In a previous blog post we spoke about the growth and performance of the oDesk Customer Success Team, and the progress we have made this year.

As we experienced a doubling of our case load to nearly 10,000 tickets and chats submitted per month, we also recognized the need for improved internal tools to help us achieve operational efficiency, and meet to overarching goal of better serving our customers. After an exhaustive search of more than 15 help desk software solutions, we have selected the one that we feel best meets our needs, as well as the needs of many of our users.

We are pleased to announce the selection of Zendesk as our internal case management solution. Zendesk’s open architecture and rich APIs were a key factor in our decision. We find the SaaS solution elegant, easy to use and learn, and very robust. We look forward to an early 2010 launch of a new customer support portal, which will make use of the Zendesk platform and enhance the experience for all users.

We believe so much in the strength of the winning team of oDesk and Zendesk that we are also thrilled to announce a deeper partnership that includes a new Zendesk Group on oDesk. Within this new group, oDesk buyers will find tried and tested customer service agents, admins and integrators who are experienced with Zendesk. These approved professionals can help transform your help desk and, more importantly, your business. The strong pool of customer service experts available on oDesk combined with the increasing demand for this type of work ensures the ongoing success of this group – we look forward to great things to come from our partnership with Zendesk!

We are pleased to announce our best Providers for October 2009! We have over 350,000 Providers on oDesk, but these ones stood out as the cream of the crop this month, as they performed the most hours of work with the highest feedback rating. They have been given special badges recognizing their achievement.

oDesk Buyers, you might want to get in touch with these Providers soon…they just completed assignments and are available now, but probably won’t be for long. Click on their profile to check out their work and contact them for an interview!

	Top 25 Freelance Designers for October 2009 were:
1	Arvind T.	PHP/IIS/MS SQL, joomla, PHP, Drupal, MySQL, Ajax, XHTML
2	Susan B.	Silver Cat Studios – Audio/Video/CBT Production; Script/Copy Writing;
3	M Paul	3D artist/animator -3DSmax, Zbrush, After Effects, Flash…
4	Vivek Acharya	Programmer in Iphone/VB.Net/ASP/C#/PHP/Joomla
5	Kim M.	Senior Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, and InDesign
6	Abdullah Al-Baki	Ultimate 3D Modeler and Architectural visualizer
7	Anna P.	Graphic Designer
8	Mick D.	Web Expert, Photoshop,Flash Animation, HTML/CSS, Web2.0, Logo Designer
9	Xenia S.	Search Engine Optimization, Blogging, Social Media Marketing
10	Herbert M.	Fine Artist, Over 600 oDesk Hours, Perfect Rating, Great Portfolio
11	Guillaume Le Taeron	3D for game & Illustration, Iphone game development, Android
12	Bill Whitney	Illustration, animation art, for corporate presentation and law cases
13	Stanimir S.	<+> Creative Freelancer 2D & 3D Designer (Architecture) <+>
14	Anait Sagoyan	►► PROFESSIONAL LOGO & WEBSITE MOCKUP DESIGNER WITH HIGH-END PORTFOLIO
15	Agnes B.	creative logo designer always in time/strong in marketing & branding
16	Daniela C.	ARCHITECT – 2d and 3d- DESIGNER
17	Jonathan Antonio	ODESK TOP DESIGNER / ILLUSTRATOR
18	Nikolay Atanasov	3D Generalist / Post prduction
19	Johlett Van Der Merwe	Unique & Noticeable Print Design & Fine Art
20	Srujith Kudikala	Microsoft Certified .NET programmer, PHP/MYSQL, ORACLE,JOOMLA
21	Joanna C.	Listed #1 Best Freelance Designer Sept 2009/Joomla/Zencart/Graphics
22	Wajeeha Hussain	3 years experienced and professional Graphic Designer+editing expert
23	Alexey Medvedev	○●○●3D MODELING║VISUALIZATION║ARCHITECT║GRAPHIC║CAD specialist○●○●
24	Michelle Gamboa	MICHELLE@WORK
25	Jashan K.	Web2.0, Mockups, Logos, Prints, Illustrations, HTML, DHTML, CSS, Flash

	Top 25 Freelance Software Developers for October 2009 were:
1	Vikas S.	4yr Exp. Sharepoint,C#.Net,VB.Net,SQLServer,AJAX,WebServices
2	Alexander M.	Microsoft Certified C#.NET/ASP.NET/J2SE/J2EE Senior Developer
3	Ivan T.	Sr. .NET Developer / Technical Architect, 6+ years of experience
4	Gurpal M.	ASP.NET/Ajax and DotNetNuke Professional
5	Ravi K.	ASP.NET+VB+VB.NET+AJAX+RSS
6	Luis Gomez	Sr. Developer in C#, C++, MS SQL, Website Development & Administration
7	Alex Bowling	Wide Array of Experience
8	Yuriy E.	4000+ oDesk hours, Senior C#/.Net Developer
9	Anatoly Mikhailov	RubyOnRails/Ruby, jQuery/Prototype Developer | xHTML, CSS Designer
10	Shrish T.	Silverlight and ASP.NET 3.5 expert
11	Denis S.	.NET and java Developer
12	Amit Agrawal	Programmer / Developer
13	Pankaj Singh	Java Developer
14	Vlad I.	.NET 3.5 (C#, ASP.NET), C++(STL,Boost, ATL,MFC,WinAPI), Java
15	Cantor Fan	7+ years experience/J2EE/EJB/Java/Oracle/PHP/ERP/Twitter
16	Budugu N.	Top 10% in Testing – QA, iseb Trainer, Online Research, Admin Support
17	Amrik Singh	ASP.Net/VB.Net/C#.Net/VBA programmer
18	Meteonic Innovation	PMP/Sys-Engg/Architects/Designers/System Test ::C,C++/Games/Android
19	Rodion Bykov	Adobe Air/Flex/Coldfusion/MSSQL/PHP/MySQL development & management
20	Jan K.	❶ Experienced Flash / Web / Joomla developer ★★US Based★★
21	Ross C.	Senior iPhone/C/C++/Web/Python Developer
22	Ajit J.	Expert DNN Programmer
23	Alexey Verenikin	Web design & development, 10+ years of experience
24	Sandra Qiu	oDesk certified iPhone expert (1st!)
25	Nelson T.	Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, HTML, CSS

	Top 25 Freelance Web Developers for October 2009 were:
1	Evgeny M.	PHP/MySQL/DHTML/Ajax Developer/Project Manager
2	Tatiana D.	PHP, MySQL, Drupal Developer, Team Leader
3	Alexander D.	Expert J2EE/JBoss, PHP/MySQL, AJAX, SMARTY Developer
4	Olexiy O.	Java/J2EE Architect / Senior Developer
5	Dmitry A.	ASP.net/Mobile – Professional Experience
6	Dora M.	Dora
7	Vladimir K.	ColdFusion/MSSQL/PHP/Smarty/mySQL developer
8	Denis S.
9	Fahmi A.	Full PHP Experience
10	Igor G.	Java Developer
11	Yaroslav O.	Senior (around 3000 oDesk hours) PHP/MySQL/Ajax, Project Manager
12	Alexander Aristov	Self-motivated software developer (j2ee, JSP, javascript, ASP, .NET)
13	Mircea C.	Senior Delphi Expert Software Developer, with JAVA, C# .NET and PHP
14	Misha B.	Drupal/PHP/MySQL/HTML/JS/CSS
15	Jane Durm	Sales & Marketing, Management, Admin. Assistant, Customer Service
16	V K.	Unmatched Silverlight and ASP.NET 3.5 Professional
17	Maninder S.	HTML/ XHTML/ CSS Developer, Certified Wordpress Professional
18	Gurdeep Dhillon	PHP/MySQL/Ajax Drupal Joomla Wordpress ECommerce Rails UberCart Expert
19	Denis Statsenko	Greatest PHP/MySQL/AJAX/Symfony/Smarty/osCommers/Joomla developer
20	Vladimir Fedorov	Flash & Flex developer
21	Andrey Z.	Experienced PHP/Python/Django/Coldfusion/Flex web-developer
22	Yogesh S.	Certified ASP.net|C#.Net|VB.Net Developer|SQL Server 2005|VB 6|VBA
23	Alexei Shulga	PM & Zend certified PHP,MySQL,Ajax,CakePHP, CI, ZF senior developer
24	Durrab Khan	Sr.Software Lead & Architect | Flex/AIR/Spring/Java/J2EE/J2ME/Android
25	Sri Vardhan Gogineni	Developer

	Top 25 Freelance Writers for October 2009 were:
1	Deborah Hemstreet	Specialist in Online Help, Manuals, Presentations, and More!
2	Chitra Raghavan	Business Research Analyst
3	Christopher Subijano	TOP 10%! Superb SEO Writer/Link Builder/Business Consultant/Engineer
4	Deepa Ashith	TOP ODesk Writer/Business Analyst/CopyWriter
5	David Tong	Senior Technical Writer, Photography Instructor
6	Manal Sh	Accountant , Bookkeeper ,E-learning , English>Arabic Translator,Moo
7	Cc M.	Professional – Project Management, Design, Content, Data Entry
8	Georges D.	Forex trader / MQL coder / English – French – Arabic translator
9	Jayne W.	♣♣♣ Microsoft Office Expert ♣♣ Researcher ♣♣ Teacher ♣♣♣
10	Jamie M.	Data Entry, Data Mining, Copy and Paste Work Expert
11	Graham Land	Creative/Copywriter, research, travel, branding, SEO, Swe-Eng trans.
12	Michelle Grace	Data Entry/Researcher/VA/Social Bookmarking/DocumentEditing/WebContent
13	Ramon B.	Excellent WRITER, resourceful ADMIN ASST, first-rate TRANSCRIPTIONIST
14	Ray Kirstein	Voice and Production Pro
15	Jason Spidle	Professional Writer, Web Programmer and Certified Project Manager
16	Bryan D.	Experienced Email support, Research/Writer, Graphic Designer, CSR
17	Sally R.	On the ball administration, research, writing, editing and data entry
18	Betsy Pickering	Creative/Technical Writer | Native English Speaker
19	Ed Q.	۞ Data Entry Expert/Autocad Capable/Virtual Assistant/Video Editor ۞
20	Maria Revillo	English to Spanish translator
21	Susan Campbell	Trusted Content Writer – Articles,Sales Pages, eBooks, Website Content
22	Geefe A.	efficient and committed business writer/researcher/virtual assistant
23	Faith M.	Multi-Skilled eBook Writer/Blogger/Spinner/SEO/LinkBuilder/Top Tests
24	Ronald Uy	Result Oriented/ Hard Working/ Professional/WordPress Writer-Blogger
25	Roselyn M.	Data Entry/Research/Social Bookmark/Article Submission

	Top 25 Virtual Assistants for October 2009 were:
1	Roshni K.	Kashwork :Writer, VA, Data Entry, CRM, Project Manager, Admin Support
2	A R.	Virtual Assistant/Data Entry/Data Mining/Research/VA/PA/eCommerce
3	Suresh M.	Virtual Assistant,Data Entry,Data Mining,Excel,Web Research,PA&VA
4	Marc A.	Data Entry, Directory Admin, part-time Writer, and more…
5	Sujata John	Data Entry Specialist – Freelance Data Entry Professional, India
6	Hazel S.	Smart, versatile and capable native english speaker
7	Livia R.	Data Entry-Virtual/PersonalAssistant-Directory Submission-Researcher
8	Benedetta De Rose	Professional Translator
9	Angela S.	I am your Experienced and Professional Administrative Assistant
10	Desiree L.	Expert Fr/Sp Translator, Social Media Marketer and Content Manager
11	Lizza M.	***Virtual Assistant, Researcher & Data Entry Professional***
12	Abigail Paladin	Admin. Assistant, 6Yrs as Call Center Agent, ESL Tutor for Japanese
13	Kaye A.	Accounting/Bookkeeping/MSOffice/Data_Entry/Craigslist Proficient
14	Kevin Ochoco	FREELANCE I.T. Technician / Data Entry / Customer Support
15	Manolito Sulit	Online Media Strategist, Project Manager, ITO/BPO Provider
16	Marcela N.	Data Entry, Social Bookmarking, Researcher
17	Minhaz P.	oDesk 5000+ hrs, Data entry specialist, Link builder, Banner designer
18	Rachel L.	Reseacher, Data Entry, Social Bookmarking,Facebook
19	Abraham Jozsef	Experienced oDesk Provider – Data Entry, Research, MS Office, Admin S.
20	Nouman K.	VA,Web-research,HTML,CSS,Craigslist and Data Entry Expert
21	Michael B.	Expert in Data Entry, Article Writing, SEM, SMM, SEO, Tech Support
22	Daizy Raisinghani	Data Entry Expert
23	Travis B.	American! 5 Star Rating! Highly proficient with broad set of skills!
24	Simolyn S.	~Virtual Assistant/Customer Service/Telemarketer/Researcher/Recruiter~
25	Lily Roy	Legal, Administrative Support, Reserching, Writing & Data Entry

These rankings will be generated each month, and stored in the oConomy under “Rankings”. October Rankings will be published on December 1st. Congratulations again!

Congratulations to “Stylish and Dry When it Rains”, the winner of oDesk’s October Design of the Month Contest. This project was for a skilled designer to create a postcard that demonstrated his or her best creativity and skill sets while also representing the products and message of www.AmeRain.com. They actively promoted their contest submission, bringing in an impressive number of votes and helping them win a $1,000 oDesk credit and an Apple iPhone 3GS.

Runners-Up:

• “iPOV Corporate Website Design” This project was a complete overhaul of the design of the buyer’s corporate website. The purpose was to clearly communicate their instructional design approach to visitors and potential clients. The new design has a new look and feel, layout, and diagrams to help get the buyer’s message across within a clean, professional design.
• “LingQ Redesign” This was an update to the design and functionality of the buyer’s website at LingQ.com. The talented providers hired for this job made significant changes to the site’s core functionality and design to provide a cleaner and more user friendly appearance.
• “HelperHire Website” This was a design of a database driven website similar to a dating site in functionality. The buyer wanted a simple design with the least amount of pages and text as possible but also user friendly with a friendly, outdoors, happy theme.

This month’s contest served as a reminder of the amazing design talent we have in our oDesk community of providers. All oDesk buyers who completed any type of design job through oDesk were eligible to submit their designs to the contest. Winners were determined entirely by oDesk community voting. We’d like to thank all of the participants in this month’s contest and helping to make it yet another success. Stay tuned for our next contest which we anticipate will be bigger and better than any we’ve done in the past. As always, we’d love your feedback so feel free to submit your suggestions within the comment section below for future consideration. And please join us in congratulating our winners for October! Nice work folks!

We’re excited about taking part in today’s FailCon event being put on by the folks at Snap Summit.  It will be a great venue for entrepreneurs to share ideas about the most common startup mistakes, and take away practical and actionable advice to help keep each other from the dreaded #fail.

In an effort to do our part to help startups succeed, we’re extending the oDesk Challenge to all of the companies demoing at FailCon.  We’re going to roll up our sleeves and find the very best talent on oDesk for these companies, so they can build online workteams to save money and stay flexible.

Here are the companies showcased at FailCon – we’ll be personally extending our offer to them during the event today.

	Webvanta Webvanta is a new kind of hosted content management system (CMS) that allows designers to easily build content-rich sites with structured data, without having to mess with back-end code.
	YourVersion YourVersion is a revolutionary real-time discovery engine that lets you easily discover, share and bookmark new, relevant web content tailored to your interests.
	WeMakeItSafer Statistically, you have at least 5 products with safety defects in your home right now and don’t know about it. WeMakeItSafer has the only recall search tool with advanced filtering and image gallery to help you quickly identify potential hazards.
	MyJobReferrals With MyJobReferrals.com, it’s easy for individuals to browse through open job opportunities and identify positions that a friend or colleague might be interested in hearing about.
	Klout Klout measures influence on topics across the social web to find the people the world listens to.
	Freshout We’ve had clients from every continent and deeply enjoy the intersection of different verticals and cultures. We view your distance as an opportunity to innovate rather than a challenge.
	Fido Factor The Ultimate guide to dog-friendly locations.
	Creative.ly Creative.ly is a fun place to find and collect the best images from all over web. Catalog your favorite photos from flickr or other great websites. Show off the images you love and discover new images from people who share your taste.
	BackBlaze The no fuss solution to getting all your data backed up securely. Online backup for only $5/month per computer for unlimited storage.
	MoApps The first real estate app you need. Before you purchase a home, or move to a new location, you need to know the local economy.
	ScrumNinja Plan and estimate projects with ease. Keep your team focused and productive. Track progress and who’s working on what. Deliver high-level business value to your product owners. Manage feature delivery and acceptance.
	MeeHive Specify your interests, and we deliver the news. Get the latest from around the world Take MeeHive with you via iPhone, RSS, email and more Discover new interests Share and discuss with friends and family
	TribeVibe Tribevibe will change the way you think about measuring and curating content. We’re not quite ready to let the world hear the beat yet. But you can register now to request an invitation to the initial alpha program. More than 3000 people have already signed up!
	Envolve With Envolve you’ll be able to discuss websites in real-time with other readers, share your thoughts with a global audience, and network with other like-minded individuals.
	Econetix We build residential energy efficiency systems that are focused on providing rich end-user experiences. Our products are affordable, easy to use, and are designed to introduce long-term energy efficient behaviors into the home.

Moments ago, the odometer at oDesk’s oConomy rolled over. Our providers have earned over $100 million dollars on oDesk – a fantastic feat that has all of us here in Menlo Park cheering.

This rate grows every day, and there will be more work done on oDesk this month than on any other online work marketplace. Period.

In addition to passing this tremendous milestone, oDesk continues to grow 3-5 times faster than any other online work marketplace.

So congratulations to our incredible providers, and to the buyers who have hired them. You guys are changing how the world works!

We’re excited to announce the new oDesk Affiliate Program via Commission Junction!

We look forward to working with affiliate marketers to grow the oDesk community.  We are even more excited to introduce the world of affiliate marketing to oDesk.  Publishers can use oDesk for all of their day-to-day needs, since oDesk is a great place to find web developers, graphic designers, blog writers, virtual assistants, and online marketers (SEO, PPC, and social media experts).

Why should you enroll in our new program?

• We will pay affiliates $10 for each new buyer they send to oDesk that signs up & verifies a payment method.
• We will pay affiliates 10% of all of the money we make from those buyers for the first year after they sign up.

We’ve provided a variety of banner, text link, and flash options for affiliates to choose from. We’ve also provided a list of recommended keywords for them to use in their online marketing campaigns.  We’ve even created some APIs so affiliates can create custom sites using our job feeds - http://developers.odesk.com.

Affiliate marketers and users of our user-user referral system are welcome to apply to the new program. Click here to get started now!

We’re excited about our program and hope you will be, too.  We want to work closely with our affiliates and help them succeed, so if you have any ideas about how we can make our program better, let us know!  Email affiliate-team@odesk.com.

On October 22-23, oDesk CEO Gary Swart will be joining Silicon Valley business leaders at BiztechDay. If you’re attending, make sure to grab a moment with Gary and ask for his insights on the Future of Work – his answer will give entrepreneurs, investors and executives fuel to rethink, retarget and change how their business works.

We look forward to helping these companies do more with less on oDesk!

Patrick Schwerdtfeger, one of the Bay Area’s preeminent Social Media evangelists, will be hosting his next Entrepreneur and Small Business Academy event tonight at 6:00pm at the Hotel Shattuck Plaza, in Berkeley, CA.

At the event, special guests Kane Minkus & Jeff Slayter will share their wealth of Entrepreneurial experiences with their presentation, “Blatantly Unfair Sales Magic Sooo Powerful You Might Be Afraid To Use It.”

The presentation will cover:

• Stealth email tricks that boost client loyalty
• Linguistic tools that make you indispensable
• A precise system for creating a constant stream of clients and customers
• Three behaviors of top-producing Entrepreneurs that will change your perspective on how to do business in the current market place
• Advanced techniques for balancing multiple income streams

Patrick will also have copies of his book, “Webify Your Business: Internet Marketing Secrets for the Self-Employed“, and his new 6 DVD Set “Social Media Victories – Real Businesses, Real Campaigns, Real Results” available for purchase.  Patrick has agreed to offer oDesk users a $100 discount to the DVD set.

We’ll have a table at the event to chat with folks about oDesk, so make sure to stop by and say hello!

We’re excited about tonight’s sold-out Juice Pitcher event put on by TheFunded.com and Vator.TV.  This unique startup pitching and networking event democratizes access to exposure for promising early stage companies.  136 companies competed for the chance to present tonight to an audience of over 300 investors, founders, and members of the press.  Aaron Patzer, of Mint.com, and Munjal Shah, of Like.com – two leading Silicon Valley CEOs – will be speaking at the event to educate and motivate the participating startups.

In fact, we’re so excited about Juice Pitcher, we’ve extended our oDesk Challenge offer to the 10 finalists (who haven’t yet been announced).  These early-stage companies are under constant pressure to do more with less, and a great way to do that is enlist the help of teams of online contractors.  Through participation in the oDesk Challenge, we’re going to help them find the very best talent on oDesk, so they can begin reaping the benefits of having an online workteam on their side.

Our CEO, Gary Swart, and several members of our team will be attending tonight’s event – if you’ll be attending, we look forward to seeing you there!

We are pleased to announce our best Providers for September 2009! We have over 250,000 Providers on oDesk, but these ones stood out as the cream of the crop this month, as they performed the most hours of work with the highest feedback rating. They have been given special badges recognizing their achievement.

oDesk Buyers, you might want to get in touch with these Providers soon…they just completed assignments and are available now, but probably won’t be for long. Click on their profile to check out their work and contact them for an interview!

	Top 25 Freelance Designers for September 2009 were:
1	Joanna C.	Web Design, Logo, Collaterals, Brochure, Joomla
2	Nikolay Atanasov	3D Generalist / Post prduction
3	David Moehle	Voice Talent/Start to Finish Digital Audio Creation and Editing/Writer
4	Francis M.	►► Photoshop | Illustrator | Indesign Cr8TiVE @rtist™
5	Salman N.	Senior Ruby on Rails/ PHP/J EE/ Flex/ Flash/HTML/CSS Developer
6	Evgeniy Ognarev	Illustrations, character design, flash animations, storyboards
7	Allen Kerry	â–º 3D Artist Character Modeler, 12 yrs Game dev exp, Fulltime biz, US â—„
8	Kamal Garg	Photoshop, Flash, HTML/DHTML/XHTML, Versatile Website & Logo Designer
9	John Basile	Scraster Professional Screencasting
10	Peter Safwat	Flash Designer & Developer + Web & Graphic Designer
11	Cheryl B.	Graphic designer, 18 years building better brands
12	Kamal Pahuja	3D Modeling, Texturing, Lighiting – Freelance Website/Flash Designer
13	Tania I.	Logo Design, Brochure, Website, Stationary, & Illustration Expert
14	Dexter B.	Dedicated Illustrator • Professional Artist • oDesk Recognized
15	Nitya S.	Web & Graphics Expert, Flash Animator, Web2.0, HTML/CSS, Logo Designer
16	Anna P.	Graphic Designer
17	Sm R.	web research, video creator, adobe cs3, ms office expert.
18	Nikola Sudarevic	Desktop Publishing and Design
19	Jorge Puntriano	Senior Graphic Designer, Illustrator, Pixel Artist and 2D animator
20	Jeff W.	*Creative* Video Editing / Camtasia / Flash / Audio / Graphic Design
21	Talec H.	Expert in web designing,CSS, Div based sites & html
22	Victor Novak	Web/Print Design. Brand Identity/Logo/Stationery. IA/UX consultant.
23	Kamal Pahuja	3D Modeling, Texturing, Lighiting – Freelance Website/Flash Designer
24	Allen S.	ILLUSTRATION/WEB/GRAPHIC DESIGN/ **LOVES WORKING WITH ILLUSTRATOR**
25	Abhinav B.	â–‘â–’â–“â–ˆ Superlative Php/MySql, Web2.0, Ajax — Developer █▓▒░

	Top 25 Freelance Software Developers for September 2009 were:
1	Gabriel V.	Programmer / Developer
2	Dmitriy L.	C++ / Python developer
3	Christine Hui	BVG
4	Vinod Podar	Senior Program Manager
5	Dharminder S	.Net C# VB ASP.net .Net2.0 .Net3.5, healthcare, dontnetnuke
6	Roman Kudiyarov	C++/Python Developer
7	Harry R.	.Net/MVC/LINQ/MS SQL/T-SQL/jQuery/JSON
8	Ranjana S.	Experieced OsCommerce,Ajax,Smarty,Wordpress,Cakephp,Magento Programmer
9	Ross C.	Senior iPhone/C/C++/Web/Python Developer
10	Chinmay Das	Senior Software Engineer
11	Andrew Kramarew	Senior developer: ASP.NET/C#/MSSQL/MySQL/AJAX/JQuery/Prototype/Magento
12	Supriya B.	4+Years experienced PHP/MYSQL Web Developer
13	Paresh D.	Sun Certified Java Prof, Java,J2EE,Struts,Ajax,Hibernate Developer
14	Daniel G.	Experienced PHP/Perl/ActionScript(2,3)/C/C++/JavaScript developer
15	Tejinder A.	Web 2.0, CSS, xHTML, Flash Actionscripting Programmer
16	Dmitry Papusha	MS SQL, ASP.NET, C#, SSIS, Crystal, SSRS, DWH High-Skilled Developer
17	Goran P.	Experienced Programmer, Mobile Phones Programmer and Web Programmer
18	Gilbert E.	*PHP+mySQL*,Flex,C#.Net+MSSQL,AJax, RUBY,XHTML/XML,J2ME,VB/C/C++
19	Veer Singh	PHP Developer
20	Alexey Z.	C/C++ Technical Lead
21	Dmitry S.	C++/C# software developer
22	Andrei Mamitchev	Senior Java/JSP/Struts/Spring Developer
23	Denis Borisenko	Flex/ActionScript/AIR/Flash Developer
24	Rajan Kulkarni	Sun Certified Java Developer – Java/J2EE, Struts, AJAX SQL, HIbernate
25	V K.	Unmatched Silverlight and ASP.NET 3.5 Professional

	Top 25 Freelance Web Developers for September 2009 were:
1	Evgeny M.	PHP/MySQL/DHTML/Ajax Developer/Project Manager
2	Tatiana D.	PHP, MySQL, Drupal Developer, Team Leader
3	Alexander D.	Expert J2EE/JBoss, PHP/MySQL, AJAX, SMARTY Developer
4	Olexiy O.	Java/J2EE Architect / Senior Developer
5	Dmitry A.	ASP.net/Mobile – Professional Experience
6	Dora M.	Dora
7	Vladimir K.	ColdFusion/MSSQL/PHP/Smarty/mySQL developer
8	Fahmi A.	Professional PHP/MySQL/XHTML/CSS/ Developer
9	Igor G.	Java Developer
10	Mircea C.	Senior Delphi Expert Software Developer, with JAVA, C# .NET and PHP
11	Misha B.	Drupal/PHP/MySQL/HTML/JS/CSS
12	Jane Durm	Sales & Marketing, Management, Admin. Assistant, Customer Service
13	V K.	Unmatched Silverlight and ASP.NET 3.5 Professional
14	Maninder S.	HTML/ XHTML/ CSS Developer, Certified Wordpress Professional
15	Gurdeep Dhillon	PHP/MySQL/Ajax Drupal Joomla Wordpress ECommerce Rails UberCart Expert
16	Amit C.	.Net Professional
17	Denis Statsenko	Greatest PHP/MySQL/AJAX/Symfony/Smarty/osCommers/Joomla developer
18	Vladimir Fedorov	Flash & Flex developer
19	Andrey Z.	Experienced PHP/Python/Django/Coldfusion/Flex web-developer
20	Yogesh S.	Certified ASP.net/C#.Net,VB.Net Developer,sqlserver2005,vb 6, VBA
21	Alexei Shulga	Zend certified ZCE,PHP,MySQL,Ajax,Frameworks (CakePHP, Zend Framework)
22	Durrab Khan	Sr.Software Lead & Architect | Flex/AIR/Spring/Java/J2EE/J2ME/Android
23	Sri Vardhan Gogineni	Developer
24	Uday S	PHP, AJAX, Joomla, MySQL, CakePHP, Drupal, PHP/IIS/MS SQL
25	Ashish Singh	Microsoft Certified ASP.NET 3.5,C#,LINQ,SQL server,AJAX,JS,Sharepoint

	Top 25 Freelance Writers for September 2009 were:
1	Nelson Manning	High Quality Writer: Technical, Dev Spec, Business, Creative, Copy
2	Aashita S.	Experienced Tech Writer, Project Manager, ID, Editor, PR, Copywriter
3	Jery Esparas	7.5YRS Exp.PROJECT MANAGER/EXCEL/VIRTUAL ASST (FULLTIME Provider)
4	Oliver N.	Versatile Writer++
5	Carlo Gabriel Simbajon	TOP oDesk Writer for July 2009; ECONOMIST: Economics, Business, Mngmt.
6	Rosanne L.	Professional Writing Services – Copywriting, Web Content, SEO, eBooks
7	Sally R.	On the ball administration, research, writing, editing and data entry
8	Susan Campbell	Trusted Content Writer – Articles,Sales Pages, eBooks, Website Content
9	Nitima S.	Highly reliable Writer and SEO expert
10	Candan Kayaguney	Data Entry/Research/Personal Assistant/Translation/Administrative Supp
11	Marilyn M.	Top 15 Provider on oDesk~ PROFESSIONAL~SEO NINJA~AFFORDABLE~QUALITY~
12	Shaira B.	All-around Data Entry~Research Assistant+Graphics Editor
13	Yigit S.	Turkish native – (Tur-Eng) Translation, Proofreading, Localization
14	Houda A.	Translator French /Spanish/English-Proofreader-transcriber
15	Elvis S.	GraphicDesign/SEO/DataEntry/QA/A+cert/AudioEditor
16	Donna M.	Experienced and Published Writer
17	Deepa Ashith	Experienced Technical Writer/Business Analyst/CopyWriter
18	Faith M.	☼Multi-Skilled☼—eBook Writer—Blogger—Spinner—SEO—LinkBuilder—Top Tests
19	Susan Campbell	Trusted Content Writer – Articles,Sales Pages, eBooks, Website Content
20	Melissa Lind	Pharmacist Writer/Research/Editor in Medicine/Health/Lifestyle/SEO
21	Teresa Schultz	HTML/photoshop/writer
22	Faith Anne Hurley	Writing for you – mathematics, humanities, and education
23	Daphany Dixon	Data Entry Expert and Office Assistant
24	Mark Aragona	A Wizard with Words: Creative Writer, SQA Specialist and Voice-over
25	Kamran Mehmood	MBA IN FINANCE (DATA ENTRY EXPERT IN MS. WORD, EXCELL, POWERPOINT)

	Top 25 Virtual Assistants for September 2009 were:
1	Marie C.	Graphic Design Print & Web, Photo manipulation, correction and other
2	Marie C.	Data Encoder Specialist, Internet Researcher, Data Mining.
3	Janice Alcantara	☼ ♥ TOP SEM, SEO, Link Building, Web Content & Article Writing ♥ ☼
4	Philippa E.	British certified SEO Practitioner and Copy Writer Extraordinaire
5	L Maher	Virtual Assistant – Highly experienced
6	Ariel Pichersky	Native Spanish speaker| Writer| Discourse worker| Letters student @UBA
7	Rostyslav K.	â–ºDATA ENTRY, RESEARCH, FRENCH TRANSLATION, ADMINISTRATION, EXCELâ–º
8	Mia B.	Highly Reliable Project Coordinator, Writer,Researcher
9	Bobby L.	BlackSheepUK|Graphic/Web Designer+CSS+Photoshop+Video Traffic Expert
10	Bobbi D.	Executive Virtual Assistant
11	Jessica H.	★★★ Design/Data Entry/Writing/Research ★★★
12	Renee B.	Information Professional/Business Researcher/Librarian
13	Vinayachandran Gopalakrishna Panicker	Admin. Professional/Data Entry Professional
14	Candy W.	Joomla/Wordpress/Ecommerce /Senior Virtual Assistant from China
15	Arpan K.	Excel/Word/Powerpoint/HTML/Virtual Assistant/Data Entry
16	Deepika Tiwari	Web Researcher/Marketing and Sales/Data Entry/Recruitment professional
17	Pradeep Chandru	MySQL certified DBA who provide support in any MYSQL activity
18	Charmaine G.	~~Customer & Tech Support,Virtual Assistant,Research Specialist~~
19	Mark Walusimbi	Dedicated To Client Service, Accurate Data & Timely Delivery
20	Sanjeev Chauhan	Certified System Administrator/Link builder/ SEO Expert/Sharepoint
21	Arlene Santillan	~ 10 YRS. EXP VA ♥ RESEARCHER ♥ ARTICLE SUBMITTER ♥ WEB CONTENT EDITOR
22	April Toucheque	Multi-Tasking Admin. Asst. with Bookkeeping Experience
23	Christine B.	Experienced researcher/ Data Entry-Virtual Assistant
24	Liza Roy	Legal, Administrative Support, Research, Writing & Data entry
25	Arvin S.	Highly motivated virtual assistant, data enterer, and web developer.

These rankings will be generated each month, and stored in the oConomy under “Rankings”. October Rankings will be published on November 1st. Congratulations again!

We’re excited to announce that voting has officially begun in our oDesk Design of the Month contest! This time around we have 57 submissions, each of which was built by oDesk providers, and we must say we’re quite impressed with the entries.

Here at oDesk we have the privilege of bringing businesses and individuals together with remote workers to collaborate on oDesk, and seeing amazing results come out of it. Our buyers are proud of their products and likewise ourrebeccaturner providers are proud of their hard work. This month’s contest is rather unique because it was open to all types of design work. It allows buyers a chance to show off their masterpieces, from logo and illustration, to video, to web design and everything in between! We’re also excited to showcase the incredible design talent of our community and honor some of the best work done through oDesk.

Winners will be chosen entirely by community voting which will continue through October 31st. The grand prize winner, or Design of the Month will officially be announced on November 1st. So what are you waiting for? Click here to cast your votes – you are allowed to vote for up to 3 apps per day. Facebook guru? You can also vote via our Facebook App. That way, your votes will show up on your walls, and your friends will be encouraged to vote as well.

The grand prize winner will get $1,000 oDesk credit, an iPhone, possible press opportunities, and of course, ever-coveted bragging rights! The three runners-up will each get an oDesk t-shirt.

So what are you waiting for? Check out the competition (we think you’ll be as impressed as we are) and cast your vote today! Good luck to the contestants – may the best design win!

We’ve redesigned our assignment detail page and think it will be useful for all users — buyers and providers alike.

To access the new page, visit My Jobs > Assignments and click on any assignment, active or ended.

For buyers:

The assignment detail page is your central screen for each provider. It shows key information, statistics, and actions all on one screen. Everything you need will be one-click away…

• see the provider’s local time
• link to the provider’s work diary
• see how much time (and money) was spent last week, this week, and for the entire assignment
• send a message to the provider or staffing manager
• change rate or weekly limit
• make bonus or fixed-price payments
• end an assignment
• manage feedback for ended assignments

For providers:

The assignment detail page is your central screen for each of your assignments…

• view your own work diary for that assignment
• see how much was earned last week, this week, and for the entire assignment
• send a message to the buyer
• end an assignment
• give refunds

Let us know what you think!

Last week, we listed out some of the most useful iPhone apps for business use. We intentionally left one off that list, so we could share it with you in more detail today:

Your oDesk team room is a great place for staying abreast of all the things your teammates are working on, but sometimes you’re not in front of your computer and you’d like to keep up to date with what’s going on back in the virtual office.  With the new oDesk iPhone app, now there’s an app for that.

The oDesk iPhone app gives you literal visibility of your online workteam no matter where you are:

• See all providers in your team room grouped by current work status – Working Now, Worked in the Last 24 Hours, Other
• View each team member’s latest work memo, local time, 24-hour work sparkline, and latest snapshot
• Check complete work diaries including memos, full-size snapshots, activity indicator, billing status, timestamp, and active window for any date

The app is designed for both buyers and providers.

Watch Brain Goler, oDesk’s VP of Marketing, give a quick demo of the app in action:

Ready to download? If you have an iPhone (or iPod Touch), follow this link to install the app.  Or, search the App Store for “oDesk” to find it.

If you have any suggestions, we’d love to hear them at iphone-app@odesk.com, or in the comments section below.  And, if you like what you see, please rate the oDesk iPhone Application it in the App Store!

____

If you’re a blogger or member of the press looking for more information, please contact press@odesk.com.

“Work is no longer tied to a single location -
it happens anywhere on the Web, anywhere in the world.” – Gary Swart, oDesk CEO

The oDesk iPhone App announced today was built by leveraging oDesk APIs, which are now publicly available in the oDesk API Center. In releasing access to our APIs, we’d like to encourage developers and managers to create custom workspaces that shape existing oDesk tools to fit their own specific needs.

The APIs currently available:
* Authentication – Allows for login/logout functionality to be implemented from outside the oDesk site.
* Provider Search – Facilitates the searching of oDesk provider data.
* Provider Profile – Returns detailed profile information about a provider or list of providers.
* Team – Provides multi-directional interaction capabilities with the oDesk Team and its members.
* Work Diary – This method retrieves all screenshots captured from a user account within a single day.
* Get Snapshot – Retrieves one or more snapshots of activity from a user account in a company’s team at defined points in time.

Visit the oDesk API Center at: http://developers.odesk.com/

Here’s a continuation of yesterday’s post, showcasing some more of the types of providers available for hire here on oDesk. These are the rockstars we’ll help you find when your venture-backed startup signs up to take the oDesk Challenge.

	Alexander Bondarenko, Web Developer Alexander Bondarenko is a developer based in Kiev, Ukraine. With a master’s degree in computer engineering from the National University of Ukraine, Alexander has the skills that many businesses look for on oDesk. With expertise in PHP, Javascript, HTML, Smarty, Jquery, and the Zend Framework, Alexander has been a successful provider on oDesk for more than 3 years.
	Vadim Kravchuk, QA Engineer Vadim Kravchuk is a QA Engineer based in Zhitomir, Ukraine. He has a master’s degree in computer engineering from Engineering and Technology University of Zhitomir. His skillset includes LAMP, PHP, Perl, Delphi as well as administration of ISP, Postgres and Deputy Director. His testing expertise includes manual and automation, black and white-box testing. He is proficient in requirements/architecture/code analysis. Vadim has been testing oDesk projects for the last 3 years.
	Suzanne Davis, Customer Support Rep Suzanne is a customer support representative based in Burns Flat, Oklahoma. She has a background in administration and customer service beginning with companies such as Convergys and Duke Energy. Along the way she transitioned from working in physical call centers and executive offices to working from home answering customer calls while still providing executive level service. She has held roles as HR Manager, Customer Service Trainer and Head of a Customer Service department for several firms, and is now part of the oDesk Customer Support team.

This Monday, we announced the oDesk Challenge – and we’ll continue to post more details over the next few days. We’ve been asked about the types of providers available to hire on oDesk. Below are a few examples of the stellar providers venture-backed startups may be interested in hiring through participation in the oDesk Challenge (and there are 320,000+ others, as well!):

	David Kadavy, Graphic Designer Although David bills himself as a graphic designer, he’s more like a Marketing and Product department all in one. Based in Chicago, he is experienced in branding, product management, user experience design, graphic desgin, front-end XHTML/CSS coding, SEO, and Google Analytics. David has Silicon Valley startup experience, and has several endeavors of his own, including Flatmate Meetup, nom.ms, and the Through a Friend Facebook Application.
	Thea Go, Customer Service Rep Thea Go was a Quality Analyst in an American multi-national company the Philippines. When she got pregnant she started thinking of a alternative ways to make a living and at the same time be with her baby. She started with small projects, building her career expertise in several fields of work. She built her reputation through feedback scores and work history, and has recently joined oDesk’s very own customer support team.
	John Kim, SEO Consultant John Kim is a Search Engine Optimization lover with the track record of a VC-funded startup behind him. As Five9.com’s founding CEO & principal lead generator, John grew the company from his apartment in Alameda, California, to a business that generated $10M annually through the web. John has helped half a dozen VC funded startups achieve their online marketing goals. He has a reputation for frankness with clients and passion for lead generation.

Yesterday we announced the oDesk Challenge at TechCrunch50 – and we’ve already received some great questions about what exactly we’re doing for venture-backed startups. Today’s post introduces the process and the oDesk team who will be by your side throughout it.

Once a venture-backed company signs up as an oDesk buyer and posts its first job, our team takes over. Just let us know you want to take part in the oDesk Challenge, and we’ll get to work – starting with a brief phone call with you to understand what skills you’re looking for. We’ll then handle sourcing & interviewing candidates for you, and serve up the top 3 candidates for your job within a week.

Please visit www.odesk.com/oDeskChallenge for more details!

One of these ‘oDesk Challenge’ account managers will find the top 3 candidates for your job Amit Bakshi amitbakshi@odesk.com donot deleate Rebecca Daneault rdaneault@odesk.com donot deleate Josh Breinlinger josh@odesk.com donot deleate

Customer Service 22,000 oDesk providers Interact with your customers via phone, email, and chat Hourly Rates $4-15 Graphic Designers 87,000 oDesk providers Do your HTML, CSS, and offline graphic design Average Hourly Rates $10-30 SEO/SMM Experts 43,000 oDesk providers Blog writers, social media account managers, and SEO linkbuilders Average Hourly Rates: $8-30

We’re excited to be in the TechCrunch50 Demopit this morning, and announce a special offer for venture-backed startups called the “oDesk Challenge“!

Visit www.odesk.com/oDeskChallenge for more details!

Last week we were fortunate to be invited to the fbFund REV incubator program’s demo day.  For the past 12 weeks, 22 startups with facebook apps were educated, mentored, housed, and funded with up to $100,000 by fbFund (a joint venture by Facebook, Founder’s Fund, and Accel Partners).  We liked what we saw – these startups were innovative, scrappy, and entrepreneurial, and in fact reminded us a lot of oDesk buyers. We wanted to do our part to help out, so we decided to roll up our sleeves to help them find the very best talent on oDesk.

We’re pleased to announce that 7 of the 22 fbFund startups have agreed to take our offer, and we’re in the midst of helping them build online workteams on oDesk!  The teams (and newest oDesk buyers) are:

Funji is a mobile virtual community for the iPhone and iPod touch, satisfying users’ desire to express themselves and communicate with others in a fun, creative way in mobile devices. The team has more than five years of experience in the mobile market in both South Korea and the US.

Gameyola is a distribution and monetization platform for casual Flash games. Flash games currently monetize poorly, but Gameyola solves this problem by providing Flash developers tools to sell virtual goods and to acquire users through social channels.

From keeping track of your kids to protecting your identity and getting back your lost stuff, Life360 is the place you go to keep your family safe, secure, and prepared for daily life.

Churches create their own social networks on MyChurch.org. They extend their community between Sundays with tools to connect and engage their members. Over 30,000 church congregations are represented on MyChurch.org.

Simplify the way you manage Facebook and other social networks through your email inbox. NutshellMail consolidates activity from all your accounts into a single email digest delivered on your schedule. Don’t let email alerts clutter your inbox. NutshellMail keeps you connected and productive at the same time.

Combines the success of resident referral programs with the power of social networks. Residents refer their community to friends through social networks like Facebook, and email to earn rewards and live with friends.

RUNmyERRAND is a social networking inspired web and mobile marketplace that provides people and businesses an easy and trusted way to get everyday tasks done in their own hyperlocal community.

We think oDesk is a great fit for companies like these to access talent anywhere in the world, scale their teams up & down as needed, and save as much as 80% on labor costs. All of these companies need to remain lean and agile on their paths towards profitability, and using oDesk to hire, manage, and pay remote contractors is a great way to do just that.  We wish them all the best as they continue along their entrepreneurial journeys!

Here in the oDesk community we have a pretty impressive bunch of designers, if we do say so ourselves.  To celebrate some of the amazing design work being done through oDesk, we thought we’d try something a little different this time around and hold a “Design of the Month” contest for the month of October.

As with past contests, the competition is open to all oDesk buyers and will be used to showcase all types of graphic design, including web design, logo & icon design, 3D animation, video editing, illustration and more.

If you’ve hired a designer through oDesk, why not show off the results by entering?  The winner will receive $1,000 oDesk credit, a gift card for a new iPhone 3GS, press opportunities and, of course, bragging rights.

Voting for the “Design of the Month” will be based on visual aesthetics.  For example, if a web site is submitted, it will be judged on how it looks, not its functionality.

So what are you waiting for?  Enter today.  Submissions will be accepted through September 30^th with voting to take place throughout the month of October.

Let the competition begin!

We are pleased to announce our best Providers for August 2009! We have over 250,000 Providers on oDesk, but these ones stood out as the cream of the crop this month, as they performed the most hours of work with the highest feedback rating. They have been given special badges recognizing their achievement.

oDesk Buyers, you might want to get in touch with these Providers soon…they just completed assignments and are available now, but probably won’t be for long. Click on their profile to check out their work and contact them for an interview!

Top 25 Freelance Designers for August 2009 were: 1) Jason D. Sr. Graphic Designer | Creative Director 2) Enric I. Creative Graphic Designer for Print & Web, Image Masking Specialist 3) David Moehle Voice Talent/Start to Finish Digital Audio Creation and Editing/Writer 4) Lily W. Sr. designer for logo, banner ,website and business card(Photoshop & I 5) Athen Desautels 3d Artist, Character Animator, Digital Content Creator 6) Drupalchamp D. drupalchamp 7) Mike P. Branding, Logo Design, Templates & Full Websites – over 7 years exp. 8 ) Justine B. Bilingual Photojournalist, Blogger and Translator (Spanish+English) 9) Pavle Borovac | Logo – Branding – Corporate Identity | 10) Matthew G. Video Editor – Viral Video – On-Line Video – 12 Year Professional 11) Greg Williams Creative Voice Talent and Audio Production 12) Bohdan S. Highly skilled flash developer, Web Designer 13) Agnes B. creative logo designer always in time/strong in marketing & branding 14) Dexter B. Dedicated Illustrator • Professional Artist 15) Tyler Bartlett Corporate Identity, Illustrator, Graphic Designer 16) Mirza M. Architect, Designer, 3d & jewellery modeler, real estate consultant 17) Alexey Medvedev 3D MODELING • VISUALIZATION • ARCHITECT • GRAPHIC • CAD specialist 18) Bogdan Macoviciuc Motion Designer 19) Tania I. Logo Design, Brochure, Website, Stationary, & Illustration Expert 20) Nick L. Print and Web Designer – www.nicklay.ca 21) Jeff W. *Creative* Video Editing / Camtasia / Flash / Audio / Graphic Design 22) Amit Thakkar 3D designer/animator/media graphics and visual effects 23) James A. Web-Graphic Design / Logo / Brochure / Flash / HTML / CSS / template - 24) Silvia Boyadzhieva Motion Design Video/Audio Production 3D Modeling, Rendering 25) Michael Stagkos 5 years+ expert in Creative design & Typography

Top 25 Freelance Software Developers for August 2009 were: 1) Denis M. Senior C++ Developer 2) Matthew S. Developer 3) Dmitriy S. C++ Developer 4) Oleg V. C++ Developer 5) Parth Bhatt CERTIFIED, ASP.NET, C#.NET, PHP, AJAX, Joomla, XML, PDA 6) Atif H. Sr Software Engineer | ColdFusion, ASP.NET, VB, C#, cakePHP,SQL Server 7) Atif Q. IT Consultant 8 ) Maneet S ASP.Net 2.0 3.5 ADO.Net C# WEB 2.0 AJAX Healthcare appl expert 9) Dmitri G. TOP QUALIFIED JAVA|FLEX|AS3 DEVELOPER | OnlyMegaâ„¢ 10) Ross C. Senior iPhone/C/C++/Web/Python Developer 11) Yash Pal Top Notch Facebook PHP/MySQL/Ajax FBML Ecommerce developer 12) Goran P. Experienced Programmer, Mobile Phones Programmer and Web Programmer 13) Alexander Rudenko iPhone / .NET developer 14) James Hammond Customer Support Engineer 15) Varun Shingal High Quality Software Delivered! 16) Maxim K. C#/.Net Developer, C++ Developer 17) Fabricio Daza ►►Experienced & reliable (PHP-MySQL-.NET-VB-C#- MSSQL) Developerâ—„â—„ 18) Yaroslav Y. ASP.Net, ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight, VB.Net, C#, MS SQL Server, MCTS 19) Devarshi M. â–“ 7+ YEARS IN QA/CODING [WEB & DESKTOP APPLICATIONS/IPhone] â–“ 20) Rachana Patel CERTIFIED, ASP.NET, C#.NET, PHP, AJAX, Joomla, XML, PDA 21) Rakesh Patel CERTIFIED, ASP.NET, C#.NET, PHP, AJAX, Joomla, XML, PDA 22) Daniel I. C# GUI, WPF, .NET 1.1 – 3.0, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, MSSQL, FireBird 23) Jiten Solanky 6+ Years of Experience in QA/QC 24) Alexandr S. C# Developer 25) Manoj K. Expertised in AJAX 2.0, Joomla,OSCommerce, PHP/ MySQL, ASP.NET, VB.NET

Top 25 Freelance Web Developers for August 2009 were: 1) Andrew K. Java/C++ Developer 2) Denis P. Brainbench Certified Java/C++ developer 3) Ratnamraju N. Ruby on Rails (RoR) Developer 4) Chowdary N. RoR and PHP Developer 5) Ivan S. Java Developer 6) Sergey S. Consultant 7) Elena E. C++ developer 8 ) Ivan S. Programmer / Developer 9) Aleksandar M. Flash/Flex/PHP GURU 10) Swaminadhan N. Ruby on Rails (RoR) Expert Developer 11) Mel A. ASP/ASP.NET – Senior Developer 12) Pavel L. JavaScript/ExtJS Developer 13) Egor N. JavaScript/ExtJS Developer 14) Teddy E. Software engineer / Project manager 15) Sony J ASP.NET+ADO, AJAX, MSSQL 2005, SQL SERVER REPORATING, WCF, WPF, XML 16) Sergey P. ASP.NET / C# Developer 17) Yuriy P. JavaScript/ExtJS Developer 18) Vadzim L. PHP/MySQL , Symfony, Zend Framework, ExtJS/jQuery Developer 19) Andrey V. Web Developer PHP/MySQL/JavaScript/HTML/CSS/*nix 20) Ivan V. Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist: .NET, C# 21) Oleksandr B. RIA [Adobe Flex & AIR / AJAX] and Web 2.0 [JavaEE / Grails] specialist 22) Evgeny C. C# Developer 23) Eugeny Petrushenko JavaScript/.Net/Asp.Net Developer 24) Ruslan Gayfulin C++/C#/Asp.net/JavaScript 25) Oleg V. Senior Analyst LAMP Developer [backend/frontend], Project Manager

Top 25 Freelance Writers for August 2009 were: 1) Theresa Mccuaig Writer, Editor, Content Provider 2) Shula Kopf Published journalist, clear, compelling SEO copy for websites 3) Leo Gatdula IT-Tech Support/Helpdesk/Customer Service/Research Specialist 4) Ariadne S. Master MOS, Dutch translation & more. Your 1 stop shop! 5) Merliza C. Blogger Par Excellence/ Veterinarian/Creative Writer 6) Derek J A Content Writer, Copywriter, and Blogger For Your Online Needs 7) Susan Campbell Trusted Content Writer 5 Top % Skills – Sales/Landing Pages/Articles 8 ) Rebecca Haden quality copywriting and SEO 9) Christopher Subijano TOP 10%! Superb SEO Writer/Link Builder/Business Consultant/Engineer 10) Bhagwad Park Expert Creative Writer with SEO Skills 11) Hal Major Writer/Editor/Proofreader/SEO/SEM/Web Copywriter/Expert Rank-EzineArti 12) Monica B. Web-researcher. English-Portuguese Translator. Data entry. 13) Dagmara M. Experienced SPANISH / ENGLISH / POLISH Translator TOP 25 Provider 14) Sabou R. Data Entry, MSOffice, Photoshop,Internet research 15) Sawsan E. Academic Writer, Editor, Proofreader & Translator 16) Aurelien Capella Translator English/French/Portuguese – Marketing Researcher 17) Monika S. Senior Technical Writer/Instructional Designer/Content Writer & Editor 18) Grace Florencia Manalili EXCELLENT ENGLISH/VA/WRITER/EDITOR/RESEARCH/TRANSCRIPTION/DATA ENTRY 19) Iris P. ***VIRTUAL ASSISTANT, RESEARCHER, DATA ENTRY SPECIALIST, SEO SEM*** 20) Karen G. MULTI-TASKED V/A,RESEARCHER,POWERPOINT,TYPIST,DATA ENTRY EXPERT 21) Inika Arora >Top 10% | SEO Copywriter, Blogger, Editor 22) Sheetal R. â–ºSOCIAL MEDIA~Facebook~eLEARNING~eBOOK~CAMTASIA♫VOICE♫TRANSCRIPTIONâ—„ 23) Katrine S. Experienced writer, researcher, blogger, forum poster, illustrator 24) Rick Sizemore Experienced Catalog/Web Copywriter, Editor & Proofreader Pro 25) Kristin F. Writer, Editor, Administrative Support

Top 25 Virtual Assistants for August 2009 were: 1) Alejandro D. Expert in Webpage Designing 2) Ritesh Dembani ASP/PHP Expert With 4+years of Experience 3) Laurie G. Virtual Assistant for all of your admistrative needs 4) Ronald M. Affiliate Manager, Content Writer 5) Sheetal S. A commited Virtual Assistant/Researcher/SalesForce.com Expert 6) Floremer M. VA; Data Entry; Researcher; osCommerce; Transcriptionist; Photoshop 7) E Suratos | VIRTUAL ACES | DOUBLE DEGREE HOLDER | VA | RESEARCHER | 8 ) Estrella L. SEO/Internet Marketing/Link Builder Efficient Data Entry, Researcher 9) Madelle A. Personal Assistant,Team Leader,VA,Researcher,Web Content,CMS,LinkBuild 10) Florante F. Project management/ Technical assistant/ Engineer /Web developement 11) Marilyn M. ~VERY FAST~ DETAIL-ORIENTED~PROFESSIONAL~SEO NINJA~AFFORDABLE~QUALITY~ 12) Marie C. Graphic Design Print & Web, Photo manipulation, correction and other 13) Devi D Data Entry Specialist 14) Mark Walusimbi ▫♣▫♣ Dedicated To Client Service, Accurate Data & Timely Delivery ♣▫♣▫ 15) A R. Virtual Assistant/Data Entry/Data Mining/Research/VA/PA/eCommerce 16) Tanya C. Executive Assistant/HR Professional/Recruiter/Web Researcher 17) Lorena C. Researcher, Writer, Transcriptionist, Data Entry Professional 18) Jerah Y. Technical Support Representative \ Transcriptionist \ VA 19) Darlene A. Double Degree Holder/ Virtual Assistant 20) Jacklyn Ruiz ►A SMART CHOICE: COST-EFFECTIVE, ACCURATE, RELIABLE, SKILLFUL ACHIEVER 21) Mohammed H. Experts in Data Entry , SEO & SEM , Content Writing any projects 22) Janneth S. SEO Specialist/Virtual Assistant/Graphic Designing/Researcher 23) Melanie L. 5 yrs exp in BPO industry, data entry, outbound & inbound calling, 24) Kristin Fenton Virtual Assistant, Researcher/SkipTracer. Data Entry and Admin Asst 25) Brenda Espinoza Excellent Administrative Support/ Data Entry/ Online Order Processing

These rankings will be generated each month, and stored in the oConomy under “Rankings”. September Rankings will be published on October 1st. Congratulations again!

Congratulations to iCooking, the winner of oDesk’s August App of the Month Contest.

iCooking is an innovative iPhone app that provides easy and simple solutions to avoid the hassle of deciding what to cook for dinner. Users can get multi-course dinner menu suggestions, as well as starters, main courses, deserts, soups, browse existing recipes, edit them and add your own.

They actively promoted their contest submission, bringing in an impressive number of votes and helping them win a $1,000 oDesk credit and an Apple iPhone 3GS.

Runners-Up:

• SpaceClash
  SpaceClash is an exciting multi-player on-line role-play game that erases the border between real life and fantasy world. It allows you to play with other people like you, make new friends and defeat enemies.
• Carpenter’s Helper Pro
  Carpenter’s Helper Pro is a unique application that offers iPhone users an advanced construction calculator, capable of handling even the most demanding construction projects. With Carpenter’s Helper, you’ll always have the calculating power you need on you, every time you need it.
• Cirris
  Cirris brings the classic game of bricks to your iPhone and iPod Touch. But there is a circular twist to this game. Player needs to complete a ring with the falling pieces in order to remove it.

All oDesk buyers who completed applications through oDesk were eligible to submit their apps to the contest. Winners were determined entirely by oDesk community voting.

We’d like to thank all of the participants in this month’s contest and helping to make it yet another success. Stay tuned for our next contest in which we will be looking for the best design commissioned through oDesk in our Design of the Month Contest.

As always, we’d love your feedback so feel free to submit your suggestions within the comment section below for future consideration.

And please join us in congratulating our winners for August! Nice work folks!

oDesk executives and team members will be attending a number of events over the coming months. In order to share with you where we’ll be and who you can expect to see there, we’re launching this “Upcoming Event” blog series – a place for us to share the details of our future travels and the people we’ll be talking to.

Leverage the power of Social Networks – Promote your product, your business or yourself
Thursday, August 20, 2009
6pm to 8:30pm
Location: Hewlett Packard, Oakroom Auditorium
19447 Pruneridge Ave, Cupertino, CA 95014

Over the last several months, the role of social media has dramatically changed. No longer are social sites like Facebook or YouTube or Twitter solely used for exchanging trivial content. Large companies are shifting their marketing dollars from traditional outreach channels to social media. In addition to reducing marketing spend, firms are realizing that they can reach specific target markets more effectively through social media.

How can you leverage social media to your best advantage?

• If you are a product manager or an engineer, you might want to learn how you can use the power of real-time customer feedback and proactively incorporate it into your product development.
• If you are an entrepreneur, you can promote your company to a variety of audiences much more effectively.
• And as an individual, you can use these networks to make a brand for yourself and become a valuable player in your own industry.

We have assembled a fantastic panel of experts who are actually in the process of leveraging social networks for personal and business purposes. Please don’t ignore this key trend. Don’t even watch from the sidelines or dabble in the shallows – come and play with us on on August 20th and gain the tools to start leveraging social networks!

Moderator : Edith Yeung, Host of CBS 5 Startup Profile and Founder of BizTechDay

Panelists
Himanshu Jhamb – Founder, Active Garage
Megan Casey, Editor in Chief, Squidoo
Gary Swart, CEO of oDesk

For more information, visit: www.sipa.org
To register, visit: https://www.123signup.com/register?id=jzpgr

oDesk Ranks No. 110 on the 2009 Inc. 500 with Three-Year Sales Growth of 1,470%

Inc. Magazine announced the results of their 28th annual Inc. 500, an exclusive ranking of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies. Inc. editor Jane Berentson said of the list: “If you want to know which companies are going to change the world, look at the Inc. 500. These are the most dynamic, fast-growth companies in the nation, the ones finding innovative solutions to problems, creating smart systems, and inventing products we soon discover we can’t live without. The Inc. 500 list is Inc. magazine’s tribute to American business ingenuity and ambition.”

We’re proud that oDesk has been able to join this elite group of companies, and we could not have done it without the fantastic buyers and providers in our marketplace, and the efforts of our phenomenal global workteam. Read the details of our ranking on the Inc. 500 here – and pat yourself on the back. We couldn’t have done it without you!

We are pleased to announce our best Providers for July 2009! We have over 250,000 Providers on oDesk, but these ones stood out as the cream of the crop this month, as they performed the most hours of work with the highest feedback rating. They have been given special badges recognizing their achievement.

oDesk Buyers, you might want to get in touch with these Providers soon…they just completed assignments and are available now, but probably won’t be for long. Click on their profile to check out their work and contact them for an interview!

Top 25 Freelance Designers for July 2009 were: Victor Novak, Jonathan Antonio, Rajat P., Manu B., Alexey Taganchin, Hamid Akbar, Neil F., Emmanuel U., Max Uzkikh, Sampad T., Lateralcreativa Team, Alex C., Joseph Bempong, Jorge Puntriano, Anna P., Kim M., Michelle Gamboa, Lateralcreativa Team, Rob Louw, Nikola Sudarevic, Daniel Rothier, Brad B., Lucky L., Yan Bellavance, Kamna S.

Top 25 Freelance Software Developers for July 2009 were: Daljeet Singh, Neil H., Martin Pollard, Gayle Myers-Harbison, Dmitry S., Andrey Kurashev, Atif Q., Lester F., Atif H., Haseeb K., Alexander Rudenko, Goran P., Sergey T., Eugene P., Srinath Gunasekaran, Ashar Samdani, Raju Maharjan, Goran P., Khalid G., Aashish Nadkar, Dmitry I., Gurdev S, Radhika Anandaraman, Victor Velasquez, Raj Sharma

Top 25 Freelance Web Developers for July 2009 were: Humayun S., Peter P., Komail Noori, Maxim D., Yuri Perevoznikov, Sergey R., Singh B., Jaggy S., Ezhil Maran, Vaibhav Joshi, Andrew Murenko, Sergey Shoublakov, Sajid H., Roman V., Sergey R., Roman Poznahirev, Johnathon Wright, Kiran R., Robert D., Tahir Awan, Louis H., Sarabjeet Dhillon, Leszek P., Kamil D., Ivan R.

Top 25 Freelance Writers for July 2009 were: Amna Nadim, Lilia Carone, Sridevi V., Irene B., Angela N., Gloria Mcmahon, John Essick, Carlo Gabriel Simbajon, John Carl Villanueva, Ruth S., Paula P., Rachel M., Dagmara M., Betsy Pickering, Sally R., Christopher Subijano, Fia C., Ayoub Chouchou, Eva B., Karen G., Revy Ablen, Jeanne Bowyer, John Martel, Anna A, Revy Ablen

Top 25 Virtual Assistants for July 2009 were: Sergey R., Sreenath V., Vivin J., Ramsh G., Simon Wakefield, Gheet Pakhra, Jaclyn Azuela, Talec H., Yun Yang, Karla K., Marie F., Rattandeep S., Ping F., Sujata John, Juan Lorenzo Natividad, Michael Hope, Maria Erika Nillas, Julian J., Saurabh K., Becky L., Solaiman Sujon, Ana B., Jery Esparas, Pedro Cisternas, Bharat B.

These rankings will be generated each month, and stored in the oConomy under “Rankings.” August Rankings will be published on September 1. Congratulations again!

We’re happy to announce that voting has officially begun in the oDesk App of the Month contest and the competition is now in full force. We’re excited to have 37 amazing entries, each of which was built by the oDesk community.

Every day, we have the privilege of bringing remote workers together to collaborate on oDesk, and seeing incredible results come out of it. Our buyers are proud of their products and likewise our providers are proud of their hard work. This month’s contest gives them a chance to show off their Facebook and iPhone masterpieces! We’re also excited to showcase the development talent of our community and honor some of the best work done through oDesk.

Winners will be chosen entirely by community voting. Voting will continue through August 31st, with the grand prize winner, or App of the Month, officially announced on September 1st. Click here to cast your votes – you can vote for up to 3 apps per day. You can also vote via our Facebook App. That way, your votes will show up on your walls, and your friends will know what you’re up to.

The grand prize winner will get $1,000 oDesk credit, an iPhone, possible press opportunities, and of course, bragging rights! The three runners-up will each get an oDesk t-shirt.

So what are you waiting for? Head on over, take a gander at the competition and cast your vote today! May the best app win!

Whew! Do NOT try to say that title aloud ten times fast!

Last week, we had asked everyone to submit their best “Remote Working” or “Remote Management” tips for a chance to win a $100 Amazon Gift Card. We received many wonderful responses, and we managed to narrow down the list to our top 10 tweets.

It’s a good thing we drew the winner randomly, because all of the tips we received were great! We had a hard enough time picking our top 10, let alone a single winner!

Thanks to @chaviebugsey on Twitter (our unofficial random number generator), our winner of the $100 Amazon Gift Certificate drawing is:

@tjlytle (Tim Lytle):Make sure you (and your client) know the difference between an employee and a contractor.Tim Lytle is a Technology Consultant & oDesk Contract Web Developer. Owner of timlytle.net ltd since 2003, his oDesk adventures have been mentioned on the BBC’s Click and in Forbes Magazine.

Congratulations, Tim!

Here are the Top Ten #oTip Tweets (in alphabetical order) and our responses to them:

	@AnneSemana (Anne Semana): That’s simple. Use oDesk!!! – Best tip ever! Our response: Yes, we like shameless self-promotion! Who doesn’t?
	@arronguy (Arron Washington): Don’t friend clients on Facebook. Ever. Our response: Funny, but true. We doubt you’d want your buyers knowing which Twilight character you should marry, or the top 5 people you want to punch in the face.
	@CrystalsQuest (Crystal Woods): Silence ISN’T golden. New clients need reassurance of you checking to clarify anything unclear BEFORE you go ahead and do it Our response: This is a MUST. ALWAYS ensure both you and your buyer know what the expectations are for each assignment BEFORE you start.
	@Deepa7476 (Deepa Govind): Never respond to email in haste, No body expects instant updates. So collect your thoughts, present them well & use spell check. Our response: We couldn’t agree more…especially if you’re upset!
	@EricaFenik (Erica Fenik): Overcommunicate. Clear expectations + execellent results = WIN for freelancers + buyers. Our response: Yes, this was sent in by an oDesk Staff member (so it disqualifies her from the prize), but this is very sound advice.
	@JoannSondy (Joann Sondy): My #oTip based on 15+ yrs of serving clients remotely = email isn’t always the answer. Pick up the phone occasionally! Our response: Absolutely! Even though our teams are staffed by oDesk providers, we have weekly conference calls to make sure everyone is on the same page.
	@likke (Fleire Mae Castro): Network with other oDesk providers. Referrals will be appreciated. Who else is gonna help you but other freelancers, right? Our response: Yes! Even though you’re competing in the same job field, you can still make friends and help out other providers – who knows? They may get too busy to take on work and refer clients to you (or vice versa).
	@michelem (Michele Marcucci): When you submit a proposal double check what the buyer is asking for and if you’re in doubt ask a question within the proposal Our response: There are no such things as stupid questions…okay, maybe there are sometimes – but don’t be afraid to ask questions! It can save you lots of time and money in the long run.
	@mylescxy (Mylene Sereno): Before letting out a loud sigh or scream “Whew! Whatta day!” while talking to a buyer on GoogleTalk, make sure your mic is turned OFF! Our response: I think we’ve all been there before!
	@tjlytle (Tim Lytle): Make sure you (and your client) know the difference between an employee and a contractor. Our response: Absolutely! This is the most important, yet highly misunderstood, aspect of freelancing!

We are pleased to announce our best providers for June 2009! We have over 250,000 providers on oDesk, but these ones stood out as the cream of the crop this month, as they performed the most hours of work with the highest feedback rating. They have been given special badges recognizing their achievement.

oDesk Buyers, you might want to get in touch with these providers soon…they just completed assignments and are available now, but probably won’t be for long. Click on their profile to check out their work and contact them for an interview!

Top 25 Freelance Designers for June 2009 were: Ratnakar N., Alex C., Victor Novak, Kapil C., Feriani A., Erick Medina, Catherine Azzarello, Pradeep K., Sm R., Gibs T., Nguyen Cao Qui, Allison Bair, Fahmy Ferdian D, Michael M., Darwin Discaya, Sampad T., Agnes B., Ksenia Zatolocinaia, Rajkumar Khatri, Giovanni Suarez, Agnes B., Marc Smith, Eloisa L., Ankit Mahajan, Paul T.

Top 25 Freelance Software Developers for June 2009 were: Kapil Sachdeva, Anton Astashov, Anton B., Victor L., Ketan S., Girish K.,Venkateswarao N., Dmitry Eroshenko, Vladimir Penkin, Pavel I., Deepak K., Yaroslav Zagorui, Ivan Terziev, Ivan M.,Yuriy E., Hire Mrspreadsheet, Parthasarathy Giridhar, Reema John Cb, Koti V., Denis B., Muhammad Atif, Rommy Sandhu, Mishra J., Dmitry T., Sunil R.

Top 25 Freelance Web Developers for June 2009 were: Kapil Sachdeva, Anton Astashov, Anton B.,Ketan S., Venkateswarao N., Dmitry Eroshenko, Vladimir Penkin, Pavel I., Deepak K., Yaroslav Zagorui, Ivan Terziev, Ivan M., Reema John Cb, Denis B., Muhammad Atif, Rommy Sandhu, Mishra J., Dmitry T., Sunil R., Galgodage L., Alexander M., Alexey Borschenko, Shivakumar B., Sunita Puniani, Shalini M.

Top 25 Freelance Writers for June 2009 were: Rachel M., Tina B., Chrissy Coleman, Ruth S., Citadel Burla, Sarah Wooten Dvm Llc, Catherine C., Tamara Bentzur, David B., Barbara G., Christine C., Holly S., Micah Abigail Lacsamana, Allison N., Ramon B., Heather G., Dhikra A Dean, Victoria L., Tamara Rice, Maria T., Amy M., Maria B., Sheri P., Sufen K., Sally R.

Top 25 Virtual Assistants for June 2009 were: Alex E., Anuj S., Anish Mittal, Alexander H., Tina C., Theresa D., M K., Angie O., Ahmed Adel, E.A. Pineda, Gurminder Singh, Michelle B., S. Brown, Srikanth R, Matt B., Joseph Marcuccilli, Alex E., Nanette C., Ji Q., Teri M., Jose Carlos A Pires, Kimberly M., Kristen C., Ahmed Adel, Michael Hope

These rankings will be generated each month, and stored in the oConomy under “Rankings.” July Rankings will be published on August 1. Congratulations again!

Congratulations to SafeTekusa.com, the winner of oDesk’s June Site of the Month contest.

SafeTek USA is the nation’s leading safety services company, providing consulting, technologies, and supplies that make workplaces safer while reducing costs. They actively promoted their contest submission, bringing in a whopping 350 votes and helping them win a $1,000 oDesk credit and an Apple iPhone 3GS.

Runners-Up:

• MyConferenceTime.com
  MyConferenceTime facilitates parent-teacher conference sign-ups. Teachers create their conference schedule online, and then parents reserve their desired time using the site. Email confirmations are sent to the teacher and to the parents.
• Moving Services
  Moving Services brings users free moving companies information. Visitors can compare movers in their area, get free moving quotes and find useful moving tips.
• The Mamasphere
  The Mamasphere was created to assist mothers in quickly accessing the information they need to navigate through their lives as women, wives, partners, co-workers, friends, sisters, daughters, and, most importantly, mamas!

All oDesk buyers who completed websites through oDesk were eligible to submit their sites to the contest. Winners were determined entirely by oDesk community voting.

We’d like to thank all of the participants in our second installment of the Site of the Month contest. We plan on running even more exciting and innovative contests in the future, such as “App of the Month” and “Blog of the Month”.   As always, we’d love your feedback so feel free to submit your suggestions within the comment section below for future consideration.

And please join us in congratulating our winners for June!  Keep up the great work!

Make money when your friends sign up on oDesk!  Embed our banners & links (like the one shown here) into your websites, blogs, forums, and emails, and earn $50 when referred providers earn $1,000 or referred buyers spend $1,000 through oDesk. Many of our current users are already reaping the rewards of this program, and so can you.  Join them by learning more about oDesk’s referral program.

We’re happy to announce that the second installment of the oDesk Site of the Month contest is in full force.  This time around we have 47 entries, each of which was built by oDesk providers in collaboration with their oDesk buyers.

Every day, we have the privilege of bringing remote workers together to collaborate on oDesk, and seeing amazing products come out of it.  Our buyers are proud of their sites, and this contest will help them show off their masterpieces!  We’re also excited to showcase the web development talent of our community and honor some of the best work done through oDesk.

Winners will be chosen entirely by community voting.  Voting will continue through June 30th, with the grand prize winner, or Site of the Month, officially announced on July 1st.  So what are you waiting for?  Click here to cast your votes – you can vote for up to 3 sites per day.  This time, you can also vote via our Facebook App.  That way, your votes will show up on your walls, and your friends will know what you’re up to.

The owner of the winning site will win a $1,000 oDesk credit, an iPhone, and a spot in our Site of the Month gallery.  Runners-up will get oDesk t-shirts.

We are pleased to announce a new program in which we will rank our 25 best providers in each of 5 categories each month. We have over 250,000 providers on oDesk, but these ones stood out as the cream of the crop this month, as they performed the most hours of work with the highest feedback rating. They have been given special badges recognizing their achievement.

oDesk Buyers, you might want to get in touch with these providers soon…they just completed assignments and are available now, but probably won’t be for long. Click on their profile to check out their work and contact them for an interview!

May’s Top 25 Freelance Designers were: Waleed S., Juan Carlos Susano, Sherwin D., Jorge Puntriano, Dan C., Oleh Bochulyak, Alejandro Anillo, Pablo Gosso, Abigail Lim, Grace C., Red Guevarra, Erick Medina, Jonathan Antonio, Sally C., Linda Massie, Mike P., Larry M., Hadi S., Pavle Borovac, Ramesh Raj, Philip M., Marie F.,Mike P., Jamie Mcdaniel, Lateralcreativa Team

May’s Top 25 Freelance Software Developers were: Lead M., Sandeep Garg, Vivek Agrawal, Muhammad Hassan Nasr, Jagdeep Chawla [Smartdata], Nishil J., Oleh Myhaylovych, Pawan Vir, Vladimir R., Reddy K., Anirban P., Sugiarto U., Veer Singh, Zhang K., Balvinder Singh, Vadim Eremeev, Sergei L., Igor Rikhard, Dzmitry K., Alexander D., Denis E., Alex Dunaitsev, Goran P., Arv R., Vinayak Kankanwadi

May’s Top 25 Freelance Web Developers were: Valentin S., Ali I., Ajeet S., Mujeeb R., Eugene P., Mantas M., Yashdeep G., Yura Klesov, Nick N., Deepak D., Abderazzak A., Param Inder Singh, Harmesh S., Dmitry Feduleev, Danil K., Qaiser M., C J., Alexey H., Valery V., Julian M., David R., Chetan P., Garry B., Yuri V., Sajid H.

May’s Top 25 Freelance Writers were: Cesar P., Ashraf K., Sylvia Edwards Davis, Harpal Singh, Irene B., Jae R., Antonio S., Karen V., Marcy Aldridge, Tamara Bentzur, Sushil S., Ashish Totade, Travis B., Susan C., Edward D., Robin S., Cinzia A., Betsy Pickering, Kimberly B., Lilia Carone, Dhikra A Dean, Danielle A., Yolly P., Zelda Bezuidenhout , Courtney G

May’s Top 25 Virtual Assistants were: Andrew Goodhand, Chrystal Threeton, Jo-Ahn Mabelo, Rochelle A., Sony Klm, Saleha Akter, Sandura K., Steve Carlson, Kuldeep S., Anna Marie Ortinero-Onate, Maritess P., Janice Alcantara, Rose Sebua, Heshantha Fernando, Lucero Contreras, Chakki E., Mary R., Devi D, Nadia M., Mary H., Minhaz P., Amy Lopez, David Man Dhanjal Solution, Jose Carlos A Pires, Paul De Wouters

These rankings will be generated each month, and stored in the oConomy under “Rankings.”  June Rankings will be published on July 1. Congratulations again!

We’re turning the oDesk Provider Manifesto into a video showing off the heart and soul of oDesk: our providers

Send us a video of yourself reciting all or part of the oDesk Provider Manifesto in your own way. Get creative, show us your culture, speak in your own language. Your video will be used in our oDesk Provider Manifesto Video!

You can view more information and submission guidelines on our oDesk Video Upload Site.

There are three ways to submit a video. You can use our private submission form, post a video to our Facebook Wall, or submit a video response on YouTube.

Video submissions will be accepted from Wednesday, May 20 – Monday June 15

Congratulations to NeedInstructions.com, who won oDesk’s first Site of the Month contest. NeedInstructions.com has a rapidly growing library of Instructions, Manuals and How To’s created by NeedInstructions.com members. They actively promoted their contest submission on Twitter, which helped them receive 1407 votes and won them a $1,000 oDesk credit and an Apple iPhone.

Meet the Team:

Ava, Philippines	Dana, United States	Edison, Italy	Poonam, India	Rampalli, India	Stacy, United States
More team members: Abderraouf, Tunisia | Bappi, Bangladesh | David, United States | Keshav, India | Prashant, India

Runners-Up:

• Ozzietel
  Ozzietel enables its customers to make unlimited calls within Australia and abroad, all for a low-cost, set monthly fee
• DVDCorral
  Organize your DVD Catalog, Share with Friends, Enhance your Collection!
• OnTrackArabia
  On-Track Arabia is dedicated to enabling small and medium enterprises in the Middle East develop their IT strategies

oDesk buyers who completed websites via oDesk were eligible to submit their sites to the contest. Winners were determined entirely by oDesk community voting.

We’d like to thank all of the participants in our inaugural Site of the Month contest. Thanks to your feedback, we believe our next contest will be even better!

oDesk is not just for geeks, anymore!

Of course, we’ve known this for a while which is why we have been frantically working behind the scenes to accommodate our non-techy providers. Over the years we’ve seen oDesk grow exponentially, and it was all thanks to you!

In response to user demand, we’re proud to announce that we’ve vastly improved the way we break jobs into searchable categories. We’ve combined some job categories, added others – bringing the total from 51 to 74!

The biggest highlight is the addition of three new non-tech categories:

• Customer Service
• Sales & Marketing
• Business Services

What does this mean?

Providers in these service areas can more easily find the right jobs. Buyers can craft more accurate postings that will attract exactly the professionals they need. It’s all about finding the right person for the right job.

Some of you may find your jobs changing categories (don’t worry – we’ve done all the migration work!).

We suggest all providers double-check their preferred profile categories in Profile & Settings > My Provider Profile > Categories & Job Alerts. This is especially important if your skills are in any of the areas listed above, or the newly-combined Design & Multimedia category.

Buyers may want to double-check open jobs to make sure there isn’t a new sub-category you’d prefer to move it into.

Questions? Comments? Concerns? Please let us know what you think in the forum.

We have rolled out a brand-new Time Analyze report. We’ve basically taken the two old reports (Work Analyze and Time Analyze), combined them, and thrown in a few new features. For example, providers now have access to individual Time Analyze reports to check out their stats across assignments. And staffing managers get their much-requested combined view of all their affiliated contractors. Try it out and tell us what you think!

Who can see these reports?
Visibility of reports depends on the team privileges you have. Hiring managers can see hours and charges for their teams, Team members can see only the hours, Providers can see their own hours across all their teams. Staffing managers can see hours and charges for their all the assignments they have staffed.

How do I use reports?
On to the Manage & Work > Reports Time Analyze tab.

1. Select the role for which you want reports
2. Select whether you want your report to be grouped by day, week or month
3. Select the time period over which you want reports (jump to providers some useful options like “last payroll period”)
4. Select the columns to show and sort the data using the column headings to create the report you want

For example: If you are a staffing manager and you want to see how many hours your affiliated contractors worked by company in the last payroll period,

1. Select a “staffing manager” report
2. Choose to report by week
3. Jump to “last payroll period”
4. Remove all columns besides “company”

The resulting report will show one column showing the total number of hours for each company.

Similarly, Buyers can create: estimated charges by week, hours worked in each team, hours worked by a single provider across all teams. Staffing managers can view charges by company, charges by provider, hours by team. Providers can view the hours they have worked by company they worked for, and can also summarize the total number of hours they worked across all teams.

Why does the report say “beta”?
Unfortunately, the current report only shows hours worked in an assignment, and we cannot display memos. We are working to fix this, but for the moment you would need to use “Classic Time Analyze”. We are also actively making other improvements in the area of reporting so please give us your feedback on what you would like to see.

What improvements are planned?
We are planning on adding:

• Filtering
• Permanent URLs
• Memos
• And more…

Let us know which reports would help you in our Community Forums!

We’re proud to announce the oDesk Site of the Month contest.  Each of the 27 websites entered in the April contest was built by oDesk providers in collaboration with their oDesk buyers.

Every day, we have the privilege of bringing remote workers together to collaborate on oDesk, and seeing amazing products come out of it.  We’re looking forward to  showcasing the web development talent of our community and honoring some of the best work done through oDesk.

Winners will be chosen entirely by community voting.  The grand prize winner, or Site of the Month, will be announced on May 1.  The owner of the site will win a $1,000 oDesk credit, an iPhone, and a spot in our Site of the Month gallery.  Runners-up will get oDesk t-shirts.

Was your website built on oDesk?  Submit it to our next contest.

A while ago we started to hear some positive chatter about a new service called Outright that provides a simple, online accounting web site designed specifically for entrepreneurs, self-employed individuals and very small businesses.  We checked it out and were impressed with how easy the site is to use, especially if you’ve ever found yourself scratching your head when using more complicated products.

Today, we’re excited to announce a new partnership with Outright.  As a result of the partnership, you can now manage your finances quickly and easily.  Export your oDesk financial activity using the CSV download provided on your Payments > Financial Activity page and import it directly into Outright.com.  Outright will help you stay on top of your business finances and taxes (US businesses for now) with a number of useful reports, tax reminders, and estimated tax liability.

Regarding pricing, Outright offers the following from their FAQ:

What does it cost to use Outright?

Outright is currently free to all users and will most likely remain so throughout the Beta period. However, we do plan to charge for certain features in the future. But we believe every user should be able to try the service for free.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

As anyone who manages a large distributed team will tell you, the complexities of managing and paying  your team grow with the team’s size.  Teams building more sophisticated software have needs particular to software development including things like how you protect and manage your source code and how you track tickets and bugs.  These tools are critical to successful larger software development efforts.

oDesk is proud to offer integrated Bugzilla and SVN repositories with every Team Room, but we know that some oDesk buyers and provider companies want more control over their repositories and may prefer other tools.  To help satisfy some of this demand and give those of you that want more options, we’re excited to announce today that we’ve partnered with Assembla.  Assembla offers Subversion and Git code repositories enhanced with an integrated code browser, “view as web page” mockup rendering, email alerts, and fine-grain permissions through a Teams panel.  Assembla itself is the product of a distributed team and their suite of tools enables of lot of software development best-practices that we think are important to long-term success.

As part of the partnership, Assembla is incorporating oDesk provider search into their application, so we’d also like to welcome Assembla users to oDesk!

Historically, interviews have happened outside the system – when you “interviewed” someone, oDesk just gave you their email address and Yahoo! ID. We left it to you to connect with them, and then come back in the system to make the hire. Not the ideal system:

• Both sides had to divulge their contact information immediately
• Interview communication happened outside the system, leaving no record about what was agreed to
• It was just clunky!

Now, when the buyer clicks “interview”, they are prompted to “send a message”. The ensuing interview messages are private and take place in the oDesk Message Center – you’ll exchange contact info if and when you want to chat or talk via phone.

We hope this will make the interview process easier and safer for all our users. Questions? Comments? Concerns? Please let us know what you think in the forum.

Like our content & want to share with your own communities?  We’re excited to announce our new oDesk blog widget, which you can embed into:

Click on “Get Widget” and then “More” for the embed codes.  Enjoy!

We’ve launched new Groups on oDesk – each one is a special marketplace within the oDesk network.

Many providers advance their careers and reputation by counting on industry and professional certifications, alumni groups, or developer networks. Groups allow providers to join communities of professionals who share a common interests, skills, certifications or passions.

For providers, joining Groups offers the benefit of enhanced reputation with a Group logo in their individual profile and access to exclusive jobs that are posted to the Group.

For buyers, posting a job to a Group allows them to reach a highly qualified group of providers that specialize in a skill set.

For partners, Groups allow companies with certification programs or developer networks to strengthen and expand their brand’s reach by promoting their Group on oDesk.

You can take a look at our new Groups Directory.

A special thanks to all of our initial launch partners:

Check out the Directory, apply to Join a Group if you’re interested, and stay tuned for more Groups in the near future. Keep in mind, membership in a Group is solely at our Partner’s discretion, so please check the criteria for joining a Group before applying.

We’re a little obsessed with analytics here at oDesk. We start each day with a vigorous round of “Daily Predictions.” The rules of the game: Guess how many hours of work will be logged worldwide on oDesk that day (ending 4 pm Pacific time). Players must log their guesses in a Google doc by noon, and no one can pick a total within 20 hours of anyone else’s guess. Don’t even ask about the disciplinary procedures for sneaking in after lunch and changing your guess — they involve severe public shaming.  The winner gets bragging rights, his or her name in the official “winners column,” and the (grudging) admiration of colleagues.

This is not a game for the faint of heart. Each of us has developed a personal algorithm, taking into account such variables as the number of hours already logged a the deadline approaches, the percent increase over the same day and time from the week before, and which guesses have already been claimed by rivals. It’s amazing that any work gets done before noon.

Last week was an especially exciting for this pulse-pounding mental sport.  We crossed 10,000 online hours in a single day for the first time on Tuesday.  What does 10,000 hours mean?  That’s five man-years of work logged on oDesk in a single day.

We couldn’t have crossed this important milestone without you – the more than 200,000 buyers and providers in 150 countries, so thanks for building our success, and for giving us a thrilling afternoon.  Imagine if we had money riding on this game.

When we’re not swimming through our data for fun and sport, we’re crunching numbers to better serve our community.  We always like to be transparent, and like to share data with you whenever possible.  To better live up to that, we recently redesigned our oConomy this week, which is chalk full of fascinating trends and data.  Check out the new look:

In case you’re wondering, it’s Product Manager Anand Hattiangadi who’s on a winning streak at “Daily Predictions” these days.  But we’re all gunning for him now, refining those personal algorithms every chance we get.  Work hours might be going up, Anand … but you’re goin’ down!

oDesk launched its new blog today, as a resource for our community of buyers and providers. We’ll use it to share relevant announcements, helpful tips on freelancing & outsourcing, and commentary & analysis with our community. However, oDesk users are the true experts. If you have expertise in an area that would be interesting to our readers, write a guest blog post (~500 words) for us! You’ll get to showcase your knowledge as a subject matter expert, and if you’re interested, we’ll link back to your oDesk provider profile or buyer company website.

Here are a couple of recent posts from the community:

• The challenges of working from home
• How to get more work that you can possibly deal with

See complete guidelines here.

Amit Bakshi
Manager, oDesk Marketing

My Teams has a few new features that we think you’ll appreciate. It’s not just for hiding Teams anymore!

• Easily distinguish hidden from non-hidden teams.
• Edit Team Names (Team IDs still cannot be changed)
• If your company has more than one financial account, see (and change!) which financial account each team uses.

Whether you’re admin of one Team or dozens, you should definitely go check it out! We’re always working at add new features and improve the user experience. So keep an eye out for more great enhancements throughout 2009.

Beginning this month, oDesk will provide chat support from the hours of 6:00 AM – 5:00 PM PST, Monday – Friday. We are committed to our customers success, and providing high quality, timely responses to customer service needs. We are hopeful that Chat will become an important communication channel for the Support Team, and our customers. Traditional EMail Support will also continue for all oDesk users.

We are launching Chat Support as a Beta feature, and we will monitor staffing and service levels to ensure a quality user experience. As we learn, we may need to modify availability in order to maintain service. Please let us know how you feel about this new support channel, and we look forward to connecting soon.

Shannon Adkins
Director, oDesk Customer Service

Update: We have had great success with chat support, and we have heard your feedback asking for expanded hours. As such, and in order to support buyers and providers outside of the Americas, we have expanded our hours. The new chat hours are from 12:00 AM PST – 5:00 PM PST (8:00 AM GMT to 1:00 AM GMT).

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.

A little while back I wrote about how open-source work serves as a great resume builder. Today, I had the pleasure of speaking with OStatic.

– A message from their site:

Our goal is to increase the adoption of Open Source Software by helping users find viable projects and applications that fulfill specific needs, evaluate them against available alternatives and collaborate with their network of trusted peers.

OStatic seems to fill a great need in the IT world. I browsed around today and already feel a bit more enlightened about the vast number of great open-source projects out there. It is an excellent tool for discovery of new projects as well as information and resources around each project on their project pages. Here’s the page for Subversion.

We think that this is a great resource for buyers and providers to find, evaluate, and collaborate around open-source projects and hope that oDesk users will find it to be helpful.

I just wanted to give readers a little preview of our new and improved website that is scheduled to launch next Wed, Mar 18th. We think it will appeal to our visitors that are looking for long-term relationships with value-added tools in the Manage and Pay components of our offering. We tried to simplify the homepage and make it more clear where to go and what to do. Here’s a peek into our sandbox:

– Top of new homepage

– Bottom of new homepage

– Tour page

– Tour page zoomed in to show feature

– Who Uses oDesk page with testimonials

– FAQs page

What do you think?

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:

With tonight’s Oscars only hours away, we’re delighted to know that oDesk hasn’t been left out this awards season.  The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) has named oDesk a finalist for the 2008 CODiE award in the Best Human Resources Solution category!

From the SIIA’s press release announcing the finalists – "Established in 1986, the Codie Awards celebrate outstanding achievement and vision in the software, digital information and education technology industries."

There were over 1,000 products nominated this year, so we’re thrilled to be on the CODiE’s shortlist.

CODiE winners are announced in late May after a vote by the SIIA membership.

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.

With over 1,000 jobs posted each week, it’s becoming more difficult for providers to find the perfect jobs. And with increasing provider competition in the marketplace, it’s more important than ever for providers to focus their job search efforts and apply to the best jobs available.

A few weeks ago, we launched fully customizable RSS feeds for jobs posted on oDesk. Our intent is to give providers a way to setup a few custom feeds to save time and energy in searching for the jobs that are the best fit. I put together a few sample feeds below that you can use in your RSS reader to view high value oDesk jobs as they’re posted.

For starters, I wanted to narrow the search by a particular skill. Then, I wanted hourly jobs only because they tend to be higher value and longer term jobs. I further filtered out all jobs that were less than 4 weeks in estimated duration, so I’m left with the highest value jobs available in each skill set.

If you want further customization for your job feed – go to the Job Search, enter any parameters you want, and then use the RSS icon when you have exactly what you want. Good luck!

oDesk – PHP Jobs | oDesk – Drupal Jobs | oDesk – Joomla Jobs

oDesk – Design Jobs | oDesk – Writing Jobs | oDesk – SEO Jobs

oDesk – C++ Jobs | oDesk – .NET Jobs | oDesk – Visual Basic Jobs

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.

As anyone who has been watching the oConomy Facts tab on our homepage will know, the oConomy has been growing rapidly.  It wasn’t until yesterday, though, that we learned just how fast our revenue growth has been when compared to other young companies.  We’ve been named a Rising Star on Deloitte’s 2007 Technology Fast 500.   A special category, the Rising Star list ranks the 20 companies that have been in business a minimum of three years, but less than five years, that showed the highest percentage of revenue growth over the past three years (2004 to 2006).  Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 is a ranking of the 500 fastest growing technology, media, telecommunications and life sciences companies in North America.

We love winning awards.  We’re gunning to win a spot on the Fast 500 list once we’ve been around long enough to be eligible, so please keep the feedback coming and let us know what we can do to better serve you.  Thank you!

This morning we announced the launch of a Facebook developer skills test.  The test is the first and only skills test designed to help businesses hire the most talented Facebook application developers.  See the full release here.

In recent weeks, we’ve seen a rapid increase in Facebook development job opportunities.  The test provides a great new tool to oDesk buyers who want another data point to evaluate a developer’s Facebook-book development skills.  As is the case with all of oDesk’s 103 skills tests, you can easily search the oDesk provider database to find providers that have passed the test.

If you are a provider with Facebook development skills, you can take the test for free.  Upon test completion, you can choose whether or not to display your score on your profile.

And while we’re talking about Facebook development skills, it’s also worth mentioning that our friend, Dave McClure, has announced an interesting new conference that will be of interest to Facebook developers and those that love them.  Graphing Social Patterns is a conference for developers and marketers on how to build and distribute apps for the Facebook Platform. 

As a winner of the Red Herring Top 100 award, we were invited to interview with Red Herring TV and discuss how we are making it possible for SMBs to access talent around the world. Here’s the clip of Gary’s interview with Sean Wolfe in Red Herring’s snazzy new studio.

Go to Red Herring TV’s website.

-
Abid Mohsin

Hello oDeskers,

Do you have a great story to tell about how you’re using oDesk? Are you able to travel more, have greater flexibility with your work day, or free up more time because of your remote work environment?

In honor of “The Four Hour Work Weekâ€? by Tim Ferriss, we’re looking for some great stories from oDesk users that are able to do and experience new things because they’re either working remotely or hiring remote assistance to help them grow their businesses. We know you’re out there! If you have a great story to tell, please share it with us. We’re gathering stories to share with the media – tv, print and radio. This could be an opportunity to talk to the media about your remote work situation and promote yourself and your business. So let us know! Send us an email at odesksuccess@gmail.com

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!

oDesk is pleased to announce a new way for providers to receive their earnings: the oDesk Debit MasterCard, powered by Payoneer, is now available for pre-order.

The oDesk Debit MasterCard is a prepaid debit MasterCard. A provider’s earnings are loaded directly onto the card, which can then be used to withdraw cash at any MasterCard ATM worldwide as well as make purchases anywhere MasterCard is accepted, in stores or online. We believe it will be the best way to receive funds for most non-US providers, with low fees, the best exchange rates in the world, fast transfer and the convenience of a MasterCard.

We will be shipping cards around the second week of May, and will waive the activation fee for providers who pre-order their cards before then. To pre-order your card, providers should log into oDesk and go to the new My Money tab.

The oDesk Debit MasterCard is available for providers in all oDesk countries, and will replace iKobo for providers in Ukraine.

For more information on the oDesk Debit MasterCard, visit the oDesk Guide to Payoneer or discuss the new card here.

…so are we and we’d love to see you. oDesk is exhibiting at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco next week. If you are planning to be there, please stop by our booth to say “hello” and enjoy a treat. We’ll be in one of the kiosks in the Long-Tail Pavilion.

We’re really excited about the conference. It’s a great opportunity to see what’s new and meet new people, not to mention that former oBlogger, Dave McClure, is a program co-chair.

It’s always nice when someone describes your company as “leading the next wave of innovation.” That’s especially true coming from Red Herring.

Here’s the quote:

Award Recognizes the 100 “Most Promising” Companies Driving the Future of Technology

SAN FRANCISCO, CA (April 4, 2007) — Red Herring today announced that oDesk (www.oDesk.com) is a Finalist for the Red Herring 100 Award, a selection of the 100 private companies based in North America that play a leading role in innovation and technology.

The Red Herring editorial board diligently surveyed the entrepreneurial scene throughout the North American region and identified the top 200 out of more than 800 closely evaluated companies that are leading the next wave of innovation.

We have great company, too.

Anyone who has ever tried to name a company knows how difficult it can be to find a name and a matching available URL, let alone one that you and your business partner like.

I got a kick out of this IM thread between oDesk co-founders Odysseas Tsatalos and Stratis Karamanlakis that chronicles the selection of “oDesk.com�?.

(August 31, 2002)

OT – …how about nodesk.com? [Ed. note - Odysseas had worked with an outsourcing firm called "nostaff" while with a previous company.]

SK – sure, that sounds like a positive name for a company

OT – I bet people have taken the odesk.com …sh*t its still available

SK – odesk is no good, look for idesk or edesk..

OT – You won’t believe but almost every other letter is taken for *desk unless if you prefer fdesk.com

SK – I still don’t like it..

OT – you would have liked it if it were sdesk

SK – har har..

OT – We can stick a globe instead of the O you know

SK – .

OT – Or we can make it 0desk (zerodesk.)

SK – stop it

OT – I am taking it and when you find a better one we change it….

And we didn’t even need to pay $7.5 million for our URL.

Hi oDeskians – Brian Goler here. In case you didn’t catch Robert Scoble’s profile of oDesk on the ScobleShow, I want to quickly introduce myself to let you know that I’ve joined Team oDesk as VP of Marketing.

I’ve been a huge fan of oDesk since last Fall when my last company hired a sensational java engineer to develop and manage our application. If you’re an oDesk buyer and your experience has been anything like mine, you know the joy of posting a job one night and having a great provider working with you a couple days later. In our case, we interviewed eight candidates, invited three of them to complete a small test project, and hired one java rockstar (a Dutchman living in China) that has been managing the application for several months now. oDesk tools make it possible for the trans-global relationship to be more productive than we ever could have imagined.

We’ve got a lot of exciting stuff in the works that will bring even more great job opportunities and talented providers into the network. Stay tuned.

We have made our release log page public. While we figure out where to effectively place it in the application/website, you can access it by clicking here:

What’s New page: https://my.odesk.com/console/whats_new.php

There is a lot of information on new features (what they do and why they were developed), and insights into the oDesk philosophy about service to our users.

We will be making regular blog posts about the new features as they are rolled out. Here are some older blog posts that you can access:

• Feature launched: Provider Email Forwarding
• Feature launched: Feedback Improvements
• Feature launched: oDesk Team client and Bugzilla Integration
• Feature launched: Team Client Snapshot Popup Notifications
• Feature launched: “Invite a Providerâ€?
• Feature launched: Provider Self-Service Signup
• Feature launched: More Drawing Options for Your ScreenSnaps
• Feature launched: Providers can now give Refunds to Buyers
• Feature launched: “My Analyticsâ€? tab offers CSV export & financial data

-
Abid Mohsin

oDesk @ Web 2.0 Launch Pad

For all the folks in San Francisco this week for the Web 2.0 Conference, look for oDesk to be demoing on the Web 2.0 Launch Pad tomorrow, Tuesday November 7th.

oDesk was selected as one of 13 Launch Pad companies, from over 250 that applied for this year’s conference. (must have been the flowers and chocolate chip cookies we sent to both John Battelle and Mike Arrington

Look for us to make a few notable announcements tomorrow, and if you’re at the event we’ll be happy to give you a cool oDesk Making Geeks Rich & Famous t-shirt.

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

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:

• We raised $8M from Benchmark Capital
• We won an SMB Top 20 Award from PC Magazine
• We were named one of 13 LaunchPad companies to demo at the Web 2.0 conference

and most important of all:

• We just rolled out Righteous New oDesk T-shirts

(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!

Beginning on Oct 4th, 2006 all assignments will be displayed in the oDesk Assignment History section of provider profiles and buyer job openings. Previously, only assignments with 10 hours or more were displayed in this list.

Initially, we made the decision to display only assignments with 10 hours or more based on the assumption that feedback and comments would only be meaningful for longer jobs. We intend the profiles to be an accurate representation of a provider’s skills and ability and did not want the profiles to be negatively affected by small jobs.

However, due to popular demand from a number of oDesk providers, we’ve opted to change the oDesk Assignment History to display all completed assignments with more than zero hours. This change is intended to enable providers that have successfully completed short assignments to showcase their success on their profile. It will allow positive comments on these assignments to be displayed prominently along with any longer jobs.

Please be aware that this will not affect the overall feedback scores in any way. The jobs with less than 10 hours have always been factored into the overall feedback scores, they just have not been displayed in the profiles or job openings.

Also, oDesk users may want to do a check in the My Assignments tab to make your comments public or private based on your preferences.
Thanks,

Josh Breinlinger

For some of you, it may be surprising that oDesk is just now announcing its launch.

After all, so many talented tech workers from around the world have been using oDesk to find great gigs. And companies all over the world have tapped our network to find great people, irrespective of their physical location.

Well, while we’re very proud of how far we’ve come, we at oDesk are ready to work with our community to take things to the next level.

For starters, we are excited to unveil our venture capital backers. It’s great to have the super smart people at Globespan Capital and Sigma Partners see the promise of our vision. And while we’ve been in silent mode so long, we’ve now started talking to the media as well. We’re off to a great start, to say the least- check out our profile in Business Week.

And that’s not all. We’re thrilled to announce the launch of the oDesk blog, or oBlog. Stay tuned for the latest discussions on the future of work, how to grow a business using remote talent, and getting ahead by being your own boss. Most importantly, the blog is a way for us to have a conversation with our great community- so please don’t hesitate to comment whenever you get a chance.

oBlog – the oDesk blog – will launch in early May.

We have some exciting news to share with the oDesk community and we will be unveiling it next week.

oBlog will serve as a forum for conversation among our community. We will delve into all aspects of remote work, including how to find great jobs, build an all-star global team, and nitty-gritty of working in a distributed environment.

Stay tuned for more!