TAMPA, Fla., Nov. 19, 2012 /PRNewswire/
-- Freelancer.com, the world's largest freelancing
marketplace, today announced the acquisition of vWorker, the fourth
largest marketplace globally.
(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120709/NY36516LOGO
)
Headquartered in Tampa,
Florida, vWorker has over 2.5 million enterprise and
professional users from around the world, who have been paid over
US$139 million through the site from
1.3 million projects. Founded by Ian
Ippolito in 2001 originally as Rent A Coder, the
marketplace was one of the earliest companies of its kind in the
world. It rapidly developed an exceptional reputation for
attracting quality programmers and grew at an astonishing pace.
From 2007 to 2010 RentaCoder.com was named by Inc. magazine
as one of the 5000 fastest growing private companies in the
USA. In 2010, Entrepreneur
Magazine called Rent A Coder "one of the hundred smartest,
most innovative, hands-down brilliant companies on our
radar."
Originally focusing on programming and IT-based work, in
2010 the site expanded to include a wide selection of work
categories including graphic design, writing and more. To reflect
this expansion, the company changed its name to vWorker - short for
"virtual worker".
A true innovator in the space, vWorker was the first
company to introduce the trialsourcing model and one of the
first innovators in crowdsourcing and time tracking
technology.
With a huge pool of 2.5 million professionals spanning the
globe, the acquisition of vWorker represents a massive boost to
Freelancer.com's already market-leading user-base of 4.4 million
professionals. This undisputedly affirms Freelancer.com as the
largest marketplace globally with 6.6 million users, greater than
the combined user population of its two nearest competitors.
Combined with Freelancer's 2.7 million projects to date, the
marketplaces have completed 4 million projects as the largest
online freelance economy in the world by far.
"I am immensely pleased to announce the acquisition of
vWorker, which has the absolute best reputation in the industry for
sourcing the finest programmers," said Matt
Barrie, Chief Executive of Freelancer.com. "Through Ian's
incredible leadership over the last 12 years, vWorker was a pioneer
in the development of many technologies and processes that the
industry today takes for granted."
Ian Ippolito, Chief
Executive and Founder of Exhedra Solutions, Inc. (owner of
vWorker), said, "We're elated to be joining forces with the global
leader in the space. Our highly skilled freelancers will now be
able to increase their earnings potential by accessing more
projects, and our employers will be able to tap into a larger and
more diversified skill base to get things done."
Today, small businesses are able to hire freelancers for
projects in 600 skill categories which today are in areas as
mainstream as Website Design, Graphic Design, Copywriting and SEO;
but are also as diverse as Astrophysics, Aerospace Engineering,
Genetic Engineering, Biotechnology, Manufacturing and Industrial
Design.
Freelancer.com is also the global leader in web traffic
for the industry, currently ranking at #412, according to Alexa.
Freelancer enjoys a cult following in some countries, regularly
ranking in the top 20, 50 or 100 websites in countries like
Bangladesh, Pakistan and India, where freelancing is the vanguard of an
economic revolution sweeping the developing world as the Internet
connects the rest of the world's population together. Freelancer
today has 22 regional marketplaces, allowing transactions in 15
currencies and is available in 10 languages, with a 24x7x365
support team that speaks English, German, French, Spanish, Dutch,
Filipino and Indonesian.
Freelancer.com has aggressively consolidated the online
outsourcing industry since May 2009
when the company was started by Australian and BRW Entrepreneur of
the Year Matt Barrie. The company's acquisition of vWorker
(United States), adds to a list
that includes GetAFreelancer (Sweden), Scriptlance (Canada), LimeExchange (United States), Freelancer.co.uk (United Kingdom), Freelancer.de Booking Center
(Germany), Freelancer.com.au
(Australia) and Freelancer Hong
Kong (China), together with the
Freemarket.com virtual content marketplace (United States) and the Webmaster Talk
(United States) forums.
The terms of the acquisition were undisclosed.
For more details, please go to
http://www.freelancer.com.
About Freelancer
Webby award-winning Freelancer.com is the largest
outsourcing and crowdsourcing marketplace in the world. Through
Freelancer.com, entrepreneurs and businesses connect with 6.6
million professionals from all over the world. Employers can hire
freelancers in areas such as software, writing, data entry and
design, right through to engineering and the sciences, sales &
marketing and accounting & legal services. The average job is
under US$200, making Freelancer.com
extremely cost effective for small businesses, which often need a
wide variety of jobs to be done, but cannot justify the expense of
hiring full time.
SOURCE Freelancer.com