Archive for October, 2006


October 31st, 2006 by Abid

Our founder Odysseas wrote this email to the oDesk Engineering team. It offers his perspective on using webcams while working on oDesk.

From: Odysseas Tsatalos
Sent: Friday, October 27, 2006 10:11 AM
Subject: our teamroom

Take a look at our teamroom.

https://url.odesk.com/t0lw

Every morning when I login - seeing our team, seeing the faces of our team makes me smile.

It makes a huge difference to make our extremely distributed team become connected.

When i see myself without the webcam shot I feel loosing my identity in the team I i feel like a computer and not a person.

Thats why even though I work from a laptop and I need to carry a webcam wherever I go - I keep on trying to carry it around.

Maybe one day Dell laptops will come with built-in cams just like these cool apple machines do…

We were talking with Stratis that opening up the odeskdev stream of teamroom/snapshots/webcam to the public could become a strong driver for the adoption of the webcam, memos etc.

Our own best practices can help create momentum and make everybody’s workplace better.

odysseas

-
Abid Mohsin

October 30th, 2006 by Abid

Mr. McClure and I were working on creating logos for some upcoming advertising spots. We needed 125 x 125 picture logos, similar to the ones we put on our sponsorship at GigaOm.

The two logos we ended up using for GigaOm were:

Random aside, between these two logos, “so web2.0 it hurts” out-performed “your geek army” by 2:1, see the Google Analytics screen snap: https://url.odesk.com/28ny

For the new spots, we wanted to come up with other funny taglines. Here is a list of the random ones we came up with:

 

The winners were “crappy marketing, great code” and “making geeks rich and famous”, like our t-shirt tagline:

We’ll see which one comes up on top for click-through-rate :)

-
Abid

Our favorite (well, mine at least) productivity tool got an upgrade today. Rather than just having an image of your entire screen or the active window, you can now have a totally customized ScreenSnap to share with others.

See this example of the functionality as I am typing this blog post: https://url.odesk.com/rr3vk

Details from the “What’s New” page:

We have added new drawing capabilities to the ScreenSnap feature (see our 9/21 What’s New listing for the initial announcement).

To recap, you can take quick screen shots of either your entire screen or just the active window using Ctrl-Alt-S (full Screen) or Ctrl-Alt-A (Active window).

After entering either key sequence, a window will pop up giving you the option to add a title and description to the ScreenSnap. At the bottom of the window are three buttons: Draw, Save and Discard. When you choose the Draw button, you are presented with the ScreenSnap image which you can annotate with standard drawing tools:

  • Initially, you will be drawing a free-form 4-pixel wide red line
  • Click the RIGHT mouse button to bring up a menu you can use to:
    • Change the color
    • Change the pen width
    • Select line, rectangle or ellipse
    • Enter text
    • Crop the picture
    • Reset to no drawing

Also, at any time you can press F1 on your keyboard to bring up a Help screen with a short description and Hot keys.

Read more release logs here.

-
Abid Mohsin

October 18th, 2006 by Dave McClure

7 Habits

Last month oDesk won an SMB20 award from PC Magazine for innovative use of technology in small business. To be honest, most innovation comes out of necessity — both startups & small businesses need to be scrappy and frugal if they plan to survive.

In a followup online webcast with Jim Louderback, our CEO Gary Swart gave a brief description of several online services oDesk uses internally to help run our business (see slide 4 below). Gary then gave this summary of 7 habits oDesk practices in choosing & using online tools (apologies to Stephen Covey).

lately it’s become easy to find inexpensive hosted solutions that are quite powerful, and can make a real difference for startups and other small businesses as they’re getting rolling. not everything works perfectly just yet, but tools like QuickBase, Skype, Wordpress, and Google Docs can make life easier for folks on a budget.

(note however some free solutions may not survive the next few years of online competition, so it’s probably important to be able to export your data just in case!)

Here is the release log:

About a month ago we released a new feature which gave buyers the capability to give bonuses to providers. We are now releasing the symmetric feature to allow providers to give refunds to buyers. This is needed in cases where the buyer has been mistakenly charged for time when the provider was not actually working. For example, if the provider has finished working for the day and forgets to suspend the oDesk Team time capture functionality, the provider’s time logs will still track non-working time. We frequently hear from buyers and providers who have mutually determined modifications to hours but still need to contact us to make the update. Now, the provider can do this via self-service.

To give a refund, the provider needs to go to the My Assignments tab, click the “view” button for either an active or closed assignment (sreensnap: https://url.odesk.com/p1y6). Then click the Give Refund button.

On the form that is displayed (https://url.odesk.com/iebj), the provider will then enter the amount for the refund and can leave comments which will be emailed to the buyer as well as add notes that will be recorded in the adjustment record for record keeping.

Read more release logs on the “What’s New” page.

-
Abid Mohsin

October 10th, 2006 by Dave McClure

oDeskOffice2
Going to be in SF for the Office 2.0 Conference?

Stop by the oDesk demo area and pickup the sweetest geek t-shirt in Silicon Valley before we’re all sold out.

We’ll be in San Francisco at the St. Regis Hotel this Wednesday & Thursday (10/11-12) to show off our latest stuff. If you’d like to find out how you can use oDesk to build your own Web 2.0 startup, come by and see what we’ve got :)

tags: office2, office2.0, oDesk

October 9th, 2006 by Dave McClure


oDesk pix here

Last Friday’s Late Lunch 2.0 was a smashing success, as documented in photos here and here, also nice photos on the PR 2.0 blog.
Thanks to Mark & Terry for bringing folks by to checkout oDesk, and to Jeremiah for the terrific Long Tail writeup on oDesk. A great time was had by all :)

lunch 2.0 Geeks. Food. T-shirts.

What more do you need to start a Web 2.0 Revolution?

How about a Late Lunch 2.0 celebration this Friday at oDesk?

oDesk has invited Mark, Terry, Jeremiah, and the whole Lunch 2.0 crowd over to our office in Menlo Park for a massive geek2gether from 4pm-6pm with the best & brightest in Silicon Valley. We’d love to hear about any new projects people are working on, show off some of our latest bits, and just shoot the breeze and help you geeks chow down and fatten up for the fall season.

We’ll also be celebrating several w00ts from the past few weeks:

oDesk t-shirts: all about the bling, G. and most important of all:

(pictured at right)

Want to join us? Great! Just RSVP over on the Lunch 2.0 site, then drop by Friday & pickup one of these soon-to-be-collectors items (free to first 50 folks who arrive).

See you then!

October 2nd, 2006 by Josh

Or in my case, 38.

Some of you may have noticed that the screensnap functionality has been upgraded recently to allow for simple drawing on top of your screenshot. This might not seem like much at first, but this feature is turning out to be quite convenient for asynchronous written communication.

It sure came in handy in this community post, where it took me 38 words to poorly describe a location of some fields in a provider profile. A single screensnap with a little red circle does the job quite a bit better.

Thanks,

Josh Breinlinger

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