Freelance

A freelancer, freelance worker, or freelance is a person who is self-employed and is not committed to a particular employer long term. These workers are sometimes represented by a company or an agency that resells their labor and that of others to its clients with or without project management and labor contributed by its regular employees. Others are completely independent. "Independent contractor" would be the term used in a higher register of English.

ODesk

oDesk is a global job marketplace with a series of tools targeted at businesses that intend to hire and manage remote workers. Based in Redwood City CA, oDesk was founded in 2005 by Greek entrepreneurs Odysseas Tsatalos and Stratis Karamanlakis.

oDesk was founded by Odysseas Tsatalos and Stratis Karamanlakis. The two friends created a new technology platform (an online workplace) to allow distributed teams to work together and help instill trust in work happening via the Internet. oDesk, along with its network of freelancers (spanning any type of work that can be done via the Internet) launched in 2005.

As of 2012, oDesk is the largest online marketplace in which independent professionals and their clients can establish and fulfill work arrangements. The company’s business strategy, including new pricing, is credited with helping it surpass competition to establish market dominance.

Staffing Industry Analysts puts oDesk into a category of fast-growing staffing businesses that it refers to as "online staffing" platforms:

Elence

Elance was first launched in 1999, its name inspired by a 1998 Harvard Business Review article titled "The Dawn of the E-Lance Economy". It was initially developed as a technology for supporting virtual work. Two years later Elance introduced a vendor management system (VMS) for contractors and third-party services used by large enterprises^] In 2006 Elance sold its enterprise software division and developed instead its current web-based platform for online, contingent work.

Guru

Guru.com is a freelance marketplace. It allows companies to find freelance workers for commissioned work. Founded in 1998 in Pittsburgh as eMoonlighter.com and still headquartered there.

Guru Inc. was founded in 1999 in San Francisco as an online clearing house for high tech workers seeking short-term contracts. The company, led by brothers Jon and James Slavet, raised $3M in angel funding and a further $16M in a full venture round led by Greylock Partners and August Capital. In a May 2000 interview, Paul Saffo cited Guru.com as an example of a company using the Internet to provide new kinds of services where individuals negotiated directly with potential employer. In 2002, Guru developed the Smartmatch technology which matches resumes and other information about job applicant to jobs. It also developed a candidate profiling system using techniques from Industry and Organization psychology to better understand a candidate's suitability for a particular job.

The company was acquired  in December 2002 by Unicru a human resources software company based in Portland, Oregon. Guru's technology and staff remained with Unicru, focused on software to help large employers assess and hire job applicants.

People Per Hour

PeoplePerHour is a UK based company that provides a website for the advertisement of freelance work.

Founded in 2007 by Xenios Thrasyvoulou and Simos Kitiris  the company has offices in Landon and New York. Its network consists of about 250,000 active users, of whom 180,000 are freelancers and 70,000 who are clients. The majority of clients using the services are small companies that do not want to hire a full-time professional resources.

This type of online marketplace is also referred to as crowdsourcing  using a virtual network to outsource work.

There is some debate as to whether the emergence of this type of freelance marketplace is part of a longer-term structural change in the way that companies across the world manage their human resources. Figures from the UK Office for National Statistics  show that 358,000 more people aged 65 or over are currently working than was the case a decade ago. Usage statistics from PeoplePerHour indicate that the number of retirees looking for work using the website has increased by 137 per cent during 2012.

In August 2012, PeoplePerHour was named by the science and technology magazine, Wired UK as one of "Europe's 100 Hottest Startups of 2012”

Online Home Based Jobs

Following are the some home based jobs.

1. Web development Jobs.

If you are expert in web development and web designing then you can do this job easily. On odesk.com, it is prominent job for home jobs searchers.

2. Online Writing and Translation Jobs

If you have grip on two or more languages then you can do translation job. You just need to be an expert in your local language and English. Most of the times you get work on the project where you are asked to translate local language into English or English to local language.

3. Web Content Research Jobs