Archive for the ‘Features’ Category


We were thrilled to be a part of Good Morning America’s Great American Job Fair in Atlanta yesterday (we’ve included some pictures in this post from when we had a few open moments), and if you were watching GMA, you may have even caught a glimpse of our booth during Tory Johnson’s segment about Cheryl Ludwig and her use of oDesk. In fact, Cheryl’s oDesk success story seems to have inspired a lot of people because a massive number of new accounts were created on oDesk yesterday, and we even took the top spot on Google Trends. Therefore, we’d like to take this opportunity to welcome all of our new users! Feel free to examine our Features and FAQs to get a better idea of how oDesk works.

It’s always exciting to spread the word about oDesk, and the interest and enthusiasm that was shown by the people that we talked to helped to make the event a great success for us. Of course, it didn’t hurt to have Cheryl at the table right next to us because she told everyone who stopped by how much oDesk has changed her life. 



Thanks to Tory and Cheryl for all of their support!

Our Booth
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Tory Johnson
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Cheryl Ludwig
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Cheryl on Good Morning America
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February 2nd, 2008 by Josh

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

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

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

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

oDesk - PHP Jobs | oDesk - Drupal Jobs | oDesk - Joomla Jobs

oDesk - Design Jobs | oDesk - Writing Jobs | oDesk - SEO Jobs

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

December 19th, 2007 by Michelle

We’ve releasing a new feature that allows you to create custom RSS feeds for your RSS reader or site!

Looking for high-paying copy editing jobs to advertise on your forums? How about programming jobs that demand specific skills? Don’t waste your time wading through job posts — have them sent directly to you.

How does it work?

1. Select your job search criteria. Let’s say you’re a PHP developer interested in only long-term projects that pay per hour.

Head over to our job search page and enter in the criteria that fits your project. In this example, we’ve entered:

* Keyword: PHP (only in titles and skills)

* Hourly Jobs only (Full Time: 30+ hours/week)

* Buyers with at least 1 job (this will include buyers with some experience)

Click “search” and you get jobs that fit that specific criteria. To have those jobs sent to your RSS Reader, right click the RSS link on the right hand side of the screen to copy the link. Paste it into your RSS Feed Reader and when those jobs are posted on our site, they’ll be sent straight to you!

April 30th, 2007 by Michael

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

oDesk Debit MasterCard, powered by Payoneer

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

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

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

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

February 21st, 2007 by Jason

Hey oDesk-ers,

We are excited to announce that oDesk now offers the option to post fixed price jobs. This option is in addition to the hourly jobs we currently support.

What is Fixed Price?

Fixed Price lets buyers hire a provider to do a job for specific bid amount. The buyer then pays once the provider successfully completes the job’s requirements.

Why Fixed Price?

We’ve been listening to the oDesk Community, and here are some examples of what we’ve heard. Users told us that while an hourly relationship is great for longer projects with changing requirements, fixed price was often preferable for shorter projects with fixed requirements.

How to use Fixed Price?

  • Buyers – go to www.odesk.com and post a job, and you’ll have the fixed price option next to our standard hourly option.
  • Providers - go to the jobs page, and select “Fixed Price”

We’d love for you try it and let us know what you think.

Check out the Fixed Price FAQ in Community to see why we’re launching fixed price, how it works, and what it means for you.

Thanks!

Jason

December 1st, 2006 by Abid

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

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

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

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

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Abid Mohsin

We launched a new feature yesterday that will allow Providers to forward emails from their odesk.com email account to their personal email accounts.

Some context:

  • Buyers signup with their personal email address and are not given an odesk.com email account. All emails are sent to their personal email accounts
  • Providers signup with their personal email address, and are given an odesk.com email account . All oDesk notifications and communications from Buyers are sent to their odesk.com email account
  • Providers previously had to set up a desktop client (like Outlook Express) or log in through a web interface to check their oDesk email (https://secure.odesk.com/webmail/src/login.php)

Now, Providers can simply have all oDesk email auto-forwarded to their personal email accounts. They can enable or disable this at any time.

From our “What’s New” feature release log:

While this sounds like an obvious enhancement, our decision to proceed with it was the result of a bigger debate. The question that we face on a recurring basis is the extent to which, we, oDesk, should try to enforce best practices in our marketplace-workplace or we should just provide options and let our users decide how they want to work.

The debate is meaningful not only for the email issue, but for every part of our service,

  • Should we require providers to communicate using only their oDesk email or not?
  • Should providers pick any userid they want or should we standardize the userids?
  • Should we allow providers to join oDesk with or without having taken a few minimal tests?
  • Should we expect that all buyers and providers speak one language, English?
  • Should we allow providers to apply to as many job openings as they want?
  • Should we require buyers to prove they have the money to pay before hiring? before posting?
  • Should we allow “offline hours” in the weekly timelog? Should we act when there are too many offline hours?
  • Should we contract with providers and buyers or just offer templates and let users contract among themselves?

etc etc.

One could argue that enforcing discipline and processes would add friction and would limit our ability to grow. Besides, it is arrogant to believe that we, oDesk, know better than our users.
On the other hand we have seen that efficient networks of individuals have to rely on common structures, processes, protocols to work together.
What is the right balance?

Read more
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Abid Mohsin

November 11th, 2006 by Abid

Another big feature to make it to the release schedule this week is an improvement to the oDesk Feedback (read the other two features here and here). An excerpt from the “What’s New” page:

The use of our feedback system is growing rapidly. Furthermore, the providers that are getting top scores are growing as a percent of the feedacks received. You can see the oConomy feedback stats as of today. The graph displays all feedbacks given in oDesk for assignments that were ended this year. Keep in mind that our feedback system has been introduced less than 6 months ago.

  1. We decided to expose the fact that a person has decided to keep their feedback as private. Before the viewer could not tell the difference between a missing feedback and a feedback that was kept private. We applied this change symmetrically for both the provider assignment history in the provider profile as well as the buyer history in the opening profile. We have seen in many cases that providers do not actively manage the visibility of the comments. For example in the screensnap above the provider has opted to keep private the comment for an assignment with top score (4.65) and left public a less positive comment. We hope that the additional transparency will guide our users to keep comments public while still giving them option to act as a moderator for the content in their profile.
  2. We are now including the number of feedbacks given to a particular user. The feedback score is an aggregate metric : it is the weighted (by hrs) average of all provided feedback scores. However, when displayed in isolation, the viewer cannot tell whether the score is the result a single successful assignment or the aggregate of a long history of solid work record. We now include in parenthesis next to the feedback the number of assignments that resulted in a feedback in the follow web pages:
    1. provider profile - quick facts, affiliate facts
    2. affiliate profile - quick facts,
    3. provider search lister
  3. We allow the user to sort providers based on the # of feedbacks received so far (Total Feedback)

Read the full release log here.

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Abid Mohsin

Another feature related to the oDesk Team client has been released today (download oDesk Team here, read about the other feature here).

oDesk Team client is not integrated with your assigned Bugzilla tasks. Here is an excerpt from the “What’s New” page:

As many of our users already know every buyer account is auto-provisioned with an oDesk hosted Bugzilla application. Since Tuesday, all users that are using our bugzilla will get a nice surprise as they open the memo dialog of the Team client :
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All the bugzilla tasks assigned to them will appear in the dialog box - selecting them auto-populates the memo with the corresponding bug number and description.

With the Team-Bugzilla integration we are introducing the first elements of an integrated task/time management system.
The idea here is that an integrated task, time and billing service is able to provide the answer to key questions like:

  • what is my team doing now , which tasks are they working on
  • how much time my team has spent on each task, what is the ultimate cost of everything produced by my team.

By having real time answers to these questions a team is able to find its weaknesses, plan better and eventually improve its productivity.
How is this feasible?

How we use this feature to manage our own team

It is easier for me to describe the process that we are using to manage our own engineering team. You can use that as a template or adjust it to fit your needs.

  1. Every team member can only bill time for assigned tasks.
    1. only memo annotated time is accepted
    2. the memos have to correspond to specific tasks assigned to that person
  2. The manager of a team is responsible to create and assign tasks to its members. This is being done by creating tasks in bugzilla, adding related attributes (product, component, release, etc) , putting a detailed description of what needs to be done, ranking them with a priority and assigning them to the corresponding user.
  3. Depending on the nature of the work some tasks are “recurring” (e.g., “Scan website logs for possible errors” ), and never finish, or they correspond to a specific outcome (e.g. “Update website home page according to attached spec”).
  4. Team members accept tasks possibly updating the estimated completion. Assigned tasks appear in the Team client memo list and the provider can “bill time” for these tasks.
  5. When tasks are complete the provider marks them as fixed and the task are automatically removed from the memo list.
  6. The manager (or a separate user responsible for testing and verifying) can either verify the task or re-open it in which case it goes back to the queue of the provider. Throughout this work flow, bugzilla provides brief email notifications to the corresponding parties notifying them about changes, completions and availability of work.
  7. The manager typically provides “back-burner” lower priority tasks for each member of their team so as they can switch to them instead of waiting for the manager’s reply after a task is being done.
  8. The manager can create reports of hrs/$ spend by task or any of the other task attributes : E.g. Hrs/$ by product, Hrs/$ by release, Actual Cost vs Budget by Feature etc. Such reports can be done today manually using bugzilla report functionality and a bit of Excel. We will soon release additional reporting functionality to enhance the current timelogs with project/task costing etc.

Read the full release log here.

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Abid Mohsin

A new feature for the oDesk Team client (download here) has been launched. The new client will give a notification of the desktop snapshot when it is taken. Here is an excerpt from the “What’s New” page:

The oDesk Team client will never be the same! During the last release we auto-upgraded the oDesk Team client. It is now configured with an important new feature:

Live snapshot upload notification and control

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After a snapshot is captured by the Team client, the snapshot thumbnail pops up in the right lower corner and allows the user to optionally review, do a quick zoom and decide whether they want to have the particular snapshot sent to the server or not.

Why did we do that?

The purpose of the feature is two-fold:

  1. From the provider side we want to provide better control of private information and better user experience and convenience.
  2. As for buyers the result of this feature is straightforward : more accurate timelogs and less opportunities for misunderstandings.

Providers already have full control of their client - they can suspend it, in which case no information is being captured and they can turn it on when they want. They can also visit their workdiary after the fact and review, delete or memo annotate their time as they see fit. However, most of us tend to let the Team client always on while we work; we just try to be careful and review immediately the diary after we do something of private nature, plus we do the occasional daily/weekly review of the diary to cleanup any non - work related activity. That’s not very convenient. For starters if private info gets captured in a group-visible teamroom it might be too late. And it is really a pain having to check the workdiary continuously just in case. Its no wonder that the workdiary is the single most visited page in our entire application.

So we changed the logic of the team client and let the user be a bit ahead of the workdiary “tape”. Just like the TV moderators are a few seconds ahead of the live broadcast, similarly the snapshots are now sent to the server with a configurable up-to 60 seconds delay allowing the user to moderate their “tape” in the same way.

The feature does not compromise in any way the accuracy or randomness of our snapshot logic.

Read the full release log here.

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Abid Mohsin