point. oDesk isn’t a project marketplace. We enable companies to build and manage global teams that work much like a local team. Many oDesk buyers have built entire teams on oDesk and an increasing number of oDesk providers are building global provider firms on oDesk. These are long-term relationships not limited to a single project.

Lastly, if you haven’t tried oDesk recently, give it a shot. We’re constantly raising the bar on user quality and site performance. We’re investing heavily in these areas and we expect both buyers and providers to benefit from improvements. Please keep the feedback coming!

Brian Goler
oDesk

Check out http://www.testcommon.com – new company focused solely on the on- demand testing space. Think Testing-as-a-Service!

Hiring is a difficult and expensive process, particularly when you are on lean budget. oDesk enables you to get up the trust curve very quickly. And it is not about low-cost / low-quality talent. Expensive contractors can point to objective ratings to justify their rates. And if they are productive, there is never any question about their earnings.

I am not going to comment on the competition since I am not familiar enough with them to opine. But to pass off oDesk as simply a rent-a-coder site is a mistake. Core members of my team, people I consider to be key contributors (* and friends*), have been found through oDesk.

Overall, I think oDesk will just become another competitor to eLance and Guru without any big differentiator.

They seem to have learned nothing from advances in social networking and SaaS suppliers. It’s much simpler and more personal now to meet potential clients/providers using Facebook and do work without having 10% of it creamed off. But searching for the right people and trust are still issues tho. A new player in this field, Ki Work, combines search, marketplaces and prof networking for free, addressing trust with its expert-evaluation system. Worth checking out.

“Pay only for
verified hours worked”

Doesnt anyone else see the problem with this? Surley you want to pay for functionality delivered not hours…

Believe it or not, people from India are not the best programmers out there and not the cheapest with the highest quality. Americans charge up the oss. I found programmers from Portugal and Hungry there that are high caliber and can do better work than Indian and American counterparts.

With all the hypes about Indians, there are gems in other part of the world not explored by the press. It’s unfortunate.

Thank goodness to the Internet, I don’t have to be limited by public broadcast and big corporations dictating my capital (money). The Internet creates market transparency and the big boys are going to get fcked! Yeah!