oDesk, the site that helps customers find and remotely monitor outsourced developers, has raised $15 million in a Series C funding round led by DAG Ventures. Existing investors Benchmark Capital, Globespan Capital Partners, and Sigma Partners also participated in the round. This brings oDesk’s total funding to $29 million.

oDesk allows companies to weed through thousands of (usually) qualified developer profiles, which include aptitude scores based on site-wide standardized tests. Projects can either be completed for hourly rates or a flat fee. After hiring a team, customers can monitor progress through a visual timeline that broadcasts screenshots of the contracted developers.

Since its launch the site has been involved in $32 million worth of service transactions (it now keeps 10% of all fees, though that rate used to be higher). The site says that it will use the money to help fuel growth and “take advantage of any unexpected opportunities down the road”.

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Citizen journalism site Helium has today officially launched its content marketplace after 7 months in beta testing.

We’ve covered the service twice before, once in 2006, then last year when Helium Marketplace first opened its doors. Helium offers two services: a user generated content portal that’s part Wikipedia, part Squidoo, complete with revenue sharing. The marketplace works in a similar way to oDesk, Scriptance and similar services, marrying buyers looking for articles to be written, with writers who can supply original content. Unlike similar marketplace services, individual writers are not selected for each job, instead submitting articles against job requests that can then be voted upon by other users. The publisher then selects the articles they want to use from the rank-ordered list.

During its beta phase, Helium Marketplace signed up over 100,000 active freelance writers. Payments per article range from $20 to over $100, with a 20% transaction fee going to Helium.

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

As you can see above, 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.

Sure, these stats publicize how well oDesk as a company is doing (you can check out the graphs reflecting its growth). But they also provide a unique, if narrow, look at how the character of outsourcing varies globally. And it doesn’t hurt to check out these figures before hiring someone through oDesk.

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Tomorrow CVSDude, provider of hosted software development environments, will announce a partnership with oDesk, an online marketplace for developers. The deal will eventually result in an oDesk branded version of CVSDude’s technology.

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.

This partnership will start as a cross-promotional one with oDesk and CVSDude generating leads for each other from their respective sites. But CVSDude has also been developing an API that will soon allow them to license their technology to oDesk for rebranding purposes. oDesk will be the first to use the API, although CVSDude says that it is seeking other partners as well.

The ease with which companies can outsource work should be improved by this deal, since oDesk will become a one-stop shop for both finding developers and executing projects. While CVSDude says that 60% of its 40,000+ users are in the United States, many of its customers also log in from China and India.

CVSDude is located in Brisbane, Australia and has been in operation since 2002. While part of a government-funded incubator, the company is looking for its first round of angel investment.

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OnForce has closed a $6.75 million series A1 financing round led by Accel Partners. OnForce is a “marketplace for on site IT services”. Companies use the site to post contract gigs for registered IT professionals in your area. Postings can be made to the site for $11 with 10% of the parts and labor taken after completion of the job and final payment transferred. OnForce plans on putting the financing toward expanding their operations into new markets outside of their current U.S. operations.

Marketplaces for technical services, especially coding, have been around for some time now, but the emergence of startups like Odesk and OnForce have shown there’s room for improvement. OnForce’s marketplace currently has more than 10,000 service professionals and has completed over 500,000 service events in its IT services marketplace. Their site also says they have an 18 minute median time till acceptance for work orders.

A key element for marketplaces is building trust between buyers and sellers. To that end OnForce has implemented training sessions, a ratings system, verified certifications, and optional background checks from ChoicePoint.

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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 - existing tests include Ajax, CSS, .Net, DHTML and ASP, among others. They’ve now added a forty minute Facebook aptitude test as well. Companies can now sort through developers based on their skill level in creating Facebook applications.

In related news, VentureBeat is reporting that a new course, called Create Engaging Web Applications Using Metrics and Learning on Facebook will be offered this fall in Stanford’s computer science department. Dave McClure is a co-instructor.

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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).

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The annual Web 2.0 Summit kicked off today at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The conference Summit, which has been sold out for months, is noticeably larger than last year and hundreds of people are milling about, seeing and being seen.

The highlight of last year’s conference for me was LaunchPad, where thirteen young startups showed their stuff to the audience. See our coverage from last year here and here. Many of those companies are doing very well. Only one, Pubsub, has entered the TechCrunch DeadPool.

LaunchPad this year was perhaps even more competitive than last year. Over 200 companies applied to present at the conference. Only thirteen were accepted, and each had five minutes to demo their product to the crowd. We have a summary of what each announced below.

Read the rest of this entry »

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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.

After 2 years in beta oDesk launched in May of this year as a marketplace for contract talent. We found that oDesk has a large number (3600 providers) of highly skilled individuals in a large number of categories, from document writing, Java development to C++ development. The process of finding a contractor was very simple, after we posted a job ad we received dozens of responses within days and Omnidrive had the position filled by a highly skilled team in India by the end of the week.

The high quality of providers is on thing that oDesk holds above competition, but it really shines once you have selected a provider to work with. oDesk uses webcams and screen-capturing technology on the providers side to monitor the progress of work being done. The online contracting business has long had issues of distrust and the project management and monitoring technologies in oDesk certainly alleviate that. We were able to watch and communicate with our provider using a webcam, which solidified the relationship which was only days old.

The providers are primarily from India, Russia, Ukraine, US, Philippines and Canada, and there are currently 255 job openings in the system. oDesk is also unique in that it doesn’t fix the cost of a project, instead charging an hourly rate, which allows the project manager to use the providers as required. For it’s part of the process, oDesk takes a commission on hours charges, and currently tens of thousands of hours are being charged out each month.

oDesk is based in Menlo Park and they have raised $6M from Sigma Partners and Globespan. oDesk eats their own dog food, as 50% of their 40-strong team are oDesk providers, and they use their own project management system to build the platform.

oDesk provides a simple, easy and safe option for sourcing and managing skilled contract labor.

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