You’ve probably come across the freelance sites,
Elance and
oDesk. The company on 5
th of May announced that it is rebranding and merging both sites together under a new brand,
Upwork.
As part of the unification, the company hopes its new site will help get freelancers hired faster. A new real-time collaboration feature is designed to make chatting and working with clients easier.
Upwork’s new messaging feature will be available to everyone for free, even those who aren’t using
Upwork. The idea is that you can create room for each of the teams you are working with, which is particularly useful if you’re hiring a number of remote freelancers to work together on a project.
Upwork’s new platform also comes with a new mobile app for iOS that allows you to create jobs, proposals and contracts on the go, and lets freelancers accept opportunities as they come in.
The company is touting its “enhanced matching algorithm” built by its Stanford PhD employees as a significant improvement that will help both freelancers find the right opportunity in a much shorter amount of time.
Another new feature called “Instamatch” allows freelancers to set their status to “available right away”, “looking” or “not looking” to ensure faster job matches.
Upwork claims that it accounts for $1 billion in freelance earning annually. It believes there’s a significant opportunity to grab even more of the market by unifying its services and making finding work easier.
The new service launched on 6
th of May and will supersede the separate
oDesk and
Elance sites.
Photo Credit: Smallbiztrends.com
About the Writer: Osakwe Richard is an avid follower of tech news and developments around the globe and a Scrabble aficionado.
