Arabnet Arabnet

Elance is an online employment platform that caters for online freelance work, or any temporary work "that can be done on a computer," according to Vice President Ved Sinha. The website currently lists about 2.7 million freelancers that businesses can hire from. At the other end, there are about half a million businesses that fish for freelancers on the site.

Locally, the service has witnessed massive growth in the last 3 years with over 1000% increase in businesses looking for work online.

Another particular feature to Elance is that, compared to other services, "the entire transaction happens on the platform." Posting a job or finding the right talent, collaboration between the two parties, and payment all happen on Elance. That dynamic is made possible by the fact that Elance focuses solely on jobs that can be done online.

What are the advantages of Elance's model? How does it compare to similar niche focused services and to bigger platforms with a more diverse offering? How big is the market? And what is the correlation between online work and the employment rate?

All that and more in our one-to-one interview with Ved at the ArabNet Digital Summit 2013.