Investors typically hold diverse portfolios of assets, with the goal of reducing risk. While diversification is commonplace in investing, most of us have no diversification in our labor income streams: we work at one job at a time, for a single employer. However, the “returns” to a job vary like returns on investments, especially on non-financial dimensions (e.g., engagement, learning, co-workers, working conditions). As in investing, there is also a significant amount of direct financial risk in holding one job — the firm may impose layoffs or go out of business. Given the similarities between jobs and assets, why isn’t there a similar impetus to diversify, i.e., why don’t we all hold a portfolio of small jobs at the same time, with many different employers [0]?

Some workers — freelancers and independent consultants — do follow this diversified model, but it’s hardly the norm of workers generally. Below, I lay out a laundry list of potential economic explanations for why the portfolio/freelancing approach is not more common. What’s interesting to me both academically and as someone working at oDesk is that many of these points are not set-in-stone attributes of the productive process, but are instead things that smart features or policies might change.

Aside from being wildly successful startups, all three companies have business models based on having on-demand access to assets — what you need, when you need it, without a long-term commitment. From picking up a car for running an hour of errands, to staying in a cozy apartment for a few nights as if it were your own, to wearing a designer dress for a night and then sending it back, these companies make the ownership of assets essentially unnecessary.

If the success of these startups is any indication, this temporary-use model may be the operating model of the future, according to Columbia Business School professor Rita McGrath. In a recent article for Harvard Business Review, she discusses how “owning anything may soon be seen as an industrial-age relic.”

While owning something certainly has a number of benefits, they come at the expense of flexibility or liquidity. When things change — which happens frequently in our fast-paced world — ownership can be problematic, she writes. In addition, permanent ownership is often unnecessary in situations where borrowing something will suffice.

McGrath also includes oDesk in this category of on-demand access to assets — in our case, access to talent. The advantages of the oDesk model present “the interesting question of when an employer would hire someone rather than simply pay for the services used on an as-needed basis,” she writes.

McGrath argues for the positive aspects of this trend: the ability for anyone to earn extra money on the side; the work opportunities for those who are physically unable to get a permanent, on-site job; and the freedom to pick one’s own hours and choose whether a traditional on-site job is best for them. While some may consider this shift to be damaging to the workforce, she also notes that regular employment options are not necessarily the gold standard for work security — in some industries, such as retail, there can be a great deal of instability and unpredictability.

“Many of the assumptions about society that we take for granted are based on the notion that relatively stable employment relationships are the norm,” McGrath writes. “When will our thinking catch up with the new reality?”

McGrath’s theory that the access-to-assets model may soon replace the ownership-of-assets model in certain cases relates back to the concept of Work 3.0, which oDesk CEO Gary Swart introduced in December.

Work 3.0 — a world where work is on demand, virtual and remote — is already a reality for many companies, those that are taking advantage of online work to make their businesses more agile and competitive. Similarly, millions of people are also leveraging the growing momentum of Work 3.0 to access work opportunities around the world, and to have the freedom to choose when, where and how to work.

When McGrath’s theory of on-demand access to assets is applied to the world of work, you get Work 3.0 and companies like oDesk. Businesses now have a huge, global pool of talent to choose from, allowing them to create a specialized, on-demand workforce that crosses borders, time zones and skill sets. In addition, the team can come together when it is needed, and dissipate when the project is done — without the need for office-based overhead or a commitment to yearly salaries.

In other words, not only does the on-demand model bring unprecedented flexibility as McGrath describes, but it also brings a significant competitive advantage.

And, in this Work 3.0 approach, the opportunities are boundless.

Jenna Weiner is a marketing specialist at oDesk and an editor of the oDesk Blog. With a background in business and technology writing and editing, she specializes in content strategy and social media marketing.

Imagine a world where employers have access to the best global talent, with just a click. One where people can work whenever they want, wherever they want, however they want. In this world, businesses can hire talent on demand, without worrying about complicated compensation packages, long hiring cycles or expensive overhead. In this world, people can work with companies from across the globe, instead of just those within commuting distance.

This world is not imaginary — it’s Work 3.0, and it’s already here.

In his presentation last week at the GigaOm Net:Work 2011 conference, oDesk CEO Gary Swart explained what Work 3.0 looks like, and how it is changing the world of work. Though many companies are already taking advantage of the technologies that power it, Work 3.0 is just getting started. Given the tremendous possibilities of this way of working, Work 3.0 will likely become commonplace much sooner than you may think. Here’s why:

Every business runs on talent. “It’s the single biggest lever we all have in our companies, regardless of the size, yet we’re all struggling to find good talent,” Gary explained. Traditional hiring is expensive and time-consuming, especially when you consider how competitive it is to attract and secure the best talent, and that “typically the talent doesn’t live where the jobs are located.”

But the times, they are a-changing. In the past two decades, we have gone from Work 1.0 — rigid, structured, on-premise work for one employer — to Work 2.0, where work is performed on site, but improvements in technology infrastructure have brought more flexibility to the workplace.

And now, with further improvements in software and cloud-based applications, we are passing through the gates of Work 3.0 — a world where work is on demand, virtual and remote.

A number of companies and workers have already found tremendous success with this model — Gary presented two examples — but the possibilities are endless.

“I don’t even think we’re at the knee of the curve of what’s to come,” Gary said.

Watch the video:

Erica Benton brings nearly a decade of experience as a small business owner and freelancer to her position as the editor-in-chief of the oDesk Blog.

- The United States has held the #2 spot for online workers since 2009.

- Small countries are growing and dominating as a group: work is spreading across more countries, as the number of countries included in the “Others” category grows.

- China joined the top ten countries in 2010, leapfrogged Canada for the #9 spot in 2011 (to date).

“We’re seeing rapid growth in online work over the past 7 years and now that growth is being distributed more evenly, in the sense that a wider range of countries are participating. Early on, India was incredibly dominant in the space, and–although still important and the largest country overall (in hiring statistics beyond the Bay Area)–we’ve seen tremendous growth in Eastern Europe, the Philippines, and even certain parts of Africa.” – John Horton, oDesk staff economist

Check out our infographic below to see the overall growth in online hiring from the Bay Area, and detail on how various countries are performing in the online work space.

Erica Benton brings nearly a decade of experience as a small business owner and freelancer to her position as the editor-in-chief of the oDesk Blog.

Diving into the Results:

“Location, Location, Location” Has Little Meaning

According to the survey results, building a distributed core workforce has become a key element to the success of both businesses and workers. The workplace itself has become virtual, reflecting a shift toward a truly borderless economy. Work happens regardless of location, and the majority of both employers and workers cite “non-preference” on the location of the other party.

“We are seeing a new employment reality,” states Gary Swart, oDesk CEO. “Location is less crucial to thriving employers and workers than it used to be, and today’s workplace is even more interconnected and global than Daniel Pink anticipated. There has been a substantial shift in the entire employment model.”

Addressing the Talent Shortage

Connecting local talent and opportunity has persisted as a challenge for businesses and workers alike. As stated recently in Manpower Group’s 2011 Talent Shortage Survey, as many as 34 percent of employers are having difficulty filling vacancies locally, making finding online talent to fill that gap even more imperative. According to oDesk’s survey, 28 percent of employers indicated the primary reason for building a distributed team is to access talent that is hard to find locally. Additionally, 21 percent of employers said that the ability to hire an online workforce enabled them to scale up or down quickly, responding in a nimble fashion to the real-time needs of their businesses.

Distributed Teams Plug In

Distributed teams may be geographically remote, but workers and employers consider themselves connected and engaged. According to the survey, as a result of frequent communication and collaboration on critical tasks with employers, online workers feel engaged, empowered and connected. 55 percent of employers assign “core” or “critical” work to remote contractors, while 87 percent of contractors, in turn, feel that they are an integral part of their employers’ staff.

Employment Loyalty Is Sprawling

The survey also found that workers have shown increased interest in growing their own horizontal networks and building reciprocal networks that lead to job opportunities. So, while workers collaborate in their work for employers, they are also developing loyalties to other workers. Daniel Pink called this dynamic “the new loyalty:”

Horizontal loyalty (is the) successor to vertical loyalty, which flowed upward — from an individual to an institution or authority figure…. By contrast, the new loyalty flows laterally. It is a fierce, and usually reciprocal, allegiance to: teams, colleagues, and ex-colleagues, to clients and customers; to industries and professions; and to family and friends.

Workers are harnessing their horizontal networks to support one another and network professionally, with 35 percent of contractors primarily finding work from other contractors referrals, and 59 percent of contractors participating in online groups/forums around their work.

“Big” Isn’t the Only Business in Town

The distributed workforce model is changing the nature of the business world. Access to global talent allows businesses of all sizes to grow and prosper. Contractors, specifically, are evolving into entrepreneurs and establishing their own small businesses. In other words, individuals are increasingly thinking of themselves not strictly as employers or workers, but as both.

Workers in distributed teams are growing their own businesses, and 77 percent of contractors currently consider online work as their own businesses. In addition, the majority of workers is reporting a higher expected income in 2011 than in 2010. Specifically, 66 percent of online contractors are expecting higher income this year than last, and 57 percent of workers are reporting a higher hourly rate.

Conclusion

Businesses and contractors are thriving — and 9-to-5 employment has nothing to do with it. While national unemployment rates remain frustratingly high and traditional staffing firms are touting a global “employment crisis,” the survey results show encouraging trends towards an interconnected online workforce.

Businesses that are building distributed teams, and the workers that are engaging in online work relationships, are succeeding in ways that are drastically different from the generations of workers and entrepreneurs before them.

How does the online workforce affect your business? Does the survey reflect how you typically interact with coworkers/employers online? Let us know in the comments!

Erica Benton brings nearly a decade of experience as a small business owner and freelancer to her position as the editor-in-chief of the oDesk Blog. She has recently admitted an addiction to infographics.

“Workers in small towns need access to jobs, and the Internet can put them in consideration for job opportunities on a global scale,” said Gary Swart, oDesk CEO. “Online jobs are giving workers a viable way to find employment, enhance their skills and build their own businesses — beyond their local economy.”

Small Towns Big Winners in Online Work

According to this month’s Online Employment Report, small towns are outperforming their big-city counterparts in online work activity and number of hours worked per contractor. Towns with populations less than 15,000 are going toe-to-toe with large cities–and winning.

When looking at the number of online workers per capita, small communities are meeting or beating nearly every major U.S. city – with San Francisco being the notable exception – and have proportionally higher “actively working” online populations.

In comparing the hours worked per online contractor, small towns like Kanab (UT), Wagoner (OK), and Newalla (OK) surpass New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles:

Online Hiring Hits Record High

Overall, demand for online work reached an all-time high in January, maintaining over 90% growth year-over-year and outstripping the slow hiring growth in local jobs.

Other key findings from the January Online Employment Report:

• 2011 Starts Strong for Online Hiring
  • A record 71,000 online job opportunities posted
  • More than $13M spent on online work in January alone
• Voice Talent and Presentations break into the Top 50 Categories
  • Businesses hiring creative talent

What do you think – are small towns the next big thing for online work?

Erica Benton brings nearly a decade of experience as a small business owner and freelancer to her position as the editor-in-chief of the oDesk Blog.

Q: What’s the biggest shift, in terms of perspective, that managers are going to have to make to embrace an “on-demand” model for talent?

Gary: The difference comes in how they value their workers and the work performed. Much like overstocked warehouses, people don’t thrive when put on a shelf. A worker who sits in a cube every day is not necessarily more productive than one who works from her home office. Employers need to recognize which skills they should keep on-demand, what roles have full-time responsibilities, and how to effectively establish context for a workforce with varied roles.

Q: The Inc. article talks a lot about “demand” in terms of selling to consumers, and it points out a growing global middle class, and a growing number of households led by single women, as the key markets to sell to. Since oDesk is about the global labor pool, how do these growing demographics affect the talent supply?

Gary: The global talent supply is going to keep growing. The flexibility of the online contracting model spreads the available talent pool to a wider demographic than is available in a local area—and with a larger pool of applicants to choose from, employers are more likely to be able to locate the right person to get their work done quickly and reliably.

Q: In oDesk’s early years, remote contractors were a fairly novel idea for medium and small businesses.  These days, where does contract work fall on a spectrum from “novelty” to “necessity”?

Gary: For SMBs, it’s definitely far to the “necessity” side. Businesses of all sizes are trying to do more with less and mitigate extra costs. Contractors are becoming a core part of the business model — the combination of a scalable, customizable workforce, then access to worldwide talent, and the decreased costs of maintaining office space and HR overhead keeps businesses of all sizes nimble, fast and competitive.

Q: What would you say is the key for employers to get comfortable with remote work — to take it from “we do this in rare cases, with a few specific functions” to “this is an ongoing part of our overall business model”?

Gary: I’d begin by encouraging them to think of a contract worker as a valuable, on-demand team member. This is how we, at oDesk, are able to run a business affecting over a million users with only 38 employees — we have over 150 contractors who are valuable additions to our team.

We use three main criteria to think through our hiring process:

1. Do we need work done fast? The recruiting, hiring and ramp up for a contractor can take hours or days, not weeks or months. This is valuable time to a small business.

2. Do we need flexibility? This is important if you have an idea of what you want to accomplish, but little understanding of what is required to get it done. Contractors allow you to keep your business nimble and flexible, and you can scale your team up and down based on how much work needs to be done.

3. Can we use different expertise? As a small business, you may not need a person to fill every seat at your table every single day. Getting ready to launch a new product? Consult a PR pro. Need a logo and basic website design? Grab a graphic designer. As your business needs grow and change, you’ll find plenty of examples of problems that need specific expertise that is beyond your in-house team’s abilities. Contractors fit the bill to have an expert handy only when you need one.

Q: Lastly, how’s it feel to be the literal poster boy for the demand economy and the remote workplace?

Gary: For me, it really is the culmination of work done by so many people over the years. Not just oDesk’s incredible employees, but also the hundreds of thousands of contractors and employers who come to work through oDesk every single day. While it’s my face on the cover, I’m just a representative of something so much bigger — a movement of career contractors and employers who are connecting, innovating and creating an economy that is borderless and where the opportunities are boundless.

Brian McDonough has been a writer and editor for more than 15 years, and has managed teams of in-house and freelance writers for newspapers, magazines and web sites.

This infographic — something we put together in less than a day — was published by TechCrunch and shared by thousands of people over the days that followed. What we didn’t realize when we started was that this 1M hours infographic project was going to be an incredible example of what can be created, with the help of oDesk, on an incredibly tight timeframe. Wanna know how we did it? Here’s how a gal with no design skill created a compelling visual aid in less than 24 hours:

September 1, 1:15 pm PT

The Discovery: While reviewing the previous month’s data, our oDesk team discovers the 1M hours per month milestone has been reached. In order to wrap our brains around the reality of a million hours, we decide to measure the hours in different terms. A fun discussion ensues about what one million hours actually looks like (114 years!) and what can be accomplished in that many hours. The result of the brainstorming session: a short list of fascinating things we quickly realize is worth sharing with the people who made reaching the 1M milestone possible. (Some of the “Things you can do in 1M hours”  didn’t make the final cut. A personal favorite was Watching all the Star Wars movies 75,187 times, with a few hours to spare to watch your favorite movie just one more time!)

September 1, 5:43 pm PT

The Job: I post a job for an “infographics expert” on oDesk. I intentionally don’t structure this as a traditional job post — I want someone who can think on her feet and bring a strong design sense to the table. I also know I need the infographic created quickly, and I’m willing to hire multiple people for the assignment in order to have options to choose from. So, after posting the job, I search the marketplace with the keyword “infographic” in the category of “graphic design” and come up with three candidates. I invite them to the position based on the experience and relevant items in their portfolios. Yes, it takes a little research, but within three hours I have a likely candidate in Ernesto, who — as it turns out — is up for the challenge of making an infographic happen under a tight deadline.

September 1, 9:00 pm PT

The Contractor: I make the hire and send Ernesto the brainstormed list of “1M hours” ideas from my coworkers, along with links to two existing infographics and an explanation of what I like about each. (One has a lot of text, but blocks the data out visually to make it easy to read. The other has a great sense of fun and the visual presentation is fantastic, but the data is a bit simplistic for our needs). In other words, I let Ernesto know what I have in mind — with concrete examples, not just a wordy description of a graphic that doesn’t yet exist. Ernesto assures me he’ll get right to work, and I leave the project in his capable hands, knowing I’ve communicated all I can.

September 2, 7:15 am PT

The Progress Report, Part 1: Good morning, sunshine! While I’ve been sleeping the night away in the U.S., Ernesto has been hard at work on the other side of the world in Spain. He sends me a pencil sketch of his idea, which I review first thing in the morning. A quick check of his oDesk Work Diary reveals that he has (in a brilliant move) grabbed the color scheme off our website, and is well on his way to turning the pencil sketch into a vector graphic. I send him a quick note to let him know he is on the right track, and I eat some breakfast.

September 2, 9:38 am PT

The Collaboration: Rough draft, first vector graphic received! I make a few suggestions, based on standardizing the format of the “red dot highlights” and add pithy callouts to the top of each data section. (Look, Ma! I added value!) Feeling the excitement of knowing we are almost there and we are a great team, I send the draft and my suggestions back to Ernesto.

September 2, 3:15 pm PT

The Progress Report, Part 2: I receive Ernesto’s revised draft of the infographic, with my revisions made and the lorem ipsum text replaced by his stab at the written content. I share the draft among our internal designers and marketing team for input, draft in my “wordsmithed” content and return the feedback to Ernesto.

September 2, 4:53 pm PT

The Job Well Done: I open my email to receive the (almost) final draft, with our last round of revisions. Loving it! One of our design team points out a small improvement in the intro text that would improve readability, so I transfer the file to him. He makes the suggested change from two columns of text to one. Finito! I write the blog post to introduce the infographic and queue it for release the following morning.

WE DID IT! A job started, hired, and completed in less than 24 hours on oDesk!

Erica Benton brings nearly a decade of experience as a small business owner and freelancer to her position as the editor-in-chief of the oDesk Blog. She’s not a designer. But she gets by with a little help from her friends on oDesk.

The Numbers

Gartner Research has released figures that suggest that there has been a 17% increase in global mobile phone sales. That’s good news for everyone except Microsoft, whose Windows Mobile OS was the only smart phone OS to stagnate during the market’s rise.

Some bloggers have gone ahead and declared things like, “Android whips the iPhone in 2010 sales.” The majority of these reports are based upon data from The NPD Group. The research does suggest a significant rise, giving Android up to 28% market share, which is – by all accounts – amazing growth. However, the accuracy of NPD’s data has been questioned by Apple.

Image via AllThingsDigital.com

Another data source of note is AdMob, who publishes the data collected by their advertising network. This data is more of a metric for browser usage. You’ll notice that RIM, who has a huge percent market share in the studies above, is not well represented in the AdMob data. Blackberry users are email and text-heavy, but they are not big browser/app users.

Admob March 2010 Mobile Metrics Report

All of the above data suggests a significant rise in Android’s market share. So, regardless of who’s “winning,” Android is not to be ignored, leaving Android and Apple Devices as dominate leaders in the App-centric smartphone market.

The App Markets

Apple’s App Store has been a hugely successful outlet for developers to connect with iPhone users, and Google’s App Market is attempting to replicate this success. But recent reports (like this one at SFgate.com) suggest that the users of the two markets are significantly different. CNN/Fortune writer Philip Elmer-DeWitt has an excellent commentary as well, titled “6 ways iPhone and Android users differ”. Like the SFGate article, DeWitt’s post draws upon more AdMob data. The report outlines several informative stats–notably, that 50% of iPhone users download at least one paid app per month, where as only 21% of Android users download at least one paid app per month.

The user data lags a few months behind the sales data, so it’s not a perfect 1:1 relationship, but we’re yet to see Google monetize apps as successfully as Apple. If Android’s growth continues at its current rate we may see this change by sheer volume.

Alex Hornbake is one of several freelance writers on the oDesk Blog team. He joined the oDesk marketplace in 2009, and brings more than a decade of technical expertise to his clients. Alex shares his point of view to help you make informed decisions for your personal and business technology choices.

Remote Workers: The Road Warriors of the Information Superhighway.

Mad Max references aside – as independent contractors working remotely, are we considered members of the Dropout Economy as laid out by Salam’s article? Are we amongst the tame, corporate-friendly folks who’ve voluntarily traded in benefits packages to have the freedom to work without a tie, be home to see the kids after school, go for a hike on a Tuesday afternoon, or have the freedom to build and grow businesses without slow-moving bureaucrat overlords?

Of course we are. But I’m not sure if our future is as gritty and post-apocalyptic as Salam makes it out to be:

But, Salam does bring up a few good points…

A Better Way

The idea behind the Dropout Economy may be a bit hyperbolic, but it reflects a growing rejection of the status quo work/life balance. The concept of balancing work and lifestyle choices is one on many people’s minds. For some, that scale gets tipped to the side of remote work — either through their current employer or as freelancers. For good reason too, having the freedom to work from home can be an invaluable boost to both productivity and family relationships.

Not all companies are stuck in the cubicle mindset either. Many companies manage to create open, relaxing, healthy environments for their workers. For some examples of progressive work environments, see Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For.

The corporate rejection of a traditional office is just as significant as a worker’s decision to “drop out”. It represents a shared experience of the problems facing the workforce at large. In addition, the integration of teleworkers into the traditional work environment shows an understanding of the value of remote talent. This survey from Microsoft offers more insight into the support for remote work in the workplace.

We’re All Dropouts

We all make choices as to how we’re going to fit in to the marketplace, and sites like oDesk strive to make it easier for remote workers to capitalize on their skills. It’s really about increasing the efficiency of connecting forward-thinking businesses with skilled remote workers.

The idea of dropping out of the economy is a bit outlandish. We are the economy. While dodging taxes and living off the grid may be choice to limit participation in the traditional economy, it’s still a part of a fringe economy and an indicator of the overall health of a larger, and so far, self-correcting system.

Alex Hornbake is one of several freelance writers on the oDesk Blog team. He joined the oDesk marketplace in 2009, and brings more than a decade of technical expertise to his clients. Alex shares his point of view to help you make informed decisions for your personal and business technology choices.

Further Reading:
BusinessWeek.com - Comcast Wins in Case on FCC Net Neutrality Powers (Update6)
Wired.com -  Appeals Court Throttles FCC’s Net Neutrality Authority

What is Net Neutrality?

Net neutrality is the concept that the internet should operate as a “dumb network” and as a result treat all traffic equally. It’s “dumb” in the sense that the network is unaware of the traffic it is carrying. The FCC’s own definition of Net Neutrality states that consumers should have access to the connection of their choice, using the services and applications of their choice, on their devices of choice, in a market place where there is competition among providers.

The debate focuses on the control of regulation. Should network owners be allowed to self-regulate, or should the government regulate both private and public network infrastructure to ensure that all traffic is treated equally?

Furthermore, should ISPs have the right to use Deep Packet Inspection, or DPI to look at the content of information on their network? This has all kinds of implications, from discrimination of services and traffic, to the replacement and targeting of advertisements found on websites.

Keep in mind the influence of money in this debate, as both sides of the issue have deep pockets. Amazon.com, eBay, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Facebook, Skype and Yahoo all benefit from unfettered access to the networks of Time-Warner, Comcast, AT&T, and other broadband providers. While this will ultimately effect consumers, the battle is being waged via lobbyists.

Further Reading:
Wikipedia.org – Network Neutrality
Wired.com – Net Neutrality Debate Is Secretly All About Internet Television, Net Pioneers Say

Pro-Neutrality

Advocates of the FCC’s regulations argue that allowing Time-Warner, Comcast, AT&T and Verizon to regulate themselves would result in the reservation of large chunks of bandwidth for service provided by those companies, allowing them to levy a toll to anyone wanting to deliver high-performance competing services. The concern is that the small companies and innovators in the market would be unable to compete, and therefore consumers would be at the mercy of the ISP, and have access only to the services the ISPs would be willing to offer them.

Examples include charging consumers access to higher bandwidth services like YouTube, or charging companies like Google a premium for priority service on the network. Whether or not ISPs would charge for tiered service is yet to be seen, but the argument is that they would have the opportunity to do so in the future.

Further Reading:
News.Yahoo.com – Net neutrality faces serious setbacks
SaveTheInternet.com
WeAreTheWeb.org

Anti-Neutrality

Opponents of Net Neutrality often cite that ISPs own their networks–that they aren’t publicly-owned networks, as many previously assumed. The ISPs’ investment in broadband infrastructure has helped push the Internet to where it is today, and some argue that if they aren’t allowed to collect a return on this investment and invest further, then network speeds and innovation in network technologies could come to a grinding halt. The ISPs state that they would become overwhelmed by the growing amount of video, voice, peer to peer and other media rich traffic that would be allowed to flow freely over their networks.

The internet is not currently “neutral”. ISPs already filter spam, and regularly blacklist computers that violate their Terms of Service. Most people view this as a good thing, and the opponents of net neutrality argue that self-regulation has worked so far, and that the market will find the right balance over time if allowed to continue in this way.

Further Reading:
PcWorld.com - Net Neutrality Foes: What If The ‘Bad Guys’ Are Right?
ZeroPaid.com -Verizon CEO: “We Will Find Pirates, Throttle Them, and Charge Extra”
DontRegulate.org

Moving Forward

The complexities of the issue extend beyond the simplification above and, moving forward, the FCC may make a move to either gain the necessary authority, reclassify broadband service under its jurisdiction, or for lobby Congress to pass some sort of Net Neutrality legislation. Either way, changes are coming.  Let us know where you think things are headed, and how you think the Net Neutrality debate will impact you.

Further Reading:
Barron’s Tech Trader Daily – Will FCC Choose “The Nuclear Option” In Net Neutrality Fight?

No one wants to stockpile know-how in a field with a short shelf life, and some of the once-popular, ultra-specific tech skills have been needed one day and obsolete the next. Predicting the future can be a tricky game, but – according to the recent Online Jobs Report – the demand for social media skills here at oDesk is clearly still on the rise, with no downward turn in sight.

Twitter Skills

Though many predicted the world would tire of Twitter by now — or the creators would tire of not making any money off of it — we still haven’t seen the end of the Twitter skills demand. Twitter skills ranked as the 38th most requested skill in February here on oDesk.

Not impressive, you say? Consider this: Twitter was ranked the 106th requested skill just twelve short months ago. What’s more, just last month it wasn’t even in our top 50. That, friends, is what we call ‘booming’.

Twitter skills aren’t limited to knowing what to do with those 140 precious characters. It’s about knowing how to use Twitter-related apps and Twitter skins too. Writers, developers and graphic designers can all get in on the action!

Facebook Skills

As for Facebook, it’s also still on the rise. Many companies want a presence on Facebook – we’re on there too – but don’t have the skills or bandwidth to take it on themselves. While those who are specialize in social media via Facebook may be the butt of jokes (you mean you play on Facebook all day long?), but right now they are having the last laugh. Facebook skills are the 23rd most requested skill at oDesk, which puts them almost neck and neck with ever-popular iPhone skills in our 22nd spot.

What’s more, Facebook skills were only 28th last month and back at 45th one year ago. This skill set is crawling up the list at a steady pace, and Facebook opportunities can include developing Facebook-related apps, writing and networking.

The bottom line is that the demand for social media skills isn’t going away anytime soon.

Working from home can either liberate you or weigh you down — it’s all about how you do it. Having worked from home for over a decade, Tamara Rice has learned what works and what just creates more work. Tamara is one of several freelance writers on the oDesk Blog team.

Coworking is the future of work. There’s a community, a synergy, bred by coworking that may not exist in corporate-mandated structures. Where I differ from the other panelists, though, is that I don’t believe coworking needs to be tied to a physical location.

Clay Spinuzzi shared this earlier. The key for me is that this “space of endless mobility” this “space made of flows of information and communication” is managed by the Internet.

Think about it… If its managed by the Internet, why do I have be at a physical THERE?

With this in mind, what does the future of work look like? It’s Coworking without location.

Currently, people are telecommuting. They’re working from home, from coffeeshops, from coworking spaces. They are making a shift away from rigid corporate structures towards a more flexible, more online way to work.

And it’s a shift that will keep growing. How do I know? Because oDesk has more than doubled in size, year over year, for the past 3 years. How much work is really happening online? To provide a little perspective:

In just one week, online workers accomplish more online workers accomplish more than 80 years worth of 40-hour workweeks. How do they do it?

It’s transparency. The Internet has opened the door for this open, free flow of information and communication between workers and employers, beyond the limitations of the physical environment.

As an employer, you gain the ability to collaborate with workers anywhere in the world, and find the best worker for each and every job.

What does this mean for you as a worker? This means you have the ability to work from anywhere in the world, on any job that suits your skills – no matter where it’s located.

Think about it. If you can work for anyone, anywhere in the world – does it make sense to work in one place for 50 years? It would feel like standing still. You wouldn’t. On the flip side, if you can hire people who only have the skills your company needs, would you keep hundreds of full-time employees? You wouldn’t.

What you would do is follow the path that Hollywood has been treading for decades. It’s like producing a movie: You get together a group of people with really specialized talents to create something unique, that taps into each one’s skills in a different way. You don’t ask the Best Boy Grip to direct. You don’t get Brad Pitt to organize the catering. You get the right person for the right job. Then, at the end of the day, they go their separate ways – they may work together again, or they may not. But the point is that this group of talented individuals is flexible and on-demand. They have the ability to change at a moment’s notice. The action script can shift to a romantic comedy by switching out a couple of screenwriters, replacing a stuntman with a lighting specialist, etc.

And if the work model mimics movie production, then there is no need for big office buildings. There’s no need for a physical location to dictate where work happens.

When work is tied to the physical world, much like real estate, location is key. You have to live near where you work. You have to commute or relocate based on where there is demand for your skills. If you’re a CAD Engineer in Flint, Michigan, and the auto maker you’re working for shuts down, you’re hosed.

But that’s the old model – work as a place. Let me stress this – “Work is not a place!”

This is the new model, enabled by the Internet. It’s about communication. It’s about connection. It’s about community.

For workers, this means they have access to opportunities far beyond their hometowns. The Internet becomes the road from all points beyond, lead into Austin, Texas, into Greensboro, South Carolina, even into Flint, Michigan. It brings jobs, it brings community, it brings opportunity.

But with the Internet bringing any opportunity to anyone in the world, it’s going to get competitive out there.

As a worker, you are competing for work against a much larger candidate pool than those within commute distance of a company’s office. You’re competing against everyone else with similar skills.

But the Internet gives you ability to truly stand out – to share your work experience, your portfolio, feedback from previous employers, certification tests, etc. with anyone. You can showcase yourself, without ever meeting your clients. We have a member of our marketing team named Jacqui, who travels the world with her husband. She’s worked for us for over a year, we love her work… and we’ve never met her.

Jacqui’s just one of hundreds of online workers we’ve hired over the years. As a company that is embracing the new model, we love having access to providers like Jacqui – in the old model, we never would be able to have her on our team! It’s the access to a global talent pool that lets companies pick from a worldwide offering of talented workers, and select the right person for the job – regardless of location.

So why should you consider all of this?

When you’re thinking about the future of work…. when you’re thinking about coworking…. remember: “Work is not a place!”

The community and synergy that coworking affords doesn’t come from what table you sit at, what building you go to… It’s about you.

It’s about your talents, your skills, your passion, and taking advantage of all the myriad of opportunities a world of work has to offer. It’s about finding the community that fits your needs, no matter where you are. It’s about creating synergy, communicating and connecting with other people. “Work is not a place!” It’s anywhere you are.

Erica Benton brings her experience as a small business owner and as a freelancer to her position as the Marketing Communications Manager for oDesk. She heads up the oDesk Blog team, and is recovering from her first trip to SXSWi.

A Narrowed Scope

Several sub-skills outrank the parent level “web design” skill: HTML (#2), CSS (#3), Photoshop (#4), WordPress (#8), Flash (#12), Joomla (#16). It appears that buyers are getting more specific with their hunt for skills.

This isn’t to say that you should stop billing yourself as a web designer. However, highlighting your specific skills under the umbrella of web design is a must. As buyers become increasingly aware of the specific skills their project requires, honing these skills, and highlighting them on your oDesk profile is essential.

Showcasing Your Niche

You may be a highly diverse, “Jack/Jill of all trades,” which can make it difficult to find your niche. Although you may be skilled enough to advertise yourself as such, try giving your strongest, most in-demand skill top billing on your profile title, and let your profile and portfolio speak for your diversity.

Be a Team Player

The move towards hiring specialists to complete individual pieces of a web design puzzle is nothing new, its the same approach you would find internally at a large design firm. There you might find artists, designers, and various specialty coders, working along a pipeline. Being part of the oDesk marketplace means that you may be asked to be part of a such a team.

Skills like building themes and templates are increasingly popular as buyers become increasingly educated about the use of Content Management Systems, and come to expect them and depend on them.

In addition, web programming skills like PHP are the most in demand skills on oDesk. The hefty supply and efficiency of PHP specialists makes it very difficult to justify hiring a “Jack/Jill of all trades” to do both coding and design work. The same is true for other specialties and languages, so be prepared to specialize.

Closing Thoughts

While being able to see a web design/development project through from start to finish is a valuable and admirable skill, it may be unrealistic to expect that it is the expected norm. While there is no single “right” way to get a project done, the data suggests a trend towards specialization within web design/development. Let us know in the comments if you’ve experienced this trend yourself!

Alex Hornbake is one of several freelance writers on the oDesk Blog team. He joined the oDesk marketplace in 2009, and brings more than a decade of technical expertise to his clients. On Wednesdays, Alex shares his point of view on the tech industry to help you make informed decisions for your personal and business technology choices.

Last Friday, the Commerce Department revised upward its already impressive gross domestic product growth estimate for the fourth quarter of 2009. Previously, the department said that growth was 5.7 percent on an annualized basis: The new figure is 5.9 percent – the best observed in six years.

While most experts anticipate that that red-hot growth will cool off in the coming quarters, the late-2009 GDP growth surge shows that there’s still life left in the American economy. Some startup innovators may advantage of the fact, following the tactic proscribed by Procter & Gamble chairman A.G. Lafley – who was quoted in a recent Newsweek article as saying that “that the best time to gain ground on competitors is when they are retreating.”

The tech sector is a likely breeding ground for new companies. There is a market for small tech firms, as Google demonstrates – many of the tech giant’s current offerings were conceived by smaller companies that Google bought. The company’s ad sales platform, AdSense (which gives website owners a share of ad revenue), was created by a Los Angeles company called Applied Semantics.

And, more recently, Google bought mobile ad sales firm AdMob for $750 million – one of the company’s more expensive acquisitions, but also one with the potential to be extremely lucrative. Mobile ad sales are poised to take off: Research firm Gartner said last August that the mobile ad market would grow 74 percent in 2009 and explode after 2011.

Twitter, too, will begin hosting an ad sales platform in the near future – making internet advertising a growth industry.

It’s not just rapidly expanding sectors that would benefit from a proposed jobs bill, though.

Political website The Hill reported Thursday that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was working on a small-business bill that would help startups in particular.

“Zeroing out capital gains taxes for budding companies has been mentioned and could gain traction,” The Hill said.

Even in the absence of aid bills and government stimulus programs – which are expected to be wound down this year – private investors may be stepping in to promote startup incubation.

Last week, tech titan Intel reported that it would partner with 24 venture capital companies to offer $3.5 billion to tech startups over the next two years. Their partnership, called the Invest in America Alliance, will “target key innovation and growth segments such as clean technology, information technology and biotechnology.”

On top of its provision of multibillion-dollar tech-firm investments, the alliance has received commitments from 17 large corporations to hire more college graduates – “an investment,” Intel CEO Paul Otellini said, “in the country’s innovators and a signal to the global marketplace about America’s commitment to innovation and future competitiveness.”

While Sand Hill Road VC firms may be an integral part of Intel’s plan to boost tech-industry innovation, it’s not just California companies that will benefit. The Boston Business Journal reported on Friday that Boston-area companies raised an aggregate of $87 million in private funding this week.

It was, the newspaper said, “a solid investment rebound for local tech and life sciences companies after a tepid funding stretch earlier in the month.”

Network Solutions blogger Steve Fisher talks about using oDesk with your iPhone, and a provider writing as “Sufidreamer” offers his fourth in-depth post about getting started on oDesk, this time focusing on cover letters and interviews.

If you’re tired of reading websites, here are a couple of YouTube videos you can watch: Camitta Davis offers a video intro to becoming an oDesk provider, and “MrWebMarketing” asks, “Is Outsourcing Just a Fad?” Watch and learn, folks — and remember to send us your links when you talk about oDesk online. For a few lucky winners each month, there’s a free T-shirt in it.

Over at the developing oDeskGuide.com, Rikki John De Castro continues to create an independent resource for oDesk providers. Recently he offered a friend advice on dealing with a difficult buyer who kept demanding broad revisions on a fixed-priced project (check it out just for the cartoon about a web design project gone awry), and he finished January by celebrating his first $1,000 in earnings through oDesk. Congratulations, Rikki!

Courtesy of Apple

The much anticipated release of Apple’s tablet has left many making off-color jokes and scratching their heads, wondering, “How the $%&! did that happen?” Its easy to point and laugh, but the iPad is already joining the elite league of highly anticipated, “game changing”, brilliantly designed failures – such as the Segway and Apple’s own Newton. (See Wired.com’s gallery of Apple’s Most Notorious Flops, and Time.com’s Top Ten Tech Failures of the Last Decade, for historical reference.) Apple has a track record of learning from it’s mistakes, and it’s been a while since they’ve made a big one, but what went wrong this time?

The Hype

“Our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price” – Apple.com

Marketing hype is great if you can deliver a product that meets or exceeds those expectations. Magical, is a tough adjective to live up to when you’re lacking basic things like Adobe Flash Player support – meaning I can’t snuggle up with an iPad and a cup of hot cocoa to settle in for a “magical” evening of watching Hulu. The Apple/Adobe flash feud has been ongoing – you can read about it in more detail here at the Wall Street Journal. At the end of the day, its hard to live up to the hype when you’re missing functionality that has become part of the daily expected use for personal computers. Which brings us to….

Ignoring the Basics

I’ll admit, the 10 hour battery life, custom built A4 chip, multi-caress screen, and slick design leave even the most skeptical drooling a bit (its a beautiful piece of design and engineering) but the lack of “the basics” means that the iPad can’t replace your desktop, laptop, or your smart phone, making it a niche luxury device, something that most of us can’t make room for even at the low low price of $499… (I mean $699… oh wait , did you want 64GB of memory, Wi-Fi, and 3G? That’ll be $829+tax  please.)

Okay, lets outline what “the basics” are.

A keyboard: I don’t care how good the touch screen is, if it doesn’t click under my fingers, then it’s not going to get used for anything longer than a tweet.

A Real OS with Real Apps: Snow Leopard would be nice. iPhone OS is for phones. On a side note, the good news for iPhone developers is that you just got a new device to program for!

Connectivity: One proprietary iPod connector, and a whole bag of dongles, adapters, and Apple-licensed accessories to get anything connected, means an iPad = a laptop bag full of extra stuff…

A Unique Device

“But it’s not supposed to be a laptop replacement.” I hear you say.

Some analysts–like Charlie Wolf, quoted here at Apple Insider–are predicting  the iPad as the the new go-to device for healthcare and general business. For healthcare, there are some huge hurdles. Looking at these survey results from medicaltablets.com, we can see that the iPad is lacking some basic functionality for this use case, “…such as resistance to dust and hospital fluids and disinfectants (the iPad does not have sealed ports); fingerprint access to the system (HIPAA compliance); barcode scanning (patient safety); and an integrated camera (documenting diagnosis)”. In addition, Electronic Medical Records (EMR) companies aren’t likely to fork over the 30% of their profits to the App Store, or spend resources developing serious EMR apps for what has been a traditionally windows-centric environment.

For business, the iPad may have a place, depending on the users, but most of us live in a keyboard-centric world. So, for those of you in board rooms that can afford to pass around iPads as fancy .pdf viewers and note-takers, more power to you. For the rest of us, it’s not robust enough for day-to-day business use.

For home. It’s an entertainment piece– Short emails, casual web surfing, games, photos, YouTube videos, iTunes store video downloads, and general procrastination. I have no doubt that the iPad can excel in these areas, but then again, so can your iPhone, your iPod touch, your laptop, and your desktop.

At the end of the day, the market will tell whether Apple has another to add to their list of missteps. We’ll see how they sell in March.

Alex Hornbake is one of several freelance writers on the oDesk Blog team. He joined the oDesk marketplace in 2009, and brings more than a decade of technical expertise to his clients. On Wednesdays, Alex shares his point of view on the tech industry to help you make informed decisions for your personal and business technology choices.

Mobile Phone Market Data

While sifting through the available data on mobile phone sales, smartphone OS market share, and Internet traffic by mobile OS, it became very clear that the relevant market leaders for developers were different than the global leaders in terms of sales volume.

By this metric, Nokia – with their Symbian OS – is the global smartphone leader. However, if you look at how people are using their phones (by how many requests they make to Admob’s ad network) you’ll find that the iPhone has the highest amount of requests globally and in the U.S.

oDesk Market Data

The first chart on global market share by sales does not necessarily translate to jobs on oDesk, but the traffic requests in the U.S. do have a strong correlation to the volume of job posts on oDesk. For more, take a look at the job post trends in December 2009 for iPhone, Symbian, Android and Blackberry (or click on the charts below).

iPhone

The demand for iPhone developers on oDesk is still larger than its competitive mobile operating systems. It was recently reported by Brighthand.com that the soon-to-be-released Apple iSlate tablet will run the still-unreleased iPhone OS 4.0. While it’s still unconfirmed, that would give developers a third hardware platform running iPhone apps, including the iTouch and iPhone. The overwhelming volume of iPhone development jobs might be due in part to the suspected “App Store Bubble” reported here by MocoNews.net.

Android

Google’s mobile OS, Android, is featured on the new Nexus One, with devices from HTC, Motorola and Samsung, shows steady growth in demand. (For a full list of Android devices you can visit this wiki entry.) The important thing is that the Android OS is growing both in market share, device support and development jobs here on oDesk. For more in depth coverage, Techie Buzz has a great quick blurb on Android’s market gains.

Blackberry

Blackberry is the leader in the enterprise level smartphone market. Its QWERTY keyboard has always been a symbol of no nonsense emailing and texting. There is still a growing demand for Blackberry developers and — as the market data shows — a growth in user base as well.

Nokia’s Symbian, Meamo and the Others

The above report can’t simply indicate that everyone is winning. The platforms above are gobbling up the lost market shares from Palm, Windows Mobile, Symbian and a small number of Linux variants. One of the others that is too big to ignore is Nokia’s Symbian.

While there hasn’t been a historically high demand for Symbian developers on oDesk (nor is Symbian necessarily the ideal platform for an entrepreneur’s next killer mobile app), it is the utilitarian global mobile OS of choice and the OS of the declining (but still largest) manufacturer of smartphones. Recent reports  have pointed out that Nokia’s open-source, Linux-based Maemo OS is slated to replace Symbian, however the official word from Nokia is that the two operating systems will coexist. At present, Maemo only runs on Nokia’s flagship N900 smartphone, and its Internet tablets. However, it seems that Nokia will be moving to replace Symbian on their high-end N-Series smartphones. Fierce Wireless has more in-depth coverage of these OS changes.

The current development market for Maemo is truly in its infancy, while the incumbent Symbian has a historically large global market share, and if Nokia does end up shifting more phones to the Meamo OS, then we may see a shift in the demand for developers in the future.

The Cautiously Optimistic Outlook

The mobile OS market is far from having a true winner yet, and while that may mean developers’ skill sets are far from settling in, there is going to be plenty of work adapting — and re-adapting — applications to the changing platforms.

Programming opportunities for these platforms has steadily increased on oDesk over the last year, and its unlikely that we’ll see either company or platform going away any time soon. As you’ll see in the graphs below the demand for Amazon AWS developers is higher on oDesk, and upon closer inspection of the trends pages for Amazon AWS and Google App Engine, you’ll notice that the ratio of programmers to available jobs is also higher for Amazon AWS.

Amazon AWS

Amazon’s Web Services, is an entire suite of services dedicated to providing cloud computing, database, and storage services. The main strength – and also main weakness – of AWS is in its extremely flexible configuration.

EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is the main attraction, offering users the ability to configure any combination of operating systems and servers imaginable via Amazon Machine Images. There is an entire library of pre-configured machine images to select from.

Amazon offers fair pricing for these services, but the configuration can be complex if you are developing an application that wants to take advantages of load balancing and other benefits of the cloud, you have total control, but have to do many tasks explicitly.

Google App Engine

The Google App Engine, is a Google-centric approach to cloud computing, that allows users to develop online applications using Python and Java based API’s that run specifically on Google’s App Engine servers. Google’s App Engine’s main strength – and also its weakness – is its ease of use.

Many tasks are done automatically for you, which is great, unless you want them done in a very specific way, in which case you may be out of luck. Google offers a free trial of 500mb of storage space, and 5 million page views per month. Beyond that, pricing is comparable to Amazon’s.

Which one?

If you need flexibility, or are planning on integrating or migrating an existing web application, Amazon AWS is probably your best bet. If you need to get a simple application online quickly, and you or your development team are already comfortable in Java or Python, then Google App engine may be your quickest development path. If you are a provider looking to learn a new skill, Amazon AWS  appears to be the more fruitful skill.

Disclaimer: Changes of this type may have the potential to cause loss of data. Before making any alterations to your system, backing up your data is strongly recommended. Proceed at your own risk!

OS and Memory
Memory (RAM) is where programs live while your computer is turned on. Your operating system(OS) is the first program loaded in to memory. You or your OS can then load more programs. However, if your OS has been instructed to load spyware, viruses, worms, or non-essential software in to memory, this can cause your computer’s processing speed  to grind to a halt.

This particular article is aimed at users running Windows XP. However, if you are running a Mac, check out Onyx. In my experience most Mac problems stem from Disk Permissions issues. Onyx is great at fixing these issues.

Malware Cleaning and Prevention
PC Tools Spyware Doctor and PC Tools Anti-Virus, are both available as free downloads. They can help you identify and remove malware from your system.  Once they’re installed they will auto-update unobtrusively and let you know if there are any more problems.

If the above doesn’t work, then the offending piece of software is brand new and really evil. Check out the forums on MajorGeeks.com. Chances are someone else has had the same problem and the solution is there, or they are in the process of figuring it out.

Unwanted Legit Applications
Now, if your machine is still running slow there are probably some programs running that just aren’t necessary.

If you truly do not use the application, then remove the application using “Add/Remove Programs” (Located by click “Start” and then “Control Panel”).

Net Squirrel has a great article on “How to use MSCONFIG” a windows systems tool that can help  you make sure that only necessary programs are running at startup.

Clean Slate
If your problems originate with the “blue screen of death” (windows goes to a blue screen, and there will be a lot of text that you don’t understand), or if none of the tips above have yielded performance on par with your computer’s original state (from the manufacturer), then reformatting and reinstalling may be a good option. This is a sure fire way to get back to a good performing system. Consult your computer’s user manual, or see below. Re-installing windows will cause data loss. Backup.

Microsoft’s Instructions on How to Install/Upgrade/Reinstall Windows XP.

Final Thoughts
Keeping your system in a healthy state isn’t too tough if you do regular maintenance. However, keep in mind that some of the programs above have the potential to cause permanent data loss. Backing up your data is highly recommended before undertaking any of the above. If you are hesitant to delve this deep in to your system, then consider consulting a professional computer technician in your area.

Check it out, share it, discuss it – We’re excited about the future of work, and we hope that you will be too!

iPhone
The Apple iTunes App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch has been open for just over 15 months, with Apple reporting over 2 billion App downloads. The gold rush to develop iPhone apps, fueled by Apple’s marketing efforts and ambitious entrepreneurs, has led many buyers to the expert developers in the oDesk marketplace and fueled steady growth in demand for skilled iPhone developers. The iPhone’s addictive multi-touch screen and sleek design offer an attractive platform for potentially viral Apps.

iPhone and iPod Touch development requires that you have an Intel-based Mac running Mac OS X Leopard, X-code, the iPhone SDK, and some knowledge of Objective-C language. Owning an iPhone or iPod touch would be necessary for proper testing, but isn’t required for writing and running programs in the included iPhone Simulator. Apple also offers a $99 iPhone Developer Program, but this is only necessary if you plan on releasing an app to the app store directly.

Android
Google’s Android mobile phone OS, without the fuel of Apple’s App Store has not garnered the same popularity on oDesk, but still employs a significant number of Android developers, outpacing demand for developers of any other mobile OS on oDesk aside from the iPhone.

Android is an Open Source, Linux-based OS running on phones from HTC, Motorola, Samsung and LG, with rumored devices appearing soon on devices from Sony Ericsson, BenQ, and Dell. The number of Android devices on the horizon makes it poised to be a dominant mobile OS. The Android Market also offers a free service for developers to sell their apps.

The Android SDK will run on Mac, Windows, or Linux, and requires Java JDK 5 or 6. Eclipse 3.5 is the recommended IDE for development. Android’s Developers site has everything you need to get started, except for a handset which can be any Android Device, or the official Android Dev Phone 1, a special unlocked HTC Dream.

The Market
While programming for the iPhone and Android OS are the most in demand mobile phone development skills on oDesk, they aren’t the only mobile operating systems. Admob’s August 2009 Mobile Metrics report shows that of phones using their ad network globally, iPhone OS claiming the majority, and Nokia’s Symbian OS, and RIM’s Blackberry OS both beating out Android. However, Android is rising from last year, and Symbian and Blackberry are both falling. This breakdown speaks volumes for the confidence in Android’s future, and to the brilliantly standardized outlet that the Apple App Store and Android Market provide as both a service to end users and developers.

Silverlight on oDesk
There are currently 520 programmers on oDesk with Silverlight experience. oDesk’s data on the trends for Silverlight developers shows a significant increase in demand over the past six months. While this isn’t as impressive as oDesk’s data on recent Flash developers trends, Silverlight 3 offers some fantastic new features that should keep the demand for talented Silverlight developers on the rise.

Key Features
Highlighted below are some of the key features that Silverlight offers. See Scott Gu’s article on Silverlight 3 for more in depth reading.

GPU accelration – Processing of video and graphics can be offloaded to the client’s graphics card, making streaming of 1080p and rendering of 2D and 3d graphics less CPU intensive.

Smooth Streaming – Microsoft’s IIS Media Services Server can vary video streaming bit rates on the fly to insure smooth playback, regardless of client’s CPU load or network congestion.

Codec Support – H.264, MPEG-4, and AAC formats are now supported, as well as the ability to write custom decoders.

Offline Support – Silverlight applications can be configured for local installation and offline use.

Expression Blend 3 – A developer’s tool for Expression Studio that offers a whole other blog post’s worth of tools, including: importing photoshop layers, Sketchflow application prototyping, support for behavior components that encapsulate complex design interactions, and much more.

How To Get Started Developing
Microsoft is offering all of the tools needed to get started for free. Download Microsoft’s Web Platform, which includes Visual Web Developer, SQL Server Express, Silverlight Tools and IIS and ASP.NET Extensions.

Silverlight.net is a great place to read tutorials, and view example projects, and Shawn Wildermuth’s Blog has some great examples and screencasts as well.

Considerations
When choosing to use a new technology, it can be tough to justify being one of the early adopters. Some statistics are showing that Silverlight 3 is currently installed on nearly 20% of all computers. While this is great – especially considering it has only been available for just under 3 months – it is no where near Flash’s 80-90% installation representation. However, Silverlight does tackle some media applications, particularly streaming video, that Flash and Java just can’t handle as well.

In viewing these numbers, keep in mind this is for oDesk, which is primarily concerned with placements for freelance and contract positions. This may vary with respect to full time placement numbers, though the data can be a useful indicator of overall trends.

In looking at the table below, there are three columns: one with the skill or technology, the second with the total jobs posted and the last with the Fill Ratio, which shows the competition for these postings – a low percentage in this column indicates great job opportunities, whereas a higher percentage score indicates that jobs requiring those skills get filled at or above our usual rate.  Anything not on this list is getting filled at a higher rate, which indicates high competition for the skill or technology.

First up, C++ programmers are recently experiencing the lowest fill rate – which means competition for jobs with this skill is fairly low. Additional good news: after an early summer slump, the field is growing again, as the number of positions requiring C++ programming skills are steadily climbing.

Java developers are growing in demand with 263 jobs posted per month and a 20% fill rate – moving Java skills up our list from #4 last quarter to #2 this time aroung. iPhone developers, the previous leaders in our opportunity rankings, have fallen halfway down the list. Not because the demand for skilled iPhone development has decreased (it has actually risen by almost 40% over the last 6 months), but because the number of skilled developers filling those jobs has pushed the fill ratio beyond the realm to be considered an area for current opportunity. As demand seems to be on a rising arc for iPhone development, you may see it reappear here in future months.

Continuing the ever-present PostgreSQL vs. MySQL debate, MySQL programmers have another quarter of strong showing on our chart, with by far the highest average number of jobs posted per month and a respectable fill rate at 28.54%. With the second highest number of available jobs, SEO consultants made a big leap in available opportunity by more than tripling the number of available jobs while maintaining a roughly 30% fill rate.

Bloggers make their first appearance on the opportunity scale, joining freelance writers in enjoying an average of over 160 job opportunities per month with a combined average fill rate of 28%.

This information derived from the thousands of jobs posted on oDesk every day. More information can be found on the skills and languages above, as well as many other desirable skills, on the oDesk Trends page.

LOTUS NOTES

Lotus Notes has a history spanning more than 20 years, causing some industry analysts and mainstream business press writers to make predictions of its impending demise, but the numbers don’t lie: IBM reported an increase of 100 million seats over the last decade. While the market for jobs requiring Lotus Notes skills has been up and down, there are a few folks out there consistently looking for those with the knowledge to handle any Lotus-related curveball that may come their way.

UNIX SHELL

The Unix shell was unusual when it was first created in 1977. On systems using a windowing system (as many do these days) some users may never use the shell directly. On Unix systems, the shell is still the implementation language of system startup scripts, including the program that starts the windowing system, the programs that facilitate access to the Internet, and many other essential functions. Due to the recent movement in favor of open source software, most Unix shells have at least one version that is distributed under an open source license, which may further explain why this “old school” technology is still a desirable job skill.

COLDFUSION

ColdFusion was anything but cold when it hit the digital realm in the mid 1990s. As the internet exploded in popularity, CF and its legions of programmers rode the dot-com wave to great success thanks to a winning combination of functionality and simplicity. Stiff competition over the years has left  ColdFusion overshadowed by other offerings such as Rails and PHP, though the language does maintain a devout following that actively seeks out other CF aficionados.

COBOL

No, we’re not talking about the ancient planet that served as the cradle of humanity in SyFy Channel’s Battlestar Galactica (besides, that’s spelled with a K), but it is nearly as old. With roots dating back to the late 1950s, COBOL is one of the industry’s oldest programming languages, and according to Stephen Kelly of Micro Focus, still “equates to 80% of the world’s actively used code.” It may not be cutting edge, but there’s no denying the benefits of being able to work with, modify, and update a language that remains so prevalent in modern society. It may not lead to an exclusive contract, but in a world where few institutions even teach COBOL, knowing this language can be a valuable asset indeed.

FORTRAN

If COBOL is ancient, FORTRAN is prehistoric, at least in the technological timeline. 1953 marks the birth of this particular programming language, and what it lacks in sophistication, it makes up for in speed and simplicity. Versions of FORTRAN code still serve front line duty in numerous applications, especially in the engineering and scientific realm, where FORTRAN’s ability to efficiently crunch numbers with little fanfare make it an ideal language for complex calculations.

The hot jobs aren’t necessarily the “hip” programming gigs. Rather, they exist at the point where demand outweighs supply, and that’s not always at the crest of the wave. Programmers know just how fast this industry moves. Today’s in-demand language could well be tomorrow’s history lesson, but having a diverse background can easily mean the difference between scrapping for work with millions of fresh programmers, or showcasing yourself to an under-served niche segment where knowledge of older languages reign supreme—and gets you the job.

The drowning starts with the conversation you never saw coming, and the conversation comes regardless of how long you’ve been with the publication or how valuable the publisher once considered you. One morning you get up and you have a job. By the time you get your cup of coffee, you’re unemployed.

Or at least that’s how it happened to me last year. When a certain national magazine pulled me out of the freelance ocean almost six years ago, slapped me with a name tag and brought me on board the ship, I thought my self-employed days were over. For more than half a decade I basked in the glow of a steady income, a snappy business card and a real title: Media Editor.

Never mind that the title itself was a constant bone of contention between me and my boss. I mean, really, I was the book and resource editor, so why not just call me that and spare me the constant clarifications at every introduction. What’s a media editor? It’s a book and resource editor. Oh. Insert quizzical expressions here, ad nauseum. (By the way, the answer “because it’s too long to fit in the masthead”, is not a good reason to keep a title so nondescript.)

Now, the squabble over the title seems silly. The editor with whom I waged this battle was laid off long ago, and now I have been too. The economy is rocky, the fear is on, and fancy titles are being lost every day. One friend took a pay cut to keep her job and title at a major publisher, but many haven’t been be that lucky. Companies are battening the hatches, plugging the leaks and tossing “dead weight” — publicists, writers, and editors — from the hold. I, myself, was mercifully walked off the plank by a friend who couldn’t help but cry. I mean, really, who wants the job of telling someone on their first day back from a medical leave to treat breast cancer that they no longer have a job?

So, post-layoff, I scrambled to update and add pizazz to my resume. (Does kicking cancer in the backside count as a relevant skill?) And, in the back of my mind, I couldn’t help but sense that it was a futile effort. Even today, publishers aren’t hiring and periodicals are sinking fast.

What makes a writer think they can get freelance work, let alone another job?

Does it matter that I sold a bunch of personal essays in 2003? Do you think perhaps that could get me a book deal? Does it mean anything to anyone that my cover story in 2005 was one of the magazine’s best-selling issues?

The answer right now, I believe, is no. None of those things helped me keep my job and none of them got me another. As it has always been in the world of publishing, it’s not what you know or what you’ve accomplished, it’s who you know. Know the captain and your ticket is a guarantee; only know the deckhand? You probably won’t make it to the galley.

What I didn’t know, during those first few months of resumes and cover letters, is that there is a whole new — and very different – world of publishing on the internet, where the old “shipping” rules are not as hard and fast. A writer can become part of the right community simply by logging in to the right forum or registering with the right freelancing site. Magic can happen overnight on the internet, publishing can happen overnight on the internet.

Still, I’m digging through the e-mail contacts, looking for the first time at the business cards stuffed in my laptop case (my apologies) and pulling up the cell phone numbers, signaling the shores and hoping against hope that the next time a group of happily employed editors are sitting around a conference table and the subject of a potential freelance gig comes up, my name springs instantly to mind.

Instead of yours.

osCommerce

osCommerce has been around a while and  there is a very well established and responsive community to offer support. There are also innumerable ‘modules’ to be found on the OS site, which allow for increased customization and osCommerce’s simplicity and flexibility means these can be easy to add.

But the appeal of osCommerce is in its ability to be translated and localized into any language. The structure of the site, written in php and using clear definitions, means all the text seen on an osCommerce store is handily stored in reference files which contain only plain text for translation – minimizing the risk of file corruption by a web page translator.

osCommerce has been around a while, but those versed in this area have seen a dramatic increase in job availability over the last year. The number of jobs posted each month requesting knowledge of the platform has risen to over 5 times the number of osCommerce jobs available in July of 2008.

Magento

This newer store scores highly for its look and overall features. The backend is well organized and most items of concern are thoroughly covered from the get-go, including re-writable URLs (a must for a well optimized online store).

Magento also has ‘Store View’ which allows online shop keepers the ability to set up multiple stores – with the same products, at different prices, and even in different languages – from a single admin area.

This also means that translating a Magento store is facilitated from within – many language packs are already available, so all the hard-coded static content and navigation (add to basket, subscribe to newsletter, invoices, checkout, etc.) are ready at the click of a button, while keeping the admin area in your native language.

Magento is newer, so it isn’t surprising that this area started with fewer jobs posted per month than osCommerce, but has maintained a more steady rate of increase over the past year. The number of jobs posted each month that request a knowledge of Magento has skyrocketed during that time – there are 13 times more jobs available for Magento programmers than there were in July 2008!

Specific Features

For those curious about the specific features of each platform, the folks over at DCKAP have put together a handy chart. But either way you go, online commerce is a rising trend – and serious business!

Had experience with either Magento or osCommerce? Share your perspective in the comments!

However, with this trend, another phenomenon was birthed and now flourishes: the Ghost Tweeter. For those not familiar with the term, here’s a quick explanation. You’re a very busy CEO. You don’t have time to tell your followers what you are doing 15 times a day. Or, perhaps, you simply suck at one-liners. You can’t “micro-blog” via Twitter, because you didn’t get to where you are chatting or learning texting lingo, you got to where you are by being a financial wiz with ideas and leadership skills — among them, the gift of delegating. So, when you feel the pressure to tweet, you hire a ghostwriter to do it for you.

Ghost-tweeting is, by most accounts, about as respected as seducing an intern. Some call it smart, others call it lying, but don’t ever put ghost, Twitter and a CEO’s name in the same sentence unless you mean it. (See the comments about AOL founder Steve Case here. And, one more time, for the record, we didn’t mean to imply the rumor was true.)

One alternative to ghost-tweeting is having various employees tweet openly under the company name — which works for Jet Blue airlines (@JetBlue) CEO David Barger. The brand is promoted, the business gets a personality, and the CEO doesn’t have to bother tweeting himself or using a ghost-tweeter.

Youth Specialties CEO Mark Oestreicher once dabbled in Twitter, but gave it up when he realized how much time social networking was taking out of his work days. “I loved Twitter while I was using it,” he recently told oDesk, ”and did feel there was some benefit to my organization.  But, ultimately, I found that Twitter (along with Facebook and my blog) were stealing too much of my time, focus, presence and creativity.”

Oestreicher went on to explain that since he pulled the plug on social networking, those four important elements have returned to his daily life as a CEO. Like Jet Blue, Youth Specialties currently relies on the company tweets (@YS_Scoop) to build the brand and communicate.

Is it the same thing, for followers, as getting tweets from the CEO herself or himself? Maybe not. But the average CEO may not be able to juggle active tweeting without taking away from her valuable time and energy.

So, is ghost-tweeting — provided no one ever knows it isn’t you — the way to go? After all, in the publishing world, ghostwriting has put many an autobiography on the best seller shelf at your local bookstore and no one seems to mind.

The answer, it seems, is that for now some form of tweeting on behalf of the company is an important part of marketing in today’s world. But the pros and cons of actual CEO tweeting might depend on who you ask.

Note: For more CEOs to follow on Twitter, see our 25 Entrepreneurs and Businesses You Should Be Following on Twitter.

How is your company using Twitter? Interested in learning more about companies leveraging the power of social media? Let me know in the comments!

- Tamara

Freelancers (and the Companies that Love Them!)
Kill Your Cubicle: Productive Collaboration and Remote Work – oDesk CEO Gary Swart teams forces with leaders of companies who have successfully leveraged remote workers in order to help businesses and freelancers find new ways to overcome the obstacles to working together.
Good Client/Bad Client – Darryl Cili discusses how to separate the best clients from the truly evil ones.
Visual Problem Solving: 5 Diagrams in 15 Minutes – Dean Meyers spells out how to solve problems visually – a useful tool for freelancers trying to communicate with buyers (and vice versa!)
Picking Your Path – A panel of designers and developers will talk about working full-time, part-time and all the time for big agencies, small agencies, and solo.
Successful Networking for Introverts, Rebels and Misfits – Jan Triplett, Ph.D. walks participants through creating a realistic networking strategy for those accustomed to alternative work environments.
Funemployed – Success Stories from the Laid Off Community Chris Hutchins, from oDesk favorite LaidOffCamp, showcases some unique ways that people have spent their time while unemployed, featuring not only successful startups, but also touch on the various unique and exciting ways one can spend their newly found “free time”

Freelance Developers
Seven Ways To Stand Out In A Sea of Software Developers – Microsoft‘s Jeff Blankenburg presents focuses on 7 things you can DO TODAY to make you stand out in the “sea of the same.”
Coding for the Man: Government Development From Home – Matthew Burton will explain how to get started on the Intelligence Community’s open source platform and other civic coding initiatives.
Selling your Milk When the Cow is Free – Jeff Eaton and others discuss making your idea succeed if you work with open source business models.
Coding for Pleasure: Developing Killer Spare-Time Apps – Adam Pash of Lifehacker fame talks about improving your life–and impact others’ lives–by coding for pleasure in your spare time.

Freelance Designers
Once Upon a Web Design – Brand Storytelling – David Stagg encourages you to step away from mere Web design and live happily ever after in the realms of the digital Brand narrative.
Are You There? Hello? Tips for Better Remote Collaboration Sara Nelson, of Tapir Studios, offers a design-specific look at remote collaboration.
Design, Collaboration, Pokemon: How Not to Offend People Globally – Chris Moeller, of Yahoo!, discusses designing for global markets, collaborating with colleagues overseas, and not offending your international customers.
A Pragmatic Approach to Wild Creativity – Finding your creative strengths and applying them to life and business issues.

I may not admit to being caught up in the Mad Men frenzy, but I will admit to wanting to go to SXSW Interactive really really ridiculously badly! What panels are you dying to see at SXSW? What other conferences are you itching to go to? Let me know in the comments!

- Erica

The Market Share

As you can see from the graph below, Hi5 may be in the top three, but it’s a distant third.  In fact, in recent months their unique visotor counts seem to have been in a downward trend while MySpace and Facebook have been gaining market share at a rapid pace.

The Demographics

The one thing that has historically kept Hi5 from being more popular in the United States may be it’s one saving grace.  Lets take a look at the user demographics for the top three sites…see anything unusual about Hi5?

Thats right, Hi5 has the dominant position in every category except “Caucasian”.   The one that especially stands out is “Hispanic”.  Hi5 has over 10 times the market share in the Hispanic community than Facebook, and nearly 5 times that of MySpace!  Right now Facebook and MySpace might be hot in the USA and UK, but eventually their growth will slow in those areas.  If Hi5 can leverage their current user base to expand further into non-english speaking markets, they could quickly become a formidable contender to MySpace and Facebook.
 

The Conclusion: Is There Room For All Three?

Some things are hot in one area of the world and don’t catch on quite as well in others.  Look at the game “Lineage”.  One of the hottest Multiplayer MMO games in the world, with a subscriber base of over 1 million, but almost all of them in Korea.  Even the American juggernaut “World of Warcraft”, isn’t able to penetrate the Korean market with the same success they had in the USA.

Just like there is room for a McDonalds, Wendys, Taco Bell, etc. on every corner, there is room for multiple “flavors” of Social Networking sites.  The one that fails will most likely be the one that tries to be all things to all people.

I was lucky enough to meet Cory in 2006 at the Aquino Museum, and I thought I’d post this picture as my little tribute to Cory.

I’m the big guy on the left, my lovely wife Amanda is second from the right, and my father-in-law (born in Bicol) is on the right. And front and center, gracious and full of optimism, wearing her trademark yellow, is President Cory.

Just thought I’d share!

Michael Levinson
Director of Products, oDesk

In viewing these numbers, keep in mind this is for oDesk which is primarily concerned with placement for freelance and contract positions. This may vary with respect to full time placement numbers, though we think the data is useful to all.

In looking at the table below we give you three columns, one with the skill or technology, the second with the total jobs posted and the last with the Fill ratio. The Fill Ratio  shows the competition for these postings – a low percentage in this column indicates great job opportunities, whereas a higher percentage score indicates that jobs requiring those skills get filled at or above our usual rate.  Anything not on this list is getting filled at a high rate indicating high competition for the skill or technology.

First up, iPhone Programmer positions have the lowest fill rate which means the competition is lowest in this particular field. Addition good news: the field is growing, as the number of positions requiring iPhone development skills is growing at a rapid rate as witnessed on our iPhone Developer Trends page.

.Moving down the table we see that AJAX developers are still in demand with 315 jobs posted per month and a 27% fill rate. PHP is still very popular and competitive on oDesk, but developing some additional skills in an area with a lower fill rate might help you keep up a steady work flow.

.The .NET languages that showed so promisingly last December have fallen from our chart, as the positions are in high demand and are often-filled.

.Adding fuel to the ongoing PostgreSQL vs. MySQL debate, MySQL programmers have a strong showing on our chart, with the highest average number of jobs posted per month and a respectable fill rate at 30%. At 658 jobs/month, this is almost double the skill needed for those working with the second highest number of jobs per month, Javascript programmers.

On the less technical front, freelance writers and those with English skills are each enjoying an average of over 100 job opportunities per month with a combined average fill rate of 35%.

Hopefully you’ll find this information useful in guiding your career path. More information can be found on the skills and languages above, as well as many other desirable skills, on the oDesk Trends page.

Recently, we had a nice visit from Paul Sedacove, one of our affiliates and principals at Oggetto Web.  The 17 providers at Oggetto have worked 9,000+ hours on oDesk in the last ten months with a handful of customers.

Paul had great things to say about the help he received from our staff (nice job, Ron and Kendra!), and  Paul mentioned that our platform was ‘perfect’ and had a few very minor suggestions to improve.

Paul left us with a book on Russia, which he signed, ‘from Russia with love’.

We were also visited last week by Elliott Ng, Co-Founder, VP of Marketing at UpTake and founder of CNReviews.com. Elliott brought his video camera, and chatted with our CEO Gary Swart about outsourcing, oDesk, and the global impact of remote work.

The video is also available at The China Business Network at: http://www.thechinabusinessshow.com/special-features/gary-swart-ceo-odesk/2009/07/

Going to be near Menlo Park? Want to stop by and tell us about your oDesk experience? Let us know – we’ll show you around (and maybe even let you win a ping pong game or two)!

Sequoia’s Mystery Scrooge

When you care enough to send the very worst…

“Which startup laid off some folks recently, but had planned to make much deeper cuts? They went as far as having their outsourced HR firm send out final paperwork and checks to a number of employees — and then changed their mind. The CEO was so spacey he wasn’t sure who got sent the paperwork. So he sent an email out to the entire company saying, “Please ignore any package and letter you might get from our HR firm – you’re not fired.” Ouch.

Squidoo’s Layoff Queen

I can’t imagine she was that professional before the lay off…

“I yelled, I ranted and raved, I threw my badge across the office, and I cried. Then I began to beg, much to my chagrin and humiliation. I said I would take a demotion or admin work, anything to keep my job. After about a half hour of enduring what has to be the worst layoff in my entire life, I was ‘escorted’ back to my office to collect my things and then out the door, in front everyone. I was so angry that I wanted to get revenge on everyone in that company, and I am not a violent person.”

Forbes’ Brotherly Love

Because laughter is the best revenge…

“The announcement, made late Tuesday by Chairman and Editor-in-Chief Steve Forbes, came amidst a new wave of layoffs at the magazine and caught few observers by surprise. The company in recent years has sold off assets ranging from its south seas island, a helicopter from the company yacht, Faberge eggs, a Colorado cattle ranch, toy soldiers, a palace in Morocco and historical documents including Lincoln’s final address as President. The Forbes building itself, at 60 Fifth Avenue, was put on the market in 2007.

Yesterday’s announcement squelched rumors the company has nothing left to sell.

“Pop always told us,” said Mr. Forbes, referring to his late father, legendary publisher Malcolm Forbes, “that people are our greatest asset. Now the time has come to prove him right by monetizing one of my three brothers.”  Exactly which brother would be sold was not immediately clear.”

Snowball.com’s Freezeout

A leaky situation at snowball…

“Here’s how the layoffs began,” recalled one former employee of Snowball.com. “The human resources director sends a list of the people that are to be canned within the next few weeks to the CEO. All e-mails to the CEO first go through his personal assistant. The personal assistant’s name happens to be on the list of layoffs (a small, yet crucial fact that the HR director happened to overlook). The assistant starts e-mailing the other people on the list, letting them know of their impending doom.

Listen.com’s Deaf Ear

He’s happy to listen, he just will never pay you again and please leave… but really we are all in this together…

…The final insult came later, as the newly laid-off Listen.com staffers congregated at a bar next door. The company’s CFO and CEO joined the crowd and tried to commiserate with the workers they had just laid off.

“It was the most tone-deaf move I’ve ever experienced. At the very least, they should have left an open tab and walked out.”

Tribune’s Layoff Voicemail

Fired by the answering machine.

“March 11, 2008: I came home to find a message on my answering machine: “Hello S—-, this is Wanda from —-—- Outplacement Services. We’ve been hired by the Tribune to help with your job search. Please call us to schedule a time to take advantage of our outplacement services—no cost to you, the Tribune compensates us. We have classroom openings for next week, so we need to hear from you as soon as possible”.

Hedge Fund’s G-Chat Liquidation

What a G-chat gut shot…

“The hedge fund started liquidating its accounts and the woman who got me from the temp agency turned in her notice, but I still had hope that maybe, just maybe, I could fill that job during the final months of the company, get health insurance and not pinch pennies anymore.

They started interviewing hot, blonde temps for the job instead. By the way, I have dark hair. And that’s when I learned of my demise in a Gmail chat window. One of the assistants led me to her desk to sign my time sheet. As she signed it, my eyes fled to her computer, where I saw these words in the little Gchat box: “Let’s use one of these girls to replace Kristie.”

One week later, I got a call from the temp agency say that I just worked my last day there and that the company couldn’t afford me anymore. Yeah, but they can still afford to hire hot blondes and company-wide bagels on Fridays, right?”

The Fire Alarm Laid Us Off

This can’t be legal…

A large office campus was evacuated when the fire alarm rang. Hundreds of employees poured out of the multi-building complex. The employees gathered in groups in their assigned area waiting for the signal to return to work, just like every other fire drill. The employee in charge of the drill began to deliver the following message over a loudspeaker:

‘Due to the ongoing recession and bad business climate, the company is laying off 50% of its staff. So when the announcement finishes I ask all of you to move back to the building. If your employee card does not give you access to the building , it means you have been laid off and will not be allowed inside the building. All of your belongings will be sent to you. The company is using this innovative approach because we do not want to clog our email system with layoff notices and farewell messages. We also wish to avoid any fighting inside the office and the security issues for all staff. We hope you had a rewarding career with us… now please move back to the building and good luck.’

Burning Man

This case is particularly interesting in that the entity of “Burning Man” is open source, for lack of a better expression, in that it is near impossible to determine or prove who, if anyone, really “owns” it. The danger of no one owning it is that it now becomes open to outside interests adopting this orphan since no one is really parenting it. When there is money to be made, this is an immediate danger. Burning man sponsored by “Taco Bell” anyone?

Chris Messina over at FactoryJoe does an excellent write-up on the topic , saying:

“What’s so interesting and didactic about this controversy is that it embodies, on a grand scale, the kind of micro-controversies that open source communities have faced for a long time around intellectual property and trademark matters.”

(Photo credit: Original uploaded by Sterling Ely and shared under a Creative Commons License.)

Podcasting

A few years ago, Apple tried to flex their muscles to own the term “podcasting”.  In fact they seemed to be after anything with the word “pod” in it. This, of course, is interesting in that we are now getting into the contentious “common terms” area. What if Coke wanted to trademark the term “Cola”?

Adwords

Google has tried to dump its responsibility for ensuring that a competitor of a company cannot advertise using Google Adwords the trademarked terms of another company. In other words Coke cannot have Adwords advertising on the term “Pepsi” since it is not their trademark. Google has gotten sued for this and may continue to get such unwanted attention.

Amazon Kindle

This case is curious in that Amazon clearly owns the term “Kindle” but that it would go to the trouble to try and stop Kindle news and fan sites. You would think that a web company would embrace these sites and any other user generated content to do with their product for the value of free advertising and support. If anything this act would seem to scare the web citizens who generally are wary of companies trying to supress information on the internet.

Pwnage

Make what you will of this one but Futuremark had made attempts to trademark the term “pwnage”. A full definition for pwnage can be gotten here. Futuremark’s argument was that:

Fellow gamers,

Our purpose in filing for trademark on the name “Pwnage” is not to charge money or stop people from using the expression. That’s not what a trademark is for. Instead, we want to protect ourselves from squatters (or what I call campers) – people looking to trademark the name on false pretenses, just to make a claim against Futuremark Games Studio for its use.

Jukka Mäkinen, Executive Producer, Futuremark Games Studio

This alone would be interesting to see how that would be enforced. How many staffers on XBox Live would be needed for full enforcement on that trademark alone?

(Photo credit: unknown)

Can this trend hold? We think not. Microsoft’s history in online, in our opinion, is one of playing a game of catch-up, and generally playing it poorly.  When it comes to the Internet, Microsoft copies others’ efforts, and usually does quite a mediocre job of it. Bing is no different – they have copied Google’s search page almost exactly.  Even the color of the premium sponsored ads at the top of the page are shaded orange, just as

Google’s are.  But one doesn’t need to look for long to see the silliness of Microsoft to shine through.  A sponsored ad goes to three lines long and looks amateurish (screenshot at right).  The #2 organic result for the query ‘php developers’ is for the Yahoo! Developer Network, which is billed as “your source for information about using PHP with Yahoo! Web Services APIs.”  It would be a very, very small minority of searchers for this phrase that would care about this specific topic, yet it’s the second result.

We think that the buzz will die down, and Bing’s market share will trend back toward where it has been. If, in the unlikely event Bing.com were to grab and keep a large share of the search market, advertisers would be much, much worse off.  This is because pay-per-click marketing is a self-service activity.  The advertiser interface provided by the search platform is key to enabling the advertiser to use thorough PPC management techniques to achieve positive ROI on a worthwhile scale.  Google does a brilliant job at this, and yet it strives all the harder to improve its advertiser interface.  Microsoft’s AdCenter interface is laughably bad.  I considered not using “laughably” as an adjective here, but decided I had to, for truth in blogging. In addition to an overall horrible interface, AdCenter’s conversion tracking system is unable to report on revenue from e-commerce transactions.

A related question: guess who constitutes a major category of keyword advertisers? Drumroll…that’s right – e-commerce companies.

Terry Whalen is a certified Google AdWords Professional and a partner at CPC Search. Since early 2003, he has managed search and other online marketing channels that have generated millions of dollars worth of revenue for clients such as Stamps.com, CitrixOnline, Autoweb.com, SoftwareOnline.com, Taleo, and Pacific Security Capital, among others.

Annoy A Teen

It gets points for honesty in advertising. Apparently teenagers hear high frequencies that the rest of us do not and use of this app will irritate them thoroughly.

iFart™

I’ll spare you the explanation. Needless to say, the value this app provides to mankind is immeasurable.

Hello Cow!

It has a cow, that moos at you. Vital!

Hold On

Hold on to the button as long as you can. Compete against yourself, compete against the world, prove to everyone you’ve got the stamina to out hold them all!

iDrunkTxt

Here is a disaster waiting to happen. The premise here is that you are out on the town, drunk, and want nothing more than to call up someone and have a conversation. This handy app will randomly select a friend or date from your contacts list and dial for you – no need to trouble yourself with deciding between your boss and “that girl” to determine who is more worthy of hearing your slurred speech!

Zits and Giggles

For those who enjoy this sort of thing. Uh … yeah.

That’s What She Said Pro

The easy way to come up with a response for anything and everything.

There you have it. If you like developing iPhone apps, there may be inspiration above.  As always, post missed gems in the comments.

Jurassic Park – It’s A Unix System

…and she knows it.

Hackers: The Whole Movie

An oddly dressed, rag tag bunch of hackers take on a evil skateboarding hacker. No really, they do…

CSI: “I’ll Create a GUI interface using Visual Basic”

Ok, so we’ll just have someone else solve the crime while you’re busy doing that.

CSI New York “VB GUI Interface

Swordfish: “I Need a Worm in 60 seconds”

…..and a decent haircut.

Live Free or Die Hard: “The entire network is down.”

Really. The ENTIRE network goes down when a bad guy tries to control everything via the internet.

The Italian Job
Playing video games at work.

So for those of you looking to work in the technology field, I’m sorry to tell you that computers don’t work like that. Please also note that the other programmers and coworkers in your office will rarely look like Charlize Theron or Angelina Jolie…

Our first hackneyed harlot is from casual dining with Ruby Tuesday. They went to the extreme of blowing up a building and still weren’t funny. The whole thing feels staged from the start. Let’s follow the sickly saga, shall we?

>> Visit Cheeto’s Underground

Strangely, the site is now shuttered. I’m shocked. All that remains, as is often the case with corporate viral campaigns, is the blow back mock-u-mmercial.

Charlie Murphy’s kinda silly TV ads ran for a while. Nike is the suspected – and only possible – sponsor. Nothing can be bought there and no brand is advertised on the site. At least they learned not to be blatantly obvious. I went to the site out of curiosity, puttered around a bit on it, and left very confused.

>> Watch Charlie Murphy’s videos

An oldie, but still a goodie.

Thought 1

I like to start with the basics: what is a layoff? This is especially important if it’s your first one. Think of it this way:

A layoff is when your current employer is no longer a qualified buyer for your skills.

I prefer this simple definition because it reinforces the impersonal nature of the event as well as the market system driving our careers. Many times a subtle game of “but I was very good at my role,” will come into the conversation about layoffs. Don’t go down this road. Don’t even begin to look at a layoff as a measure of your worth. If you want insight into your performance, look at your performance reviews.

Now you’re thinking about the event as a market event. You are also focusing on your previous employer’s financial situation instead of your own self worth. Your emotional approach to this event is very important in the job market; nobody likes to buy even their favorite products if the packaging is badly beaten up and damaged. Your perspective is your packaging.

Thought 2

Hire yourself.

I’m a huge advocate of “working is its own reward”. I hate government statistics about unemployment. Maybe this term made sense in the early 20th century when factories and farms were the primary employers, but it certainly doesn’t in 2009. While you may have faced an immediate drop in your pay, you are now working for yourself, not unemployed.

When you were company employed, more of your task direction was dictated by your organization’s needs and inputs. Now that you are working for yourself, hour is just as precious as when you were on the clock, probably more so.

Realizing you are now the manager of your own day is my most important step in facing a layoff. Managers have goals, objectives, and tasks to monitor and metric. What are your management metrics for yourself?

Don’t try to boil the ocean. What are the three big areas where you can accomplish something related to your employable skills? Are you a writer? Keep writing. A coder? Keep coding. An executive? Write a business plan and study your market.

It’s important to have your own vision and understanding of what you are uniquely good at. If you don’t know, figure it out. Where have you had success in the past and why?

Don’t fall into the trap of accomplishing generic, perhaps household, tasks to feel better. It’s great if you finally have an opportunity to clean your pool, but will it contribute to rejuvenating your career?

Thought 3

Use your self-driven accomplishments to network meaningfully. Who can you collaborate with on your projects? How can you market and promote them? Big companies no longer have a strangle hold on our attention. The TV advertising era is over and this is the era of social media, Meetup, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and more.

The best way to get hired is to be a product someone wants to buy. How much easier is it for a friend to help promote something you have accomplished or created to a hiring manager vs. simply mentioning you are available?

Contract work is a great way to network and impress new contacts with your abilities. This is thinking like a marketer. Maybe the pay isn’t the same as your prior role, but what is the value of the new connections? Perhaps it’s better to take a lower offer with a company with a long-term future.

Meaningful networking is putting your highest value skills on display in front of qualified buyers and their recommending peers. Build your life around this metric – it’s your new job.

Use social media to build and support these networks. Not only will it help you in the present, but it will be a good investment the next time you may be looking for a new job.

Summary

Defiance for me is self-autonomy in work, growth, and accomplishment. It’s knowing your employer was only a buyer of your skills, not a parent evaluating your worth. It’s having the ability to relentlessly pursue qualified buyers with a “WOW must have” product demonstration.

If you are looking for a blog that will help to boost your spirits and give some good advice, you should look into Rajesh Setty’s blog “Life Beyond Code“.  It’s a high-tech way of looking at the world without focusing so much on the work.

Photo credits: pirano, Andrew Feinberg

Introduction

In this post, I will concentrate on the role of feedback on provider wages. I hope these results, coupled with previous posts on the returns to tenure and training, help providers form expectations about long-run earnings trajectories. Overall, the results suggest that providers who receive good feedback and gain experience on oDesk can receive significantly higher wages over time.  I find that a change in feedback score from 2.5, the mean score in the data, to the maximum score of 5, results in wages that are about 5.4% higher.

Method

While oDesk users surely expect a positive relationship between feedback and provider quality, quantifying the economic effect of feedback on wages is statistically tricky. The difficulty arises because the best providers are likely to get the best feedback, but these same top-notch providers are also likely to have unobserved attributes like superior interviewing skills that simultaneously result in high wages. I use a statistical procedure to account for unobserved provider skills.

The data covers matched assignments on oDesk from the platform launch until May 2008. This includes observations on 7,123 providers matched to 28,321 assignments.  The description of my statistical strategy may be esoteric, so the casual reader may wish to skip to the results section. The basic idea is that I use fixed effects multivariate regressions to control for any time-invariant provider characteristics which may be correlated with a provider’s feedback. Because I am able to identify how changes within a single provider’s feedback influence his or her wages over time, this strategy addresses unobserved provider characteristics which otherwise hamper the measurement of the effect of feedback on wages. In my preferred specification, I regress the logarithm of hourly wages on a polynomial of the provider’s weighted feedback score, time using the platform, and overall platform time trend.  I also include controls for the number of tests a provider has taken.

Results

In this first graph, the overall effect of feedback on wage percentage changes is given in blue. Separate results for Indian and Russian providers are also provided.  Not surprisingly, the results show that relative to having zero feedback, providers with low scores do slightly worse. On the positive side, providers can expect 2.5%-5% more earnings from the best feedback scores.

The second graph breaks out the effect by job type. The graph is a bit difficult to interpret because the effect of feedback on wages for writing jobs appears huge. But be warned – the effect for writers looks large in the sample, but is not statistically significant. Web and software developers can expect to earn about 5.6% more with a feedback score of 5 versus 2.5, while providers of administrative support earn even larger percentage increases with good feedback.

Overall, it appears that managers have been willing to pay a premium for tenure but they do so selectively. For example, a manager may be willing to pay higher for a developer with a longer tenure on oDesk, but may not be willing pay more for a data entry worker for a longer tenure.

TRAINING:
Though oDesk does not provide formal training to workers, we defined “training” based on oDesk’s skill-specific tests.

We concluded that wages increase with the number of exams taken, higher exam scores yield higher wage returns, and some exams affect wages more than others.

COUNTRY OF ORIGIN:

Our analysis on country of origin led us to conclude that workers living outside North America earn wages higher than the mean in their home markets. The analysis also showed that North American workers earn higher wages than workers in other countries at a statistically significant level.

At a high level, it is clear that workers from the United States and Canada are earning wages that are higher than their counterparts from Eastern Europe and Asia. Upon closer inspection, however, the story is more subtle and complex than it first appears.

Much of the apparent country effect can be explained by observable differences in the labor forces. There may be something structural about the environment in each of these countries that prompts the differences in the makeup of the labor force, but it cannot be ignored that workers with similar characteristics around the world selling their services through oDesk are earning wages that are more similar than a simple analysis would imply. When the data is reweighted to take into account similarities in tenure and training, the mean wages in each country adjust to a more common level.

WHAT DOES THE DATA IMPLY?

Coming back to our initial hypotheses, the data reinforces that there are positive returns to tenure (length of employment) and training (number of tests taken, scoring of tests taken). Additionally, while a worker’s country of origin affects their potential wages, similiarly-skilled providers on oDesk command wages that are statistically more alike than not.

Our results were based on a study of providers over a three-year period. Are you seeing these results played out in the marketplace? Has your experience been different?

Special thanks to Ashley Carroll, Ruth Bryson, Jeremiah Dillon and Brandon Paulson – MBA 2010 candidates at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business – for their research efforts and contributing this guest blog post!

Today we’re going to look at open source databases. Ten years ago, corporate systems like Oracle and MS Access & SQL Server dominated the landscape. Since then, MySQL and (to a lesser extent) PostgreSQL have made serious inroads into the market. The PostgreSQL vs MySQL debate is a heated one, with passionate (sometimes fanatical) communities on either side.  These two camps position themselves differently – PostgreSQL, as the world’s “most advanced,” and MySQL as the world’s most “popular.”  When exploring this topic, it will come down to a few determining factors and – in some cases – it will come down to the preference of the developer. For our purposes, we will look at the currently recorded tangible factors and let personal opinion take over after that.

The center of the debate between these two open source databases revolves around three key issues: speed, data integrity, and popularity. We’ll quickly go over the basics before leaving the conversation open for your comments.

Speed

Many attest that MySQL is a much faster database than PostgreSQL, and hundreds of benchmarking websites and blogs further this notion. But as loads increase, PostgreSQL seems to win the race.  PostgreSQL has made vast improvements in recent releases, but the jury is still out….is MySQL still faster than PostgreSQL?

Data Integrity

Comparing the two on data integrity, we get PostgreSQL getting the overall nod.  Why, you ask?  PostgreSQL has always maintained a strict adherence to the academic principles of “data integrity,” placing it above all else in importance.  MySQL on the other hand, started off  with a more open attitude on the matter, instead focusing on easy acceptance, increased flexiblity, and a high level of forgiveness for the average user.

Popularity

MySQL is still the world’s most popular open source database, with over 50,000 downloads per day. Its accessible attitude fostered high popularity and rapid growth of the MySQL community, something its poor, nerdy brother was never able to compete with.

As the marketplace for online workteams, we can look at our own data (which happens to be stored in a PostgreSQL database) to get a sense for the two communities’ sizes. As of this week there were 18,317 freelance MySQL developers and 594 open jobs on oDesk, versus only 1,239 PostgreSQL developers and 18 open jobs.  Quite a big difference!

Growth, on the other hand, appeared somewhat flat in the past 12 months for both contenders as the charts below show:

Now it’s your turn to tell us what you think!  Please post your comments below…

Computerweekly has some telling statistics that would seem to back us up with respect to PHP and Dotnet (we did notice a drop in Dotnet developer demand in the early year but it has since picked up).

Anyway, on to the numbers!

iPhone Development

As you can see, iPhone development maintained strong growth through the whole of last year, with only a slight decline in the most recent months.

Twitter Application Development

Meteoric would be the only way to describe the growth of demand for those with skills to develop for this latest social networking craze, much like the growth of the service itself.

Writing

While not a development or design skill, writing has continued a steady strong growth through the last year.

.NET

.NET continues its growth and shows continuous steady increasing demand, after pulling out of its end of 2008 slump.

PHP

While not much growth, the quantity of demand shows PHP will be around for a long while – and the developers who provide it will remain employed for the foreseeable future.

Javascript

Showing decent range and stable upward trend, Javascript skills are reliably in-demand.

Photoshop

Photoshop skills also continue to grow nicely and maintain a nice range.

WordPress

Ability to develop for WordPress is a very nice expanding market and any PHP freelancer would do well to have it on his resume.

Facebook

Another specialist platform that a freelance developer would do well to have on his or her resume. Not a great range, but a healthy trend.

Interested in trends on oDesk? Visit www.odesk.com/trends to learn more!

Now, to be sure, this analysis is very simplistic and must be taken with a healthy grain of salt.  There are many factors to be taken into consideration when hiring contractors to your workteams, and the country where they reside is only one factor.

However, the analysis uncovered some interesting findings for our top 10 countries:

1. Outsourcing to Philippines and Bolivia may give buyers the “best value,” as those countries have high feedback scores and lower hourly rates.
2. You “get what you pay for” by Outsourcing to Russia, Ukraine, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Moldova.  Providers from these countries are more expensive, but also have higher average feedback scores .
3. You also get what you pay for by Outsourcing to India and Pakistan, as these countries are cheaper but have lower feedback scores.
4. Finally, it seems that Outsourcing to Canada may be a slightly overpriced, as the provider rates there are higher than their feedback scores.

Again, this analysis is overly simplistic and done mostly just for fun.  But it does open up an interesting topic for discussion.  What does your experience tell you?  What countries do you like outsourcing to?  Let us know!

It seems that while the UK and Bolivia have seen a dramatic decrease in the hourly fees software developers are able to charge, in the United States–despite the recession–software developers are now charging an average of 35% more than they did in 2008.

This phenomenon flies in the face of Softera Director Mikko Kontio’s predictions on IBM.com last September, when he stated that the future of software development was essentially going to involve a buyer’s demand for faster turnaround and lower cost.

Even earlier last year, in July of 2008, software developer Roy Lawson suggested on his PolkVoice blog that smaller, more skilled software development teams were a better bet in bad economic times. Thus, it could be that companies are simply willing to pay more for skills, as long as they are getting the work done by fewer individuals. In the long run, perhaps this is a savings for the buyer, despite the marked pay raise for the freelancer.

The exact reasons for the incredible rate increase in the face of America’s much-beleaguered economy may remain a mystery. However, it’s good news for those with software skills. As for the less tech-savvy freelancers among us, it’s a sign of hope. Doom and gloom predictions of meager future paychecks don’t always turn out to be true.

Sounds Phishy: Just like in email, getting a direct message or invitation to click a link has to be judged before following it. There have been many instances of scammers inviting tweeps to follow a link with a phrase such as “Who posted that pic of you on Twitter!!!!” Any Tweep following the link will be directed to a fake twitter logon page or other similar data gathering page. With enough data, any scammer can fill in the rest.

Give me your security question answers: This was an excellent example of social engineering. The recent twitter porn names scam was simply a hashtag trend started inviting people to create a twitter porn name by adding various common security question answers such as your pet’s name. Once someone tweets this info the scammers had the username and a selection of common security question answers. A few trips to Yahoo mail or Gmail would probably get you into someone’s bank account.

Sure buddy, just send me your credit card number: Tweet about how much you want product X. A certain scammer will befriend you as an employee of the company that makes Product X. After he builds up a little trust, he will offer you Product X at a special, insider price. Email him your credit card or bank info, game over.

Phone Home: “You have just won a free cell phone!” the tweet says. Clicking on the link and after filling out you cell number and basic details, you will just auto-enrolled on a $20/month horoscopes or similarly unwanted messages direct to your phone by text scam.

Worming in: Another recent Twitter attack that was more benign than malicious where an industrious but “bored” hacker used a javascript hack to take over Twitter accounts to spam twitter. Titled “Stalkdaily” or “Mikeyy”, it owned twitter for a few days. This, in honesty, was Twitters problem and not the users but users who used third party software clients to access Twitter like Tweetdeck were immune. This exploit in the hands of a more ill-intentioned individual might have delivered a few sad stories.

If we missed on any, simply tell us in the comments or link to the info. Safe tweeting.

1. Baby Shaker

Without a doubt, it may be the most tasteless, most ban-worthy banned iPhone app of all time. It involved a badly drawn crying infant, a lot of shaking, and (eventually) a quiet–but mostly dead–little tike. Tech Crunch’s MG Siegler called it horrifying and eventually Apple did too.

2. I Am Rich

It didn’t last, but German developer Armin Heinrich did get 8 buyers before Apple shut down his $999.99 application, which was nothing more than a shiny red gem glimmering in the middle of your iPhone screen.  The pricey app would, Heinrich proposed, prove to all your friends that you really are that rich. And stupid.

3. Podcaster

Alex Sokirynsky’s podcast application was banned by iPhone, not for being obscene or otherwise offensive, but for seeming a little too much like competition–i.e. Podcasts on iTunes.  Sokirynsky’s iPhone version of Podcaster allows users to download podcasts via Wi-Fi or EDGE. (Read a defense of Apple’s decision here.) Sokirynsky–with a lot of techies rooting for him–has found a way around the ban though, by sending potential buyers here.

4. NetShare

Before it was unceremoniously banned, a tethering application called NetShare from Nullriver allowed iPhone users’ 3G access to extend to their laptops and get them on line. This ban can’t be blamed entirely on Apple, however. It was all about AT&T, money and territory.

5. iBoobs

Well, folks, it was exactly what it’s name implied, and demonstrations are still available. These almost life-like boobies/breasts/hooters would jiggle just for fun, until Apple gave them a proper bra and sent them home. Since iBoobs’ banning, an app called Wobble has allowed users to simulate an almost identical scenario on real pictures, however Apple has been up in Wobble’s grill since day one. Its jiggling days may also be numbered.

6. SlingPlayer

Using your 3G iPhone to get television from your SlingBox would be uber-convenient. However, AT&T was ultimately terrified of the bandwidth, congestion, etc. that could have resulted when untold masses tried to watch television on their iPhones at the same time via 3G. For now, its 3G banning is a bummer, but the Wi-Fi use is still available.

7. Murderdrome

One of the oddest iPhone app bannings was that of Murderdrome, a graphic novel app from Infurious. The banning was due to the content of the specific Murderdrome series, however the app itself would’ve allowed other–less offensive–Infurious graphic novel releases via iPhone. Never fear, in the end Infurious got their app back in the store for a different comic: EyeCandy.

8. Prohibition 2: Dope Wars

This iPhone game from Hardy Macia at Catamount Software had all the drug fun that made John E. Dell’s ’80s version (Drug Wars) such an addictive–no pun intended–success. Apple didn’t see the irony or the fun, so Macia had to go with a candy prohibition game instead.

9. Obama Trampoline

Swamiware was simply not ready to back down when its iPhone app was banned due to cartoon graphics of politicians jumping up and down on a trampoline in the Oval Office. So, they stuck to their guns … sort of. You can now get the app from the iPhone store, but you’ll have to play it with paper bags over the politicians’ heads. (Let’s face it, Apple, we all know who’s in the tight red skirt.)

10. Freedom Time

This last app–banned for reasons similar to #9–makes the list for one reason and one reason only: Steve Jobs himself took the time to give creators Alec Vance and Court Batson a response. This app was meant to give those anxious to get Bush out of office a fun way to count the days in 2008; but in the end, even Democrat-leaning Steve Jobs didn’t see the point in firing up the potential controversy.

At the very least, the Palm Pre is going to give the iPhone a serious run for its money. Is it an iPhone killer? Maybe not, but I’d certainly expect the next generation of iPhone to tackle a lot of the Palm Pre’s extra features Stuff.tv shows off in this video:

I don’t know about you, but consolidating all my calendars, is a HUGE deal. Jumping between my work calendar, my family calendar, my Facebook calendar, my Yahoo Groups Calendar, and trying to keep them all synchronized is, quite simply, impossible. It’s everything that’s wrong with modern communications technology in microcosm: a flood of useful information, but so utterly dispersed as to be more disrupting than old-fashioned ignorance.

What we need is a way to unify all this sort of thing in one place, at one time, so we can see it, process it and make good decisions based on it. Palm Pre isn’t quite everything we need. It’s still subject to the old GIGO rule: Garbage In, Garbage Out. It won’t read your post-its, or the scribble on the dry-erase board that you fail to input on your computer, but it certainly looks like a huge leap in the right direction.

Unifying and capturing communications is another big step forward. About the only thing it doesn’t seem to do here is record our calls and transcribe them as text files. Still, being able to handle the email and simple research with access to Google docs and LinkedIn makes me a networking machine no matter where I am, especially since the Palm Pre supports multitasking. And apparently, it multitasks very well:

Ten to fifteen apps at once is hopefully more than most of us need, but in all honesty, I’d probably end up pushing it. As the war for the ultimate uber-phone intensifies, applications are going to become a major battleground. While the Palm Pre might not be the pocket-secretary we all desire, there’s a good chance it just might emerge from the coming clash between Palm and Apple.

Analysis of the article and the manner in which it spread reveals the following:

1. It was a list post: Minimal search on the web finds plenty of evidence to back up the fact that lists posts are not only popular but highly “bookmarkable”. Problogger’s own Darren Rowse recently made the case for the list post and it held up here. One other point to note from experience is that naming a list with a number “Top 25 …” as opposed to “Top ….” Also seem to be more attractive.
2. It was about Twitter: Tweeps love Twitter and love to talk about Twitter. This is in itself an indicator of the health of this social network – the users promote and defend it. This is not to say that you can’t go viral on Twitter without talking about Twitter, but it helps. A look at Twitturls.com gives you a look at how much the topic of Twitter is a popular topic on Twitter.

The subject of Twitter is a topic common to all Tweeps so, as a topic, has a great chance of success on the platform.

3. It was a good article: Yes, self praise is no praise but Danalyn, who sculpted the piece, spent a lot of time actually finding good writers and really looking for quality. She spent the time and effort to find not only quality writers but make the case as the why these writers were on the list. Some of the comments on the article and on retweets showed that people were appreciative of the article for its quality. Content is indeed king.
4. We made friends: The article complimented a lot of good, popular people (and deservedly so). So we received either tweets from them or the followers who know, appreciate and respect them. Many, many tweets were congratulations from the followers of our top 25 thereby spreading the story further.
5. Some power tweeps found it: All of the above contributed to this happening but to not acknowledge the value of the tweets from @zaibatsu, @guykawasaki and other well connected and respected tweeps would be a sin. It would appear @zaibatsu found us via retweets and @guykawasaki found it by the alltop.com site.

That would seem to be it. Social media for the most part is based on getting what you give and it played out here. Danalyn wrote an article that was well researched, on a topic of interest to Twitter, in a popular format and the article made us lots of friends.

With most natural disasters, simply not being there is enough. An earthquake in San Francisco, for instance, has little effect on an office in Chicago. Pandemics are different beasts entirely. They spread rapidly across continents and while they don’t hit everywhere at once, they do hit everywhere eventually. The infamous 1918 influenza pandemic killed between 20 and 40 million people world wide, making it even deadlier than the entirety of the first World War.

Dispersing your operations gives your organization a flexibility to roll with these sorts of punches. It also gives you a wider talent pool to draw from and makes you less susceptible to regional economic fluctuations. Even if you’re not facing down a plague more virulent than the Black Death, a dispersed organization is healthier, more flexible, and more robust.

The key to making this sort of thing work is communication. oDesk provides the tools to organize a scattered team and insure that everyone is working towards the same goal without wasting resources by duplicating the same effort in multiple places or working at cross purposes.

This opens up a wide array of options for companies. It means no longer being tied to the skills and labor pool of a single geographic location. It means having input from different regions and cultures. It means being able to organize and unify a far broader array of talents and aptitudes on the challenges facing your company.

And it means the next time the earth shakes or a visiting client sneezes, it doesn’t have to be the end of the world.

The real social breakout – 100 million U.S. and 500 million world-wide users and all of the social transformations that will come in their train – has not yet occurred. Remember the frenzy surrounding eBay when just about everybody you know started buying and selling on it? It’s going to be like that for Twitter six months to a year from now.

Twitter’s not just for fun, but is also now making a splash in the world of big business. Dell recently announced that they’ve moved more than one million dollars worth of merchandise through their Twitter groups. And again, if Malone is correct, this has only really just begun, with bigger things still in store.

So it’s no surprise to find that Twitter is creating jobs. Like the rise of Twitter itself, the trend points towards meteoric rise.

There are 105 new twitter jobs posted on oDesk per month, and 282 twitter professionals.

Many of these jobs are traditional SEO services, simply adding Twitter to the battery of tools which can drive traffic and increase Google page rank. Others are programming jobs, creating automated services that create a tweet reporting activity elsewhere from the web. Twitter’s also becoming a part of other, more traditional services as well. Saying something useful in just 140 characters is a skill, and we’re beginning to see it mentioned in job postings for copywriters. Keeping up with a Twitter feed is also being listed among the duties of virtual assistants.

If you’re already a skilled hand at Twitter, these sorts of Twitter jobs are already available for you. If you haven’t already, you’ll want to add your Twitter skills to your profile so those looking for “tweeters” can find you. Today, mentioning Twitter in your skill set makes sense. Before long, like email before it, aptitude may simply be assumed.

This data for providers goes back over two years.  The top line on the graph, the average hourly rate for developers, is actually up from $13.17 to $15.59 over that time, an increase of 18%.  Network Administration is flat over this period.  Data entry work and technical writing, however, have seen steep declines of -39% and -53% each.

Thus, providers in skilled technical categories are seeing rising or flat rates, whereas technical writers seem to be taking a bath.  However, this next graph helps to complete the story for writers.

The number of writing jobs posted in the last year has seen an incredible explosion of over 500%.  There are 380 open writing jobs and 20,372 freelance writers on oDesk today.

How can demand for writers increase so dramatically while rates decrease? The number of lower hourly-rate writing jobs jobs has increased over time.

This chart shows the number of jobs at each hourly rate over the past calendar year. You can see that while the bulk of the jobs are clustered at the left end of the rate axis, there are still jobs on the far side, including jobs that pay as much as $110.00 per hour. The high paying jobs are still there.  Thus, even in the sector that showed the largest decrease in average hourly rates over the past two years, top performers are still commanding exceptional rates.  However, these jobs are fewer and far between.

The average solo car commuter produces more than a thousand pounds of CO2 per month.  A lot of hot air, yes, and then add in all those disposable coffee cups, heating and cooling the cubicle farms, the reams of paper, the gallons of printer toner, the cleaning agents … on and on. The environmental impact of the average office of 100 workers adds up to more than 650 tons of CO2 annually, and a lot of landfill space.

Working from home doesn’t eliminate all that — you still need heat, and maybe the occasional printout. But you drink from a real mug. In general, working from home is much more efficient. You’re getting dual use out of your living space, and not sucking added resources for a sprawling office park surrounded by endless fields of obsessively striped asphalt.

If being green is important to your company, then start by buying recycled-content paper towels. But take it a step further: Encourage telecommuting. Since last Earth Day, oDesk has helped 10,693 software developers from around the world work from home. In that group, Americans alone accounted for nearly 2,000 individuals, saving an estimated 600,000 gallons of gasoline. That day you were running late and couldn’t believe how light the traffic was?  That was us.

Want to see what sort of impact your office can have on the environment? Use the Green Office’s calculator to tally up your environmental impact based on common office habits and consumption. Rideshare’s Commute Calculator tells you how much your driving habits are costing the environment (and your wallet).

Saving the planet also saves the bottom line. Telecommuting cuts gas prices, reduces office rent, utility and supply bills, and even makes workers happier and healthier, containing the cost of sick days. We hope you’ll think about how telecommuting can work for you.  Go ahead and bookmark this post — just don’t print it out!

Happy Earth Day!

If you view the world economy as a zero-sum game, this is grim news — if each nation’s economy is a bucket of water, and you only fill one by emptying another, we seem to be running dry pretty fast. Fortunately, it doesn’t really work that way. Sometimes jobs slosh out of one bucket into another, but other times, to totally belabor a metaphor, some entrepreneurial genius adds fresh water to several buckets at once.  We may not yet be at the next wave of entrepreneurship (but remember, both Apple and Microsoft were launched in the wake of the ’70s oil crisis), but even as waves of layoffs make national headlines, jobs are sloshing back into our bucket as companies around the world are outsourcing to United States professionals.

America’s national myth is cowboys, pioneers, revolutionaries — not couchbound whiners.  Displaced U.S. workers are not idly waiting for their old jobs to magically return.  An oDesk survey found that of its 70,000+ U.S.-based contractors, 32 percent had taken up freelancing after recently losing a job.

These Americans are adapting to today’s market needs.  For example, just 20 years ago, graphic artists and designers competed for a tiny pool of newspaper and magazine jobs. Today, those same newspapers are tottering or failing.  But the web is increasingly offering opportunities for freelance designers, opportunities that can come from anywhere in the world.  Similarly, opportunities for freelance writers are on the rise, as businesses need compelling content for their websites, blogs, sales material, help content and even Twitter accounts.

We agree with President Obama that new skills will serve Americans well as the world continues to evolve.  So will new thinking about opportunities, work environments, and the way we apply ourselves.  Flexible thinking, entrepreneurialism and a diehard work ethic have made America what it is today, and while specific jobs come and go, these qualities endure.

Last year, we saw over 300% growth in the number of assignments overseas companies outsourced to United States professionals on oDesk.

Overseas companies have employed more than 700 U.S. workers since January 2008.  These jobs are coming from places as diverse as Jamaica, Egypt, Norway, and Singapore.  However, the top countries outsourcing jobs to U.S. workers were:

Top 10 countries outsourcing work to the U.S. on oDesk

The top categories of U.S. professionals being hired on oDesk are freelance web developers, virtual assistants, and freelance writers.

Why are businesses choosing to outsource their jobs to U.S.-based professionals, who are more expensive than their international counterparts?  One possible explanation is that there are more U.S. providers on oDesk today, providing buyers a wider variety of U.S.-based skills and experience, than ever before. In December alone, over 20,000 new U.S. providers signed up on oDesk, the largest monthly percentage increase (over 40%) that we have seen since 2005.  Another possible reason is that U.S. providers’ average feedback score is consistently higher than the oDesk average.

This is certainly an interesting trend that we intend to keep tabs on.

At oDesk, we define “web development” to include web design and programming, web applications, ecommerce, streaming media, user interface design, marketing (SEO/SEM), project management, and QA.  Web development is the largest category of work done on oDesk.

Web development has breached 35,000 hours of work per week, which is enough work for 875 full-time web developers.  And the trend looks good.  The next busiest segment of oDesk, virtual assistants, doesn’t quite reach half that numbers of hours, falling just short of 17,000.

The trend in pay is also appealing.

Hourly rates for web development hovered around the oDesk average until December of 2007.  After that, they broke free, climbing further away from the average nearly every month.

The trend seems solid.  Business today happens on the web.  Gone are the days when a corporate website was a fun novelty, a way to reach the hip or trendy.  Today’s college graduates cannot remember a time in their lives before the internet.  With the web growing more and more ubiquitous, from being a regular feature in our favorite TV shows to having internet access on our cellphones, businesses today are finding they need to be online and in a big way.  Every aspect of business is now online, from sales (ecommerce) and marketing (social media and SEO), to intracompany communications (email and VOIP), to management and even production.  And as companies become more deeply invested in the web, the more they will seek to make the most of every penny.  Web skills offer the savvy freelancer numerous opportunities today, and show every indication of only offering more in the future.

It appears to be spurred by the internet.  At the time of this post, jobs listed on oDesk for blog and article writing are nearly double the number listed for the next largest category of writing jobs.  While many bemoan the death of dead-tree newspapers, in truth the internet has been a great boon for writers.  Every serious business now needs a webpage, and with the growth of social media, many are beginning to embrace blogging as well.  This means not just a one-time posting of the company’s mission statement, but frequent updates, press releases, and blog posts written in an engaging, inviting style.  The webpage that isn’t updated frequently isn’t visited.  As businesses learn to leverage social media for their marketing, the demand for writers will only grow.  This may explain why over the past year, the number of jobs posted on oDesk for writers has increased over 500%.

There are currently 390 open writing jobs and 762 new jobs posted each month.  There are 19,723 freelance writers on oDesk today.

The growth in jobs, however, is only part of the story.  A good blog post catches peoples’ attention and gets passed on.   Social media networks like Twitter and Digg can carry a story far beyond the original audience.  Google searches can also keep an old story alive long after it was written. To achieve those sorts of results, however, a story has to be interesting and include factual information and hard data.  This means research, so it’s not a bit surprising to see that the growth in hours worked has kept pace with the growth in jobs.  A year ago, we saw 1,081 hours per week on oDesk.  Today, that number is 5,590 hours.

What does the future hold?   The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicted a 10% growth in writing jobs between 2006 and 2016.  Judging by what’s happening at oDesk, this is an extremely conservative estimate.  As companies seek new ways to make use of the social networks becoming a larger part of our daily lives, the demand for good writers will grow.  In spite of YouTube, the internet is still primarily a textual medium.  So long as that is the case, the outlook for writers who can capture the attention of their audience and aren’t afraid of a little research should be good.

One of the great things about capitalism is that it allows companies and individuals to experiment with new ways.  Take UPS and FedEx for example.  While both of their services may appear similar to the casual observer, their business models are as different as day and night.  UPS delivery personnel – the folks in the brown uniforms driving the brown trucks – are full-time employees.  The trucks they drive are provided, gassed, and serviced for them by UPS.  The drivers are unionized and their performance is carefully scrutinized by the company.  The company pays attention to every little detail of their activities to shave off even the smallest inefficiencies.

FedEx drivers, on the other hand, are independent contractors.  They get no benefits, no overtime, no sick leave, and no insurance.  They pay for and maintain their own vehicles.  However, they are given independence in how they operate.  A successful independent contractor can even hire their own drivers and manage multiple routes, allowing them to grow their delivery business.  And FedEx provides very little oversight; so long as the customers are happy, FedEx is happy.

FedEx is neither a young company nor a small one, but it has embraced a new model of doing business.  By utilizing independent contractors for their delivery fleet, they’ve both decreased their own costs and created opportunities for others to run their own businesses.  The independent contractors are now incented to make smart business decisions because of their impact to their own bottom lines – for them, “raises” come from their own ingenuity, efficiency, and hustle – not their bosses.

It’s not yet clear to what extent America is ready to shift to independent contractors over full-time employees.  What is clear is that American businesses are more willing then ever to experiment with ways to increase their own efficiencies and decrease their expenses.  At oDesk, we’re certainly seeing an increase in outsourcing and homeshoring, as more small businesses discover the value of contractors.  Only time can tell how far this trend will take us.

We surveyed 600 small businesses to determine how the recession is affecting their outsourcing plans.  Our survey results showed that 41.9% said they planned to outsource more in the near future, either because they’ve cut full-time staff (7.0%) or because they’re simply unable to hire full-time staff (34.9%).  They are also outsourcing more functions than ever before – 28.5% said they are now outsourcing something that they previously thought they couldn’t.   In light of such numbers, it’s hardly any surprise that 14.6% of them report that they have replaced employees with contractors in the last year, and 14.5% have hired a contractor who would have been otherwise unemployed or a victim of the economic downturn.

It should come as no shock, then, that many who have lost work recently are turning to freelancing.  32.1% of the 350 freelancers we surveyed reported that they’d lost their job within the last year.  A majority (59.0%) said that if they weren’t providing freelance services, they wouldn’t be able to meet their financial obligations and nearly a third (32.4%) said freelance earnings are their primary source of income.  A vast majority said that there are enough jobs on oDesk to meet their needs (73.9%) and feel they are earning fair rates (77.9%).  They cited “flexibility to live and work anywhere” as the number one reason for using our platform, followed by guaranteed payment for hourly work and the ability to set their own hourly rate.

American workers seem to be doing well in the global marketplace.  53.9% of the surveyed small businesses reported employing at least some U.S.-based contractors, while 84.3% of U.S. contractors are working for a U.S.-based buyer.

Outsourcing on oDesk nearly tripled during 2008, and the trend looks likely to continue.

It may be too early to describe what’s happening as a seismic shift in how Americans find and relate to work.  However, the numbers do clearly show a greater acceptance of contract work in the general culture.  Clearly, U.S. businesses are taking full advantage of the pool of freelance talent that’s out there, at the same time that more and more people are discovering the possibilities that contract work provides.

Ruby is a dynamic, reflective general purpose object-oriented language designed in Japan.  It supports multiple programming paradigms, and combines syntax inspired by Perl with Small-talk like features.  Founder Yukihiro Matsumoto “wanted a language that was more powerful than Perl, and more object-oriented than Python,” so he developed Ruby.

Python is another multi-paradigm language conceived in the Netherlands.  Simplicity and flexibility are central to the design of Python.  Python was designed to encourage the creation of extensions, rather than having everything built into the language core, allowing programmers to customize it.

Until recently, Ruby has been greatly outpacing Python.  Our oDesk job data shows that a year ago, Ruby jobs outnumbered Python jobs four-to-one.  Today, that lead has dropped to approximately two-to-one.

There are 1,838 Ruby programmers and 1,175 Python programmers on oDesk.

One possible reason for Python’s recent surge is Google’s choice of Python for implementing its Google App Engine applications.  Google’s App Engine allows you to run web applications on Google’s infrastructure, giving you stability and reliability, and also allowing you to utilize things like Google accounts.

The momentum appears to be with Python for now, and is likely to stay that way so long as Google favors the language. And since Python’s author, Guido van Rossum, works at Google, that’s not likely to change soon.  This fight’s not over, as Python clearly has a lot of ground to make up on Ruby.  But things seem to be going Python’s way today.

In spite of some strong growth by Apple’s Mac OS X operating system in the last few years, Microsoft Windows still rules the roost with nearly 90% market share.  This doesn’t seem likely to change in the near future.  The ability to write code for computers running Windows continues to be a valuable skill and the .NET software framework is a key component of many applications.

A major reason the .NET software framework is valuable is that it was designed with Windows in mind.  This means, among other things, that installing an application built on .NET is simplified, since issues such as potential conflicts with other software and security are largely handled for you.  .NET programs also run under the Common Language Runtime, which means you don’t need to jump through a lot of hoops to optimize your code for all sorts of different memory configurations.  Programmers also have access to a large library of .NET classes that manage common functions like manipulating files or handling graphics.  And, since .NET is the backbone of many popular programming languages, like C#, VB.NET, and Cobra, .NET coding skills can improve your ability to code in these languages.

Now, let’s take a look at .NET jobs on oDesk.

As you’d expect from a bedrock skill like .NET, demand has remained steady, despite the difficult economy.  Over 225 .NET jobs are posted each month on oDesk, for the over 4,300 .NET Developers on oDesk to apply for.  In good times and bad, we all rely on our computers to get our work done.  So long as Windows maintains its dominance in the businessplace, .NET should continue to enjoy such strong, unwavering demand.

This tutorial is a good place to start if you’re interested in mastering the .NET framework.  Microsoft, of course, maintains a Developer Center for .NET users as well.  The BCL Team, in charge of maintaining the Basic Class Library that .NET programmers utilize for handling the little common tasks that pepper most projects, also have a blog.

WordPress is open-source and free.  One of WordPress’s major strengths is the variety of widgets available for the platform. Widgets are small programs that add extra features to your blog.  Many of these are behind-the-scenes sorts of things to make life easier for the blogger, but others, like the animated tag cloud towards the bottom-right of this blog are fun toys for readers to play with.  And since WordPress was designed with a such a flexible plugin architecture, bloggers and developers will continue to improve upon what is already available as blogging continues to evolve.

Now, let’s take a look at WordPress’s growth on oDesk.

In early 2008, there were just over a hundred WordPress jobs posted per month on oDesk.  A year later, it’s grown to over 500, and the growth seems to be accelerating.  This growth seems recession proof, likely because as budgets get tighter, and companies are looking for ways to stretch every dollar, they are realizing that blogging is a cheap but effective way of furthering a company’s marketing goals.  But, to make the most of a blog, companies need someone who can infuse it with their style, branding, and look-and-feel.  That’s where WordPress developers, like the 3,351 on oDesk, can provide value.

The best way to learn more about WordPress is to start your own WordPress blog.  The official WordPress site has almost everything you need to get started.  Be sure to check out their Plugin Directory to find all the latest editions and widgets available to make your blog unique.  You can then turn your new blog into a showcase of your (or your company’s) many talents.

PHP, a scripting language that delivers customizable content on web pages, is all in sorts of popular sites — Yahoo, Digg, Facebook … If you’re on the web these days, that’s probably PHP in the background. It’s flexible, stable and free — and extremely popular with Web 2.0 developers.

The language was developed in 1994 and has relentlessly expanded ever since. These days, PHP 5, powered by Zend Engine II, is no longer the up-and-coming iteration – it’s now fully mainstream.

In early 2008, there were just over a thousand PHP jobs posted per month on oDesk. A year later, it’s 2,000 and climbing, a 75% percent year-over-year increase. There’s not a lot in today’s business world growing at that rate, is there? But the global economic meltdown doesn’t seem to be turning this growth curve around. We’ve been talking about PHP for a while now — back in December, we listed PHP as the web developer skill in most demand, and highlighted its meteoric rise: from 800 jobs posted in November 2007 to 1,800 last July. Clearly, PHP is a skill with legs.

If you’re a PHP developer there is every indication you skills will remain marketable for the next decade. As with any technical skill, maintaining and increasing your skill set should be part of day to day living. PHP training is available online and in formal classes if you are not one to learn as you go. The PHP development page is an obvious good first start and w3schools offers some excellent tutorials also.

Once you have the basics down, it might be time to visit Zend’s website for some more in-depth training, with an eye towards certification. Certification from Zend will carry weight in any interview and establishes a formally measured minimum level of competence. Now that PHP is fully mainstream and the level of competition has increased, certification can be expected to be a given as opposed to a bonus like many other mainstream technologies. Certification will give you an advantage over developers who are not in this competitive job market. Once certified, you can join our own Zend Group as a location employers will look to find fully certified PHP developers as an added resource for your job search arsenal.

Facebook and iPhone are, of course, very different platforms.  One is the leading social network, whereas the other is the world’s fastest growing device.  Not only are these different technologies, they also follow different business models.  Facebook apps are free and depend on traffic and advertising for revenue.  iPhone apps, on the other hand, are either free or charge installation or upgrade fees, usually $0.99 to $2.99.  Distribution of facebook apps is primarily viral (via invites, newsfeed, etc) whereas iPhone applications are downloaded via Apple’s app store.

However, both technologies, and application development for each, have captured mainstream imagination.  So let’s look at the numbers!  There are currently 1,246 Facebook Developers on oDesk.  Demand for Facebook app development rose fast at the beginning of 2008, plateaued, then started a dramatic upswing late in the year, peaking at 159 job posts last month.  Meanwhile, over on the iPhone aisle, we see a much steeper, more prolonged rise in demand starting last May.  217 iPhone jobs were posted last month.  There are 561 iPhone programmers on oDesk.

(Caveat: oDesk is a growing service, so upward trends can partly be attributed to our growth).

Looking at both the January 2009 totals and the angle of these rising curves, it’s clear that iPhone has caught, and is now beating Facebook for developer demand.  Considering Facebook’s head start, and its 175 million users, iPhone’s rising popularity is even more impressive.  Apple’s old-fashioned “make it, sell it, cash the check” business model seems to be humming along while the social networking app business model is a longer-term play.

That’s our latest technology-versus-technology cage match, but the hard-core stats fan can find tons more data on iPhone, Facebook and more than 40 other skills and platforms on our Trends pages.  Comments are open — let us know what you think of the iPhone/Facebook comparison, or tell us which trends you think we should be spotlighting.

1)    Is outsourcing growing or shrinking as companies are tightening their belts in the recession?
2)    Is competition for freelance jobs heating up?
3)    If so, are wages being depressed?

As a marketplace for online workteams, we keep close tabs on outsourcing trends, including growth, wage statistics, and country-by-country comparisons.  We share as much of this data as possible with our community of businesses & freelancers in our oConomy. This analysis is based off of oConomy data.

1. The growth of outsourcing
Jobs aren’t just being slashed these days — they’re being clearcut like an old-growth forest. Yet work still has to get done, which is why freelancing and outsourcing continue to grow at a furious rate. With unemployment rates at their highest in 15 years, more skilled professionals are looking for freelance work, and leaner companies are looking to outsource functions rather than hire more full-time staff. The bottom line: Last year, outsourcing on oDesk nearly tripled.

This broad-based trend, stretching across continents, had an interesting twist — a resurgence of homeshoring, in which U.S. buyers outsource to U.S. providers.  We reported on this trend earlier this month.  Notice that growth in the amount of work done in the U.S. was faster relative to other countries known for outsourcing, like India and Russia:

We concluded that higher satisfaction rates are helping U.S. workers gain ground against the often cheaper competition overseas.

2. Competition for jobs
Although more freelance work is happening than ever, there are also more people looking to do it, which gives more leverage to employers. Eighteen months ago, there were 2.5 service providers for each buyer. Today, there are nearly 4.

More jobs means more providers are finding work than ever before, but that spike in competition means it takes new workers longer to find their first jobs and get themselves established. In January 2007, 11% of providers found their first job within 90 days of signing up on oDesk. Today, that number is down to 3%.

Increased competition leaves the freelance provider with two recourses as she shapes her resume, especially in tech-oriented categories such as software development: Pursue the skills and jobs showing the greatest growth in 2008, or those with the least competition.

3. Wages
You’d expect greater competition to push down pay rates. Surprisingly, oDesk is seeing wages within countries escape that downward spiral. For example, our U.S. hourly rate stats show key areas holding steady or, for highly technical skills such as software development, actually rising.

So there are more people competing for jobs, but it seems that not everyone is truly competitive.  The provider with valuable skills and the ability to market himself online and deliver results over great distances can still demand healthy rates.

So what’s the state of the freelance economy from our perspective? The bad news is the same that you’re reading in every newspaper — full-time workers are losing their jobs, and companies are tightening their belts. The good news, though, is that there there is more freelance work than ever, and the smart, skilled freelancer is well-positioned to thrive.  And, of course, businesses have more qualified freelancers to choose from than ever.

There are currently 4,695 Joomla developers on oDesk, and 201 open jobs.  Joomla has shown steady growth over the last two years, from 300 jobs posted per month at the start of 2008 to over 500 today.  The average Joomla job size is 125 hours.

There are about half as many Drupal developers (2,212) and jobs (108) on oDesk, but the average job is almost twice the size, at 234 hours.  Drupal, too, has shown steady growth from 125 jobs posted per month last year to 250 today.

So, Drupal jobs have half the frequency and are twice the length, which may point to the platform being used more by larger enterprises, vs. smaller projects for smaller businesses for Joomla.  Although there are fewer Drupal jobs for providers to choose from, it seems to be much less competitive of a skill.  In fact, it made our list of the top 10 skills with the least competition and most opportunity, which we published in December.

In any case, it looks like both Joomla and Drupal have sizable communities and continue to grow.  Providers with PHP skills should certainly promote them on their resumes to improve their marketability.

Now, onto the question you have been waiting for – which CMS is ‘better’?  It doesn’t matter — both have a lot of buyers looking to spend money.  Both have their own strengths & weaknesses when it comes to factors such as ease-of use, compatibility to databases like MySQL and Postgres, and interoperability with various elements like Shopping Carts, Event Calendars, and Themes.  They have been, and continue to be, analyzed time and again by knowledgeable experts (see here, here, and here.)  But don’t let that stop you from telling us which CMS is better.  What’s a blog for, if not passionate techie arguments?

We see over 11,000 jobs posted every month, and historically many of those jobs have gone offshore to lower-cost countries.  But, oDesk is a free market, and over the past year we’ve seen a resurgence in homeshoring, or U.S. companies outsourcing to U.S.-based talent. Why is this the case?  While rates are higher for U.S. providers, feedback scores tend to be higher, too.

Work done in the U.S. grew at a rate of 367% from 2007 to 2008, 50% faster than oDesk’s overall rate of growth.

This growth was faster relative to other countries known for outsourcing, like India and Russia.

One driver for offshore outsourcing has been the lower cost of living in other countries like the Philippines and Ukraine.  Software developers and other skilled professionals in these countries require less income than their counterparts in the U.S.  As seen in the chart below, the U.S. average hourly rate is more than $6 higher than our average.

In fact, when we break U.S. rates into job categories, we see that they are actually rising in skilled categories like software development.

So then why are businesses choosing to outsource their jobs to U.S.-based providers?  One possible explanation is that there are more U.S. providers today, providing buyers a wider variety of U.S.-based skills and experience, than ever before. In December alone, over 20,000 new U.S. providers signed up on oDesk, the largest monthly percentage increase (over 40%) that we have seen since 2005.  Other possible reasons could be better ability to co-ordinate due to time-zone differences or fewer language and cultural barriers.  Regardless of the exact cause, the chart below shows that U.S. providers’ average feedback score has been consistently higher than the oDesk average:

It seems that customer satisfaction on work done by U.S. freelancers is playing a key role in this promising new trend for talented U.S. professionals.  It goes to show that outsourcing is not just about finding the lowest price, and that’s why U.S. professionals are able to command higher rates.  We will keep monitoring this trend and keep you updated on our findings.

Один из самых простых способов определить степень трудолюбия, это посмотреть, сколько люди работают. Итак, сначала мы посмотрели на среднее количество часов, отработанных пользователями каждой из 7 стран, возглавляющих наш список, в 2008 г. – всего за год, и по дням.

*Общее количество часов, отработанных активными пользователями в каждой из стран, поделенное на количество отработанных человеко-часов.

Пользователи из России возглавляют список по количеству часов в год, и занимают второе место по количеству часов в день.

Причин, по которым некоторые пользователи работают больше, чем другие, несколько. Пользователи с высоким рейтингом, скорее всего, работают больше, потому что меньше времени тратят на поиск работы (Россия занимает середину списка из этих 7 стран со своим средним баллом в 4.30 из 5). Так же, пользователи, работающие над продолжительным проектом, работают больше, чем те, которые заняты краткосрочным заданием. Кроме того, пользователи с более низкой почасовой ставкой, как правило, работают большее количество часов (средняя ставка пользователей из России – $16.86, и она находится в более дорогой части спектра).

В дополнение к количеству отработанных часов, мы также рассмотрели усилия пользователей по прохождению квалификационных тестов. Эти тесты позволяют пользователям продемонстрировать потенциальным заказчикам свой опыт в разных областях. Мы исходим из того, что вероятно, что те, кто проходит больше тестов и получает по ним более высокие баллы, также более трудолюбив.

Пользователи из России занимают первое место как по количеству пройденных тестов, так и по полученным за них баллам.

Пользователи из России заняли первое место по трем из четырех рассмотренных нами показателям, и, таким образом, получается, что русские самие трудолюбивые. Так что, следующий раз, когда у вас будет особо трудное задание, рассмотрите в качестве возможного кандидата русского разработчика Ruby-on-Rails с высоким рейтингом – Дмитрия Сокуренко (нажмите на фото, чтобы увидеть его резюме). Конечно, к этому анализу нужно относиться с долей сомнения. Индивидуальные различия между пользователями намного перевешивают различия национальные, поэтому необходимо найти такого работника, который лучше всего пойдет для ваших нужд.

Если вам было интересно следить за нашим анализом (нам точно было интересно), и вы хотите еще, посмотрите раздел oConomy – богатый источник интересной статистики по аутсорсингу. Например, посмотрите на нашу странцу Аутсорсинг в России, где вы найдете более подробную статистику по России. Обобщенная информация представлена в недавно созданной Презентации по статистике по аутсорсингу в России в 2008 г.

(Russian translation of the previous post)

One straightforward way to measure hard work is to look at how much people are working.  So, we began by looking at the average number of hours worked by service providers in each of our top 7 countries in 2008, total and per day.

*Total hours worked by active service providers in each country divided by man-days worked

Russian providers top the list in terms of hours per year, and came in 2nd for hours per day.

There are several reasons why some providers may work more than others.  Providers with higher customer satisfaction scores may work more hours because they spend less time looking for work (Russians’ average feedback score of 4.30 falls in the middle of the spectrum of these 7 countries).  Similarly, providers working on longer-term projects tend to work more hours than those working on shorter gigs.  Finally, providers with lower hourly rates tend to work more hours (Russia’s average hourly rate of $16.86 is towards the more expensive side of the spectrum).

In addition to the number of hours worked, we also considered individuals’ efforts in qualification tests.  These tests allow providers to demonstrate proficiency in various skills to the businesses that hire them.  Presumably, those taking more tests, and scoring higher, are working harder.

Russians providers rank first for both the number of tests taken and their scores on qualification tests.

The Russians came in ranked #1 for three out of the four metrics we considered, and thus it appears that perhaps Russians do work the hardest.    So, next time you’ve got a really tough assignment, consider hiring a Russian like top-rated Ruby-on-Rails developer Dmitry Sokurenko (click photo to see profile).  Of course, this analysis needs to be taken with a grain of salt.  Individual differences between providers far outweigh national differences, so you need to find the right provider for your needs.

If you had fun with this analysis (we did), and want to do more, visit the oConomy, which is a goldmine of interesting statistics on outsourcing. For example, take a look at our Outsourcing to Russia page for more complete stats on Russia.  Summary stats can also be found in our recently created 2008 Russia Outsourcing Statistics Report.

Today we are going to examine the growth of Linux from oDesk‘s perspective (oDesk is a marketplace for online workteams), looking at supply and demand for Linux-related freelance work and the geographies it is taking place in.

Today, oDesk typically has 175-200 jobs posted per month with the “Linux” keyword in them.  A yearly snapshot of this metric shows serious growth.

*Job openings with “Linux” as a keyword

Linux jobs are clearly on the rise, but a more interesting piece of trivia is that there are currently 87 open jobs with the keyword “Linux,” compared to 134 jobs with “Windows” and 43 jobs with “Mac.” This indicates a 32% market share for Linux among new jobs, significantly higher than the 12.7% share of the server market and 1-2% share of the desktop market that Linux owns according to Wikipedia.  Of course, to suggest that Linux truly has a 32% market share on oDesk is aggressive; many job posters do not specify that they prefer Windows — it’s just assumed.  But perhaps this is a leading indicator of Linux’s continued growth on oDesk.

Looking at which countries are embracing Linux, we see the United States dominates in both posting Linux jobs and providing Linux professional services.  But, this may be (and probably) is a reflection of the location distributions of oDesk’s buyers and providers.

*Job openings, last 12 months, with “Linux” listed as a required skill

*Providers with “Linux” listed in their profile titles

Finally, let’s look at what Linux distributions, if any, are requested in job postings.  We find the following data, which shows that the work is, in fact, spread out between several distributions.

*All-time occurrences of jobs with linux distribution keywords on oDesk.

The upshot seems to be that buyers of professional services around the world investing hard cash in Linux-related jobs is a tribute to the platform’s success and credibility.  It seems Linux is here to stay with respectable growth compared to other job skill trends. What do you think? The comment thread is open …

Trouble is, oDesk doesn’t collect gender info from our remote providers — so we had to do it the hard way.  We took a sampling of 3,000 providers and divided the likely men (the Marks, Dmitriys, and Sanjays) from the likely women (the Jennifers, Olgas, Priyankas).  We threw out the names that could go either way (Robins, Shannons, Valeriys).  Here’s what we got:

The sample suggests that men outnumber women on oDesk by four to one.  Not surprising, since most of the professionals on oDesk are tech-related (like php programmers & ruby on rails programmers), and the engineering gender gap is well-known.  According to the National Science Foundation, fewer than 20 percent of engineering graduates in the U.S. are women.

However, it’s quality that we’re interested in, not quantity, so let’s look at the feedback provided by employers to their freelance professionals:

*These averages were computed with a standard error of 0.049, and are statistically significant with a p-value of 0.009 (for all the hard-core statisticians).

So there are the numbers, folks — women deliver the goods to their employers, 3.5 percent better, on average. (Gentlemen, that sound you’re hearing is thousands upon thousands of female remote workers cranking up Aretha’s “Respect.”) We know, of course, that in the real world, it all comes down to the individual you’re hiring, not how many X chromosomes he or she has. Still, we’re wondering whether any employers of remote workers would like to share their experiences.  Managers of provider companies that include small armies of remote workers might also chime in.  Have you noticed a gender-based difference, and did it contradict or confirm your expectations?

And hey there, remote-workin’ fellas — you may have the numerical advantage now, but our workplace for non-techie jobs is growing fast, so we expect more women to enter our marketplace in 2009.  You think the competition might start heating up?

Today we’re going to have some fun with numbers by trying to calculate “value for money” between countries in hiring contractors to your workteam. The following table summarizes oDesk’s average hourly rates and feedback scores in each of our top 7 provider countries.

*We’ve only broken out the rates for software development and data entry; there are many other categories of work on oDesk that aren’t listed here.

Looking at this data, it’s obvious that there is much greater variance in average hourly rates ($6.33 to $19.60) than feedback scores (4.01 to 4.40). We therefore scale the numbers to percentiles to compare between countries. We then do a quick-and-dirty calculation, averaging the percentiles, and finally rank the countries to determine their relative “value for money.”

The results … the Philippines and Pakistan rank the highest in this admittedly simplistic analysis, which must be taken with a grain of salt. There are many factors to be taken into consideration when hiring contractors to your workteams. But, in the meantime, congratulations to providers in these two countries for topping the list! Fans of outsourcing to the Philippines and Pakistan will also be glad to know that they were also the fastest growing countries on oDesk, by hours worked, from 2007-2008.

If you had fun with this analysis (we did), and want to do more, visit the oConomy, which is a goldmine of interesting statistics on outsourcing. For example, take a look at our Outsourcing to Philippines and Outsourcing to Pakistan pages for more complete stats on these countries. 2008 outsourcing summary stats can also be found in our recently created Philippines and Pakistan slideshare presentations.< –>

We are going to take a look today at the technologies or skills that enjoyed the greatest percentage increase in 2008 by keywords listed in job postings on oDesk. The numbers in the table below show the number of job postings on oDesk in which the skills were listed as “required,” and their relative increase from the end of 2007 to the end of 2008. You will notice some variance in the numbers between the table and the charts below as the numbers on the charts show keyword mentions in the job post titles, not required skills.

*Because writing, graphic design, and excel have small starting points, we believe their change reflects oDesk growth, not a general trend.

Since oDesk is a job board for freelance and contract technical jobs, the numbers here may vary from permanent placement job data. There are definitely other skills that are in more demand as noted here and here but these skills represent the greatest increase by percentage in 2008.

Blogging seems to dominate as a tech growth area in 2008. Demand for WordPress designers has increased by more than 4 times. Demand for freelance writers, a good portion of which are online or blog related, more than tripled.

Website (or blog) development and design show up elsewhere on our list with strong demand growth shown for SEO consultants, XHTML designers, Drupal developers, Joomla developers, CSS designers and Graphic Designers.  This list really shows that “web presence” and any of the skills associated with this area were the fastest growing area in 2008.

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Linux continues its march into the mainstream with its 152% increase.

We’ve summarized this data in our latest presentation on the fastest growing skills in 2008:

Enjoy!

Due to the popularity of our Web Developer Skills in Most Demand post last week, we thought we would follow up with more interesting information from the oDesk Trends vaults to assist you develop your resume to stay employed in these challenging economic times. Last week we looked at the base number of job postings for various web technologies and skills over the past year on the oDesk job boards. This week, we will look at various skills and technologies and the competition, or lack thereof, for them. A look at the supply compared to the demand.

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In viewing these numbers, keep in mind this is for oDesk which is primarily concerned with placement for freelance and contract positions. As noted by some of our .NET and Java brethren from the previous post’s comment section, this may vary with respect to full time placement numbers. We think the data is useful to all.

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In looking at the table below we give you three columns, one with the skill or technology, the second with the average jobs posted per month and the last with the Fill ratio below average. The Fill Ratio Below Average will show the competition for these postings as these jobs are not getting filled at our usual rate. A high number indicates great job opportunities whereas a 0% score indicates all those jobs get filled at our usual rate. Anything not on this list is getting filled at a high rate indicating above average competition for the skill or technology.

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First up, Database Modeling has the lowest fill rate which means the competition is lowest in this particular field but the postings are in the lower ranges of 63 per month.

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Moving down the table we see that Drupal developers are in demand with 187 jobs posted per month and a 32% below average fill rate. PHP is very popular and competitive on oDesk but developing some specialist knowledge of the Drupal CMS might give you an edge in this field.

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The .NET languages have a good showing in demand with ASP.NET developers being most favored and most competitive and C#.NET being the least competitive but with a respectable 205 job postings per month.  

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Java developers and Ruby on Rails developers are similar in fairly high demand per month (180-230 postings per month) and the competition below our average in the 13-18% region below average fill rate.

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AJAX programmers are in high demand with 707 jobs posted requiring this skill and the competition is below average at 11%. This seems like an essential element for any web developer to have on his resume.

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There you have it! Hopefully some useful information when guiding your career path. More information can be found on the skills and languages above as well as many other tech skills on our Trends page.

                     While these may not be a great revelation to many, included below are the web development skills that will get you employed now and by all evidences of their growth, for the foreseeable future. Knowing and being professional in at least some of the skills below to maximize your prospects for being employed.

                     In looking at these graphs, keep in mind that oDesk is a growing site so even a flat trend is a potential sign of decreasing demand.

 PHP

PHP is by far the most in-demand web development programming language right now. As you can see from the graph, it has enjoyed a steady climb from November 2007 leveling off in July 2008 at a spectacular 1400 jobs posted. The demand for PHP development work has tripled over the period of a mere 9 months.

AJAX

The demand for developers with AJAX in their resume or portfolio is also in high demand as the average web page has evolved well beyond animated icons, the presentation and need for a smooth user experience in the front end is more and more essential. The skill enjoyed very similar growth to PHP above from November 2007 to July 2008 where it leveled off holding at around 450 job postings.

 Javascript

As with the 2 skills above, Javascript enjoys high demand and has a similar shape in demand over the past year. As of November 2008, Javascript demand is steady at 400 after a slight decline since July 2008 but overall demand has doubled over the year.

 XML

XML is very dominant in web job postings and would seem like a relatively short learning curve to get capable in since it is not a language but a simple framework for describing and manipulating data. XML has very steadily increased over the past year, almost tripling.

MySQL

MySQL dominates the databases as the data storage method of choice. Increasing to nearly triple over the past year and holding steady at over 1000 jobs posted for the past 8 months.

 CSS

Cascading Style Sheets is now the way to maintain a uniform professional way to monitor the appearance of modern websites. This method is designer friendly too since one design change does not mean editing every page on a single website but instead one or a few style sheets. It too has near tripled over the past year and holds steady at close to 100 jobs posted.

 Graphic Design

Graphic Design is a very in demand skill and although not everyone can color coordinate or design their own icons, if you have any artistic ability or if you can train in it to develop some skills, this will round out your resume nicely. Graphic design demand has tripled over the past year and continues to grow to over 1400 postings.

                     That’s it. These are the skills to have to ensure your resume is not up for long if needed at all. A full view of these skills and 40 more can be seen in our trends page should that interest you.

We’ve pulled together statistics on our top provider countries in the outsourcing oConomy to help you find answers to these questions.  We’ve created 7 “featured country” pages, each with an interactive map showing top provider cities, charts showing the country’s hourly rates & average feedback versus the oDesk average, and breakdowns of the type of work being done in each country.  We’ve also included other useful information, including time zones, holidays, and languages spoken in the countries, and listed each country’s most active providers.

We hope that the pages will be a valuable resource to both buyers (in making oDesk hiring decisions), and providers (in comparing their statistics to their country averages).  We encourage a healthy discussion around these statistics, and feedback on what other stats may be interesting & useful down the road.  Links to the new Featured Country pages are below:

• Canada
• India
• Pakistan
• Philippines
• Russia
• Ukraine
• United States 

The stats have also been summarized in a slideshare presentation.

oDesk’s programming skill trends show the demand for application development across almost 80 different skills.  You can get an interesting look at the iPhone’s strong initial and continuously increasing demand. 

As you can see in the graph above, we had 40 jobs posted per month in the 3 months from March until June. This shows a very strong belief in Apple and its future as well as a validation of the power of its public relations department in generating strong buzz. This is followed by a dramatic increase in demand for iPhone developers over the next 6 months to 160 jobs per month posted for iPhone application development. Apple “Talked the talk” and then “Walked the walk” by delivering, as it did with the iPod, a product that people wanted to use. 

Google is less aggressive in its release of new products and features. In many cases we are lucky to get a Google blog post on a new product or feature.  Android is not strictly “Google’s” as it is open source and is merely backed by Google. It is not a Google “product” but we can’t help put them together.

The first Android-powered phone snuck out with nowhere near the fanfare of the iPhone release and it shows in its application demand.  Preceding its release, there was literally no demand for application development.

Post release, the demand for application development has increased to a humble 12 jobs per month compared with the iPhone’s very healthy 160 per month. This represents to some the degree the future of the device’s feature set and does not impress at this stage.

In looking at the demand for application development between the iPhone and Android, one can appreciate the power of the Apple PR department, Apples reputation and the continued popularity of the iPhone. Even with Google’s powerful reputation, Android does not even seem to put up a fight with the mighty Apple product. We can’t necessarily count Android out yet, far from it but it has a ways to go yet based upon the past, present and future application development that the iPhone has mustered. 

If you’re feeling overwhelmed trying to keep your remote team in motion, use oDesk to hire a project manager (PM). A good PM minimizes the direct management required on your part, so you can leverage your time and expertise more wisely.

To hire a PM using oDesk you’ve got two options: Search for new candidates, or promote someone who looks promising from your existing team. Either way, you’re looking for exceptional communication skills, business savvy, leadership experience, and technical expertise.

oDesk’s network includes both independent contractors and provider companies with dozens of affiliated contractors working under the same roof. If you hire your PM from a provider company, he will tend to hire from within his company. The downside is that, arguably, there may be better-qualified people for a specific task elsewhere on our network. The upside is that while you are remote, your PM could be on location with his team members, allowing closer management. Plus, a large provider company can quickly move the right people in and out of your team as the project requires.

Once you select your PM, take the time to provide her with in-depth training on your projects. Give your PM ìhiring managerî or ìrecruiterî privileges (in the Team Admin section of My oDesk) and ask her to build your team. Pay attention to whom she interviews and hires and why – discuss how she handles initial recruiting decisions, and offer guidance as needed. Set clear goals, deadlines, and metrics for success. Stay in close communication, and don’t hesitate to reward top-quality results.

We were looking at the total hours worked by all providers and were segmenting the hours by various different criteria. One of the most startling trends we found was the growth in hours worked by providers from the Philippines.

The number of hours worked in Philippines has grown 4x in just 4 months.

The amazing thing to us is the fully viral expansion of work that’s going on in this country. We have not changed anything about our acquisition strategy in the Philippines so this is true word-of-mouth growth. Kudos to the providers that are driving this rapid expansion.

Here’s a few top providers:

I was wondering why conversion ratio was higher on the weekend so I decided to take a look at oDesk data for job postings over the last few months. I took a look at over 10,000 jobs posted and analyzed results based on a few simple criteria.

First, I wanted to understand the distribution of types of jobs posted by day. I put together all the results in Excel and did a pivot table on the day of week. Note that for all of the following charts, 1 = Monday, 7 = Sunday. This first chart shows the total ratio of fixed price jobs posted on the oDesk network by the day of week. Sundays apparently have the highest percentage of fixed price jobs.

Ok, so clearly there is a small bias toward fixed price jobs on the weekends. What about job size? The following chart shows the average estimated hours for hourly jobs (estimated hours = estimated workload in hours per week * estimated duration in weeks). Note that durations over 100 weeks are rounded down to 100 weeks. Clearly, hourly jobs tend to be smallest on Sundays.

Ok, we’re starting to see a trend here. Let’s take a look at Fixed Price jobs. I looked at a chart of Fixed Price job size by day of week posted. You can see in this next chart that the budgets tend to be smaller than the average (the average being 100%) on Friday thru Sunday.

So, jobs that are posted on the weekend tend to be smaller and more urgent than the rest of the jobs posted. Now, remember that the conversion ratio was highest on Saturdays. The way I read this data is that if you’re looking for urgent work, you’re more willing to try anything to get the job done so you’ll convert to a user at a higher rate than normal. Now the last step is to look at the relative value of a customer that signs up for our network by day of week. If the “weekend warrior” types do indeed have small, urgent jobs then they should have a lower lifetime value than the average.

While there is not a huge difference, I think the findings are pretty interesting. Note for providers -> if you’re looking for the best jobs available – make sure you’re looking Mon – Fri.

Feedback systems in online marketplaces are designed to improve the user experience as a whole by allowing users to establish their own reputation and review the reputation of others. Users submit feedback on other users and relay their positive or negative experience so others can review feedback before entering into a transaction or relationship. In theory, it all works great. But it depends on a few key principles:

1) Identity Verification – what if any user could create multiple profiles? Well, then there’s not enough motivation to maintain a positive reputation. If I receive a negative feedback score, no worries, I’ll just create a new profile. Problem solved.

2) Transparency - what if people could leave feedback and comments, but others couldn’t see that feedback? Well, that wouldn’t do much good. If a user has received some negative feedback, others need to know about it.

3) Accuracy - the feedback that users leave on the system must be accurate. This seems simple, but in reality is quite complex. There are a lot of factors that go into a user’s decision about whether or not to leave positive or negative feedback.

4) Consistency - users should all “grade” the same. If a user is just a particularly tough critic, it might throw things off.

For the vast majority of cases, feedback systems work great and we believe oDesk’s system works well too. However, I do want to talk about some potential issues with #3 – accuracy of feedback and the mechanisms that may negatively affect accuracy. Let’s take a look at eBay first – they’re the founder of the feast when it comes to feedback systems, and they’ve announced some very major changes to their feedback system. From eBay’s site:

What changes are being made to the eBay Feedback system?
Sellers will no longer be able to leave negative or neutral Feedback for buyers. This change will occur in May, 2008.

Why is eBay making these changes?
No negative or neutral Feedback for buyers
The current system prevents buyers from leaving honest Feedback as they fear retaliation from the sellers if they leave a negative. This makes it hard for buyers to distinguish between sellers while making bidding or buying decisions. In addition, when buyers receive negative Feedback, they reduce their activity in the marketplace, which in-turn harms all sellers.

So, why have eBay buyers not been leaving accurate feedback. I believe it stems from personal motivation. Let’s say I’m an eBay buyer and I had a bad experience. I could leave negative feedback, but that might end up hurting my reputation if I get retaliatory negative feedback. So, why leave negative feedback, it only benefits the next user, not me.

Now let’s look at oDesk. I don’t think it’s as simple as the eBay feedback system since eBay is all about point transactions. The transaction is arranged, paid, and completed all within a couple days. At oDesk, it’s all about relationships, which are often ongoing and may result in repeat transactions. So, let’s look at some of the possible issues that may arise near the end of a relationship? Let’s say that buyer x has been working with provider y for 3 months on a website. It’s nearing completion, and now there are a few things that might happen (note: oDesk’s feedback system is bi-directional with a 1-5 scale):

• If everything went great, both parties will know that perfect 5 feedback scores will result.
• If the provider is expecting a 4-4.9 feedback, provider might email buyer explicitly asking for a 5.
• If the provider is expecting a lower score, the provider may, in the worst cases, blackmail the buyer. eg, “I’ll take down your site, if you don’t give me a good feedback score.” If you’re buyer x, you might as well give a good feedback score since you don’t want to risk your site coming down.

So, the provider looks to be malicious in the example above. What about buyers? Are there ever any issues that crop up with buyers of services? Here’s a couple examples that I’ve heard:

• So, it’s been 3 months and the buyer has exceeded their budget but has changing requirements and still needs more work. The buyer may threaten bad feedback scores unless the provider finishes the remaining work for free.
• The buyer is actually quite happy with the work of the provider and needs to retain full-time work. The buyer, being of low moral character, does not want to give the provider a good feedback score. Why? Because the buyer fears losing the provider to other interested buyers. Or because the buyer does not want the provider to increase the hourly rate based on a strong reputation.

While these issues are the minority of cases with online feedback systems, they have a negative effect on the whole system. I believe the only way to ultimately resolve the issues is to foster open, honest discussion about the feedback system. This post is just a problem statement, solutions are ‘to be determined’. It seems that eBay hasn’t figured it out yet, and I can certainly say that oDesk hasn’t figured everything out. But I can say that we’re dedicated to focus on user quality, and there’s no doubt that the feedback system and its integrity is critical to the success of the marketplace.

ps – if you know the solution, please comment.

Rewind 1 year ago:

-Many users complained about the quality of the test content.
-We didn’t have the bandwidth to review and improve all of the content ourselves.

So, after a number of users had brought the quality to our attention, we launched two new feedback mechanisms.

First, any user could Report an Issue with a specific question.
Second, any user could provide a Content Feedback Score at the completion of the test.

Now, let’s look at today.

Over the course of 1 year, over 2,500 issues have been reported to improve the test content. Together with our testing vendor, ExpertRating, we have used these issues reported by our users to dramatically improve the test content. These improvements are reflected in the content feedback scores from our users; they have gone up 33% from around a 3.0 (out of 5.0) to over 4.0.

This confirms our beliefs that communities are critically important to shaping the product and offering. While it was initially painful to hear the complaints of our users, it forced us to build a solution that allowed the community to get involved. And it has paid off.

The job going forward for oDesk, and for all Web 2.0 companies, is to continue to build in more ways for the community to contribute.

It made me curious to see the trends at oDesk. We have providers all over the world, and should be able to see this trend if it’s really happening.

So here it is:

Looks to me that while the entire market for remote contract labor is growing, the United States is possibly growing most rapidly over the last couple quarters.

Andrew Benkard interviewed oDesk’s CEO, Gary Swart, and here’s part of what he had to say:

“Here’s the problem: you have hired a website designer in Mumbai, India to redesign your site and you are paying her an hourly wage. How do you know she isn’t sipping chai when she should be coding – and perhaps more to this point, how do you know she’s on the right track in terms of what you want? Enter oDesk…”

Read the full article on oDesk in the New York Times.

– This says to me that the provider is professional, can functionally use Photoshop, and gives me a sense of his style.

– I like this one. It shows both individualism as well as the corporate brand of the oDesk affiliate company.

– Another well done portrait showcasing the company name and brand as well as the individual.

– This one makes me feel like she’s already thinking about my design.

– Ok, this guy knows his stuff, a true computer geek with disassembled parts in the background.

– Nice touch, but would prefer more of the face. If I’m looking for an animator, I’m intrigued.

– A bit impersonal since no face, but I like the clever sense of style.

– Hmm. Nothing like showing off a little local scenery I suppose.

– Professional, casual, sincere. I get a sense of the individual as well as the workplace. Quite nice.

Compare the portraits above to this one:

What do you think potential buyers would prefer?

So, upload a portrait. Exercise some creativity, but keep it personal and individual. You only have a brief second to impress buyers in the search results and a good intriguing portrait can capture that attention.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

“Here comes another bubble” has got it all. We stumbled upon this hilarious video from the Richter Scale blog about the sheer ridiculousness of Silicon Valley. It opens up with Peter Thiel (of PayPal fame and an early investor of Facebook), who states:

“There’s absolutely no bubble in technology”

and takes us through the crash of the last bubble to now, where companies like Facebook are being valued at $15 billion (Ford, by comparison, is worth around $16 billion, the video informs us).

If you’re in the Valley (and even if you’re not), you’ll definitely enjoy this clip.

We did want to note one thing: Several media outlets have been buzzing about one bubble indicator: made-up, off-the-beat domain names (the Wall Street Journal calls it the Goofy-Name Index). The video even pokes at several names currently in use (Meebo, Flickr, WikiYou)… etc.

But there is value in having a unique name. For one, people remember it. They associate that word with your company, and your company alone. And when they search for your company, you’re easy to find. Try doing a search for “oDesk” on Google. You’ll find us right away. (And if you’re curious about the origin of our name, check out the oDesk page on Wikipedia).

And after you’re done Googling us, watch the video again. I did, and couldn’t stop laughing (despite weird looks from cubicle-mates).

What also came to mind as we read through the stories is just how connected we all are in today’s economy. Pakistan has gone through Martial Law before, but the effects are now greater due to the interconnected nature of the global economy. Many of us have professional connections with citizens affected by political situations in various countries, and in an increasingly connected society, conflicts reach further than their borders.

The flipside is that our interconnectedness has the ability to move us to action. The more connections we make with citizens in other countries, the more we’re likely to (a) work to understand their culture to improve our communication, (b) empathize with them and (c) prevent and resolve conflicts in order to keep our interconnected economies humming. We hope that in coming years, as business connections through outsourcing increase, that we’ll all feel a greater stake in the political situations in other countries.

For now, however, we wish our friends in Pakistan the best and hope all remain safe.

We’ve seen this trend reflected in our marketplace as well. Take a look at the numerous Buyers on oDesk who are currently seeking personal assistants. These assistants can help busy professionals with a variety of different tasks, including managing databases, preparing documents, taking calls, and booking travel arrangements. Already there are more than 2,000 providers on our network available as “personal assistants.”

What is particularly startling about the trend highlighted in the New York Times is that many of these new outsourcing clients are young. Really young. They’re kids seeking homework and exam help from tutors working on the other side of the globe. This next generation is primed for a working world without borders. Computer savvy, comfortable with communicating online and already experienced in the world of offshoring, by the time this generation hits the workforce, there will be no hesitation in finding outsourcing solutions. They won’t hesitate to look for creative ways to outsource their business tasks and personal lives, leading to further growth in the outsourcing realm.

We have one thing to say: Generation Y (and beyond), oDesk will be ready for you

If you’re considering outsourcing solutions, homeshoring offers some advantages. Your providers are working in similar time zones, which may make it easier to communicate. Additionally, according to Business Week, employees who work from home may be more loyal than on-site employees.

To read more, here are some articles we’ve selected you may want to peruse:

1. Fortune: Commute to work in 30 seconds

2. Management Issues: Homeshoring is where the heart is

3. Seattle Post Intelligencer: ‘Homeshoring’ means that call center might be in someone’s bedroom

4. Small Business Trends: Homeshoring and its impact on small businesses

5. HR and Homeshoring Blog

6. Outsourcing Times: Offshoring vs. Homeshoring

7. IT Business Edge: Homeshoring helps companies improve customer service

8. Arbor Law Blog: Is Homeshoring the new offshoring?

9. Christian Science Monitor: Outsourcing comes home

10. CNN – How to earn more from home

11. CNET -  Homeshoring to trump offshoring?

If you are looking for some providers, check out this search for U.S.-based oDesk providers. Happy home (agent) hunting!

Their post: oDesk is better than RentACoder for small graphics projects

The post reminded me of Logoworks, a place to get your logos, website and other corporate ID materials made quickly and cheaply (indeed Elance has also relaunched itself along those lines, i.e. fixed cost graphics and website design packages). When we revamped the www.odesk.com website, I did a small (the $299 option) logo project with Logoworks to come up with interesting versions of the oDesk logo. Not to redesign it, but use the mockups for inspiration… and also to see Logoworks from the inside. Overall, their site is well designed and the user interface is not confusing. Logoworks gave me initial concepts from 3 designers. I had to choose one of them to continue, and had 2 more revs with that designer.

However, like mobcode, I wish I had more interaction than just a text field to write my thoughts, and I really wish we had a real-time design session. For example, the original oDesk logo was created by Alex Black/turing studio in a 2 hour power session, remote but real-time, with a few people in the company here.

To wrap up, here’s a gallery of some of the logo proofs from Logoworks and Radiopuffin, the design firm that helped us with the new website:

In the end, we stayed with the same much-loved logo, with different colors.

Old logo:

New logo:

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Abid Mohsin

“The office is out people, get over it and out of it.”

Wise words from Nick, the Code Cowboy over at NothingButNoise.

Nick shares our vision of a world where people can work from anywhere they want.

At oDesk, some of us work in an office, while some work at home. Some work in the US, some in Eastern Europe, and some in India. All of use the oDesk platform to work collaboratively. We spend lots of time on Skype and Google Talk.

Nick also has some interesting comments about working with offshore teams, keeping a schedule, and dealing with non-technical customers. Enjoy.

He commends us for – among other things – being responsive, blogging often and interacting with our community, and not being afraid to put oDesk’s software to the test in order to make it better. In a nutshell, for “embrac[ing] the Web 2.0 model of doing business,” as he puts it.

His main gripe? That it’s too difficult and cumbersome for providers to get started on oDesk. For example, he’s not fond of job interviews. “…people tend to ask pretty stupid questions, like, ‘where do you want to be in 5 years’,” he says.

Point taken, Aaron. In fact, making it easier for providers to sign up is priority number one at oDesk. Please stay tuned.

But most heartening of all is this observation: “oDesk has basically brought the traditional workplace to The Web, which is a great accomplishment.” Kudos and criticism aside, it’s awesome to see someone talk about an important part of oDesk’s vision in their own words.

To which I’ll add that what oDesk aspires to do is to use The Web to move beyond the traditional workplace. For one thing, work doesn’t have to be done in a grey cubicle, just because that’s where it’s been done so far. You shouldn’t be limited to working with only those people that happen to live nearby. And ditto with the hiring process. It shouldn’t give a leg up to those that can charm away during an interview. Instead, oDesk now puts the facts on the table. What does a person really know? What have they worked on in the past? How did they do? That’s meritocracy.

Sure, there will always be something like an interview when you are choosing to work with someone. But hopefully the conversation will have more substance once the facts are clear.

		Response Percent
No, I am happy with hourly pay + bonuses		52.7%
Yes, I would like to add minimum commitment from Buyers		12.4%
Yes, I would like to add fixed bid projects from Buyers		9.1%
Yes, I would like to add both minimum commitment from Buyers and fixed bid projects		22.5%
Other (please specify)		3.3%

Sitepoint Tribune has a good article in their newsletter about the dangers of fixed-bid internet projects, arguing that although clients may think fixed-bid is less risky, contractors should be on an hourly basis to align their incentive with the client’s. The relevant portion of the newsletter is pasted below. You can read the entire newsletter here.

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Abid Mohsin

The Danger of Fixed Bid

Fixed bid projects are the scourge of the Internet industry. It’s well known that most estimates prove to be highly inaccurate, and most Internet projects fail to come in on time, or within the original budget.

Internet projects are notoriously difficult to estimate, and most clients require a specific budget for the project. Amazingly, most small business managers will turn around and require a fixed bid from their contractors, thus incurring the very same risk they exposed their clients to by accepting the fixed bid arrangement in the first place.

Think of it this way: if you offer your client a fixed bid, and something goes wrong, you have to incur the additional cost of correcting the problem. You’re creating a situation in which you’re at your least motivated when you client needs you to be firing on all cylinders. Is that how you want your contractors to work for you?

The fact is that fixed bid projects are always at risk of turning into the never ending project, complete with burnt out programmers and diminishing client satisfaction. Just as you wish your client would pay you by the hour (even if it results in a lower total amount), your contractors wish you would extend them the same courtesy.

Whenever possible, try to determine your potential profit margins and pay your contractors by the hour. It will result in increased quality, less fatigue, great satisfaction, and a more successful project overall.

How Can I Pay An Hourly Rate When My Client Has Me On A Fixed Bid?

If you’re on a fixed bid with a client, how can you possibly afford not to have vendors on an hourly rate? It seems as if it would be exceedingly risky and unwise to do so. After all, if there is a problem in the project, you’ll really need my contractors to come through for me. If they’re on a fixed bid and someone makes a mistake, they have to fix it for free and they’re unlikely to maintain motivation. So, your client is ultimately at risk.

How do we make this work? The answer is simple:

Margin

Margin makes a tough situation easy, and lets you sleep at night.

Let’s say I have a client who needs a ground-up Website with an online store and back-end integration. I consider myself to be experienced enough to create fairly accurate estimations, so I’ll break the project down into hourly blocks and resource allocations right at the beginning.

Note: Never estimate value, only estimate time. There is no relevance to project value since rates are arbitrary. The only useful information when projecting project costs are hours worked, which can be multiplied by the hourly rate one the estimations are complete.

So, the project might break down like this:

A total of 174 actual hours are projected.

At a rate of, say, $40/hr for local contractors, the estimated value of the project would be $6,960.

Now, I ask myself what the desired margin is on the project. Given the high potential for scope-creep and bloat on a typical Web project, I’ll want at least to triple the projected hourly requirement, for a total cost of $20,880. Most likely, I’d quadruple it, for a total value of $27,840.

Sound too high? Sure, there’s always someone’s nephew hanging around to take a project for $600. Then again, there are always clients hanging around who have already been burned by the ‘nephew job’ and are ready to pay real money for real work.

If the project is highly complex or the client is very difficult, I won’t hesitate to multiply the projected hours by 6 or even 8 before bidding on the job. As a rule, if you feel that there’s any chance that you might ‘get a haircut’ on a job, you’re selling yourself short. As a Web professional, you are expected to understand the risks of a project and price them accordingly.

If a project spins out of control and you lose money on it, you cannot blame the client or your contractors. We all know how this business goes and the problems that can arise, so be prepared.

CNNMoney.com ranked technical writing as the 13^th best job in America this year, with strong growth and high salaries. Here is a link to the CNNMoney.com report. oDesk has also experienced a recent surge in provider applicants with tech writing experience. As of today, there are 155 tech writers in the oDesk Provider Network, 55 of which have joined in this month alone.

Click here to search for a tech writing job opening.

Click here to search for a tech writer to hire.

Like many things Internet, the era of broadband connectivity was seen as imminent during the go-go days, and then quickly forgotten about when things turned south. Well, it turns out that the baby may have been thrown out with the bathwater, and that reality is finally creeping up on the early hype. So what does this mean for another great promise of the Internet- the ability to unshackle knowledge workers from the claustrophobia of the cubicle? It can’t be too far behind.

And while tech work attracts the spotlight when it comes to remote arrangements, the stats regarding the US are especially promising with regard to the myriad of other types of knowledge work- such as tech writing- where the US has an especially talented workforce. We’re sure to hear more of this story, so stay tuned.