This is a great idea.

I'd love to have this option but for code. I often find myself struggling with something, whether it's not knowing the best way to handle a situation, not understanding a concept or just not being able to get something to work and I'd easily pay $15-$25 to have access to a developer who can answer a simple question.

Like right now, I am having a hard time understanding pointers in C, and it would be great if I could talk to someone on the phone for 10 minutes and they could help me understand the concept. I know there is Stack Exchange, and that is a great resource, but this would be more of a 1 on 1 consult.

I realize that most developers time is worth more than $15-$25 for a short amount of time, so I don't know if this is viable, but it would be nice.

Looks like we're entering the Mechanical Turkination of graphic design. At first blush, I think this is awesome, especially for small consultancies/businesses/side projects. Converting a logo to vectors, for example, is something that would probably take me at least an hour and I'd be more than willing to pay someone $15 to take such a task off my hands. It's no replacement for an actual graphic designer, but often you don't need an actual graphic designer.

(The caveat, of course, is that the commoditization of graphic design relies on the assumption that you can treat graphic designers as commodities; if value swings wildly from one of 99design's members to another, then the attractiveness of the service plummets.)

Perhaps the way of addressing your caveat is to have a strong reputation system, such as what Amazon has implemented with their reviews.

I just used this and received a great result within 1 hour. Excellent stuff.