Benchmark Capital funded oDesk operates an online project marketplace for hiring and managing remote technical staff. It is free to post a job. They have 5,000 developers in their network. oDesk made two announcements today at the Web 2.0 Conference.
First, they announced the oDesk Online Testing service production launch. Over 100 free tests are available in Ajax, PHP, MySQL, .NET, Java, and XML. More than 1,400 developers have been tested so far. I wonder how this will affect the hourly rates on oDesk. Will there be oDesk study guides in the future?
Second, they announced a partnership with O’Reilly Research to analyze their data and produce visualizations. oDesk collects data on those seeking resources, those offering their time and skill, and financial and time data for the engagements. Since oDesk operates a global market, and engagements routinely cross national borders, the data provides insight into relative value, technical preferences, and the flow of resources. There are currently charts showing the international markets for Flash, Java, AJAX, and PHP/MySQL.
Working with oDesk we plan on providing treemap and other visualization techniques to provide a window into trends in the technology market. We will be using visual, statistical and machine learning techniques to look for trends regarding technology usage, value and adoption. Since they handle work all over the world there will be a special emphasis on the global flow of information and technology. We suspect that oDesk engagements, since they represent a relatively efficient market of informed buyers and sellers, provide insights into the value, supply and demand for the technology areas we track that complement our other data sources (SimplyHired’s job data, Bookscan’s Book data, and Technorati’s blog data). As Tim has mentioned, we use this data to help determine our book production schedules and our conference content.