This morning we announced some exciting news. oDesk has raised $15 million in a round of financing led by DAG Ventures. Our existing investors - Benchmark Capital, Globespan Capital Partners and Sigma Partners- also participated in the round.

We’re excited to welcome DAG Ventures into the oDesk family and we’re delighted that our existing investors were eager to invest again.

oDesk is growing faster than we ever have before as more and more companies use our service to build and manage global teams.  

In addition to bringing the team in Menlo Park together for a fantastic buffet of celebratory Costco pizza, ribs, and cheesecake, having the extra cash gives us more flexibility to move even faster toward our vision of changing the way the world works.  Plus, DAG has been a pleasure to work with.

Read the press release here.

We’re always happy when people talk about oDesk, and now we’re giving just a little something back. Everybody likes free stuff right? We’re giving away free t-shirts for the following 5 posts about oDesk this month:

1) My take on someone else’s rant from Michel V
2) Real Work at Home Jobs from Doreen M
3) oDesk review from Karel S
4) oDesk has a deal for freelancers - from WebWorkerDaily
5) More ways to become a paid writer from MoueMagazine

If you’re out there talking about oDesk, don’t hesitate to let us know. We might send you a shirt from our store.

Over 21,000 providers within the oDesk network have taken over 63,000 oDesk online tests to certify their skills for potential buyers. Now they can also declare their certifications anywhere online with our new “oDesk Certified” icons. I recently took the SEO test and, lucky for me, I passed:

While the US economy might be going into recession, I’m bullish on the oConomy.

We’re excited to announce the launch of the “oConomy”, a feature that publicly shares data from the oDesk network on hourly wages, feedback, jobs, and certification tests. We scoured through our internal database in order to offer a valuable resource for both buyers and providers to understand global trends and lead to more successful remote work relationships.

The oConomy summarizes trends based on record $22.5 million (and counting!) of work completed on oDesk. The oConomy data covers more than 1,600,000 hours of work completed by over 47,000 providers from over 90 countries.

One of the first things we wanted to do when analyzing all of the data was to provide a helpful world map with details on service providers by country. For buyers - it can be intimidating to select candidates for their job and we hope the Google Maps mashup helps shed some light on the hiring situation. For providers - we hope this map can help set expectations and serve as a helpful comparison point for their individual rates and skills against their peers.

Among some of the other insights offered in the oConomy:

• Indonesian Providers Earn Highest Average Feedback Scores (for countries with over 100 feedbacks)
• The Average oDesk Pay Rate Is $14/Hour
• Experience Is A Strong Predictor Of Job Performance

Here are just some of the many things you can see in the new oConomy:

Top ranked provider companies on oDesk. The current top 10 are:

ISS Art
Impinge Solutions
SoftProdigy
SOFTREACTOR LLC
InterLink
Aarthika
UshaTech
Waverley Software
DevelopmentMill
Galindo Consulting Group

And lots of charts on every subject…

- Global hourly rate trends by week.

- Global distribution of provider rates.

- Feedback trends by Years of Experience.

- Number of Jobs posted by Type.

- Certification Test Statistics.

- Rankings of Individual Providers.

- Country List including Feedback Scores.

See all of the oConomy.

And even more data on oDesk’s growth trends. A few previews:

We’re hopeful that sharing this data will help everyone out there learn more about the global economy by garnering insights from the slightly smaller oConomy. We look forward to continued growth fueled by our dedicated users and encourage all to comment on the data and maps that you see here to foster meaningful discussion about these global trends.

We’re a little late in adding this news to the blog, but those of you who visited the “Subversion” link in your oDesk Team Rooms or who read TechCrunch would have noticed that oDesk and CVSDude have teamed up to bring you more options for source-code management. For those of you that don’t already know CVSdude, the company is a leading provider of hosted open-source development tools including Subversion (SVN) with nearly 40,000 active users and over 34,000 projects. We think oDesk and CVSDude are a natural fit since many of the projects they host are managed by distributed teams. This partnership will bring CVSDude users to oDesk via a co-branded search box on CVSDude.com and it gives oDesk users a free month to trial one of their paid subscriptions. Of course, oDesk will continue to offer our existing SVN solution which remains a free option and one that is integrated with your oDesk team room. CVSDude provides more fine-grained management of repository permissions and other goodies, though, if you desire a greater level of control.

Here’s the full press release:

CVSDude and oDesk Team Up to Drive Software Development Success

CVSDude to integrate oDesk Provider and Job Search; oDesk to offer CVSDude’s Advanced Source Code Management Tools

January 31, 2008 – MENLO PARK, Calif. and BRISBANE, QLD, Australia – CVSDude, a leading provider of hosted open-source development tools including Subversion (SVN), has teamed up with oDesk, a leading online staffing marketplace and work platform, to offer fast-growing software companies access to talented technical professionals and tools that enable faster delivery and higher-quality software products at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions. With this partnership, distributed development teams built and managed on oDesk will gain access to CVSDude’s secure storage infrastructure, advanced source-code management, and popular collaboration and job tracking software, for a low monthly fee. CVSDude customers seeking a solution for hiring, managing, and paying on-demand talent, can now tap directly into oDesk’s community of nearly 40,000 tested and rated professionals available on a pay-by-the-hour basis.

“With oDesk, we can offer over 38,500 active CVSDude users from several thousand companies an easy and cost-effective way to augment their development teams no matter where the talent is located,” said CVSDude CEO, Mark Bathie. CVSDude’s core customer base includes many VC-funded US technology startups, as well as industry leaders like Intel, Accenture, BBC Worldwide, and Harvard Business Online. Using oDesk web-based collaboration tools, these employers will be able to visually track and verify work performed, both historically and in real-time, by oDesk professionals.

“As our thousands of customers build larger and larger teams and manage projects of increasing complexity, the demand for source-code and project management tools is rapidly rising,” said oDesk CEO, Gary Swart. He added, “CVSDude’s advanced source-code management tools are an excellent complement to oDesk’s management platform.” A recent CVSDude survey found that customers save in excess of $160,000 and 2,500 hours of staffing time each year by outsourcing to CVSDude.

About CVSDude
Since 2002, CVSDude has provided a simple, safe, and fully-managed online development environment for thousands of software companies and over 45,000 developers worldwide. CVSDude (www.cvsdude.com) helps developer teams work together in real-time by hosting popular collaboration and management tools for tracking and communicating project changes. Using CVSDude, customers enjoy high-end security, a thriving developer community, “always upgraded” software, and expert, friendly customer support, for a fraction of the cost of in-house solutions. CVSDude was awarded the 2007 “Young Exporter of the Year” award by the Premier of Queensland, Australia.

We’re happy to announce that we’ll be co-sponsoring P-CAMP, an Agile Unconference for Product Managers and other product champions. This event originated out of the famed FooCamp and BarCamp.

We’re planning to participate in panels and discussions with other Silicon Valley product managers regarding working in today’s distributed team environments.

Where: Yahoo! Building C, 701 First Ave, Sunnyvale, CA

When: Saturday, March 15th, 2008

Cost: Free!

Hope to see you there.

We’re always happy when we get online coverage about oDesk, but we took special notice of this new blog. Check out this project by some dedicated oDesk users - they’re creating the first oDesk e-book for freelancers. We’re happy to see this project getting started and we plan to support and contribute however we can.

Now’s your chance to help shape the development of the book by discussing the topics that concern freelancers.

• How to best succeed on oDesk?
• How to get noticed in the network?
• How to write great cover letters?
• How to select an hourly rate?
• What questions do you have? Let them know.

We’re excited to announce the launch of the oDesk Store!

We’re featuring three awesome designs to celebrate oDesk love:

The store is still in beta, but you can browse through the designs and make purchases today. All of the purchases are handled by Printmojo, who will process and arrange all of the shipping through their secure site.

Now, you’re probably thinking, “Wow, those are some pretty cool T-shirts. I wish I was a savvy graphic designer and could come up with something like that for my company.”

We’ll let you in on a little secret. Our marketing department didn’t design all of those T-shirts — we outsourced it! We posted a job on oDesk and browsed through provider profiles (particularly those who specialize in graphic design). We found Ivan A., hired him, gave him an idea of what we were looking for, and then let him get creative. Ivan also designed the look and feel of our oDesk Store (he used a customizable PHP script from Printmojo).

So even if you don’t have an ecommerce or design background, you can still put together a pretty cool T-shirt store

We’re excited to announce that our CEO, Gary Swart, was broadcasted on the waves this last Sunday! The radio waves, that is: Gary chatted with Robert Reiss on The CEO Show on November 11 at 10 p.m. PST on “The New World Order of Hiring.”

How do you hire top talent? How do people around the world manage to find each other and work together? Gary shared his views on how to run a successful outsourced team, provide good customer service, and manage a network of over 30,000 community members. As the CEO of oDesk, Gary interacts with providers and buyers on a regular basis and has learned from their best (and not-so-great) practices.

Looking into the future, Gary shared his thoughts on rising trends in hiring and the outsourcing industry.

Robert Reiss has interviewed CEOs such as David Neeleman of Jet Blue, Bernard Marcus of Home Depot and Jay Walker of Priceline.com, so we’re pumped to be included in the mix.

Want to tune in? Listen to the entire interview here. For more on The CEO Show, visit the website.

Hello oDeskers,

We’re excited to announce that oDesk is a recipient of Red Herring 100 Spring, an award given to the top 100 private technology companies based in North America. This honor was once received by Google, eBay and Skype, and we’re thrilled to have been recognized with the same award.

As a result, Gary Swart, our CEO, is speaking at the Red Herring Spring conference. Be sure to see him if you’re there.

Thanks to all of you for helping us win this prestigious award!