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

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

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

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

Read the press release here.

So, as you may know, oDesk offers 100 free online certification tests available to users to prove their skills.

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.

Thank you to everyone who attended our first Outsourcing Roundtable on January 9th! We had an interesting discussion about how to get started on outsourcing projects and the differences between “outsourcing� and “remote management� while munching on some pizza.

One of the points made by our CEO, Gary Swart, is that while outsourcing typically refers to throwing an entire project over the wall to another company, remote management refers to maintaining control of a project while working with remote providers. The latter option is more appealing to companies who want to stay involved in all aspects of their operations, but who want to look for talent outside of their local community.

The focus of our conversation centered around staff augmentation/remote management for start-up companies. Several attendees were interested in growing their teams and discussed the difficulty of finding qualified local programmers. Never having outsourced anything before, they were eager to learn how to work with remote team members.

Bin Xu, our VP of Engineering, who, along with Odysseas Tsatalos, our CTO (and co-founder), manages a team of about 30 remote providers. One of the keys to working with a team that is both remote and local, Bin explained, is to manage everyone – whether they are working in Menlo Park or the Ukraine – the same way. He asks that his team members check in regularly and has meetings with the team leaders on a regular basis (Bin and Odysseas use Skype to conference in as many people as they can). 

One of our current oDesk Buyers, Carey Cook, who runs the site Vocabulary.com, added that one of the keys to successfully managing remote providers is to be as specific as possible when explaining the project’s requirements. He communicates regularly with his providers to ensure that the specifications he is looking for are understood. He underscored one of the things we’ve emphasized in the past: communication is critical, whether you’re working remotely or not. Regularly checking in and discussing the project’s progress can help clear up any small problems before they get bigger.

We’re looking forward to planning our next Roundtable. Let us know if you have any suggestions for upcoming topics!

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’re already excited for the new year!

We’ll be hosting the first meeting of the Silicon Valley Outsourcing Group on January 9th at 6:30 p.m.

Join us for this Outsourcing Roundtable and share your outsourcing experiences. We’re looking to gather IT professionals and business leaders in the area to discuss the benefits, challenges and best practices of outsourcing.

Never outsourced anything in your life but you just finished Tim Ferris’ Four Hour Work Week and you’re curious about the buzz? You’re welcome to attend, too!

RSVP on our Meetup.com group or check out our event on Facebook. We’ll be serving food and drinks, so come by and learn a little about how outsourcing can improve your company’s performance.

Hope to see you there!

Check out
The Silicon Valley Outsource Group!

When people think of outsourcing, they often think of India. Or Russia. Perhaps the Philippines, or Bolivia.

When oDesk was founded, the idea was to connect small- to medium-sized businesses around the world with providers worldwide who could provide IT services at competitive rates. All around our site are images of globes and mentions of the words “global,” “international,” “worldwide.” Certainly a great number of our providers are international.

So it came as a surprise when we looked at recent data and discovered that U.S.- and Canadian-based providers are the fastest growing group on oDesk (when these two countries are added together).

How did we measure this?

We looked at the number of providers working over a set time period grouped by country. When we last looked at this data, the U.S. held spot number two in terms of the number of timesheets submitted by providers. Add the U.S. and Canada together, and bam, you’ve passed India.

What’s interesting, though, is then to look at the number of hours providers worked each day. Our providers in Asia continue to log in over 50% of the total hours logged each day, while U.S.-based providers log a lower percentage. What this suggests is that while providers in the U.S. are quickly joining our network, they are likely supplementing their incomes with jobs from oDesk (and thus not working a full workday on our site), while providers in Asia, including India, are more likely to be working full-time for oDesk projects.

Still, as U.S.- and Canadian-based providers continue to accrue feedback and work history on oDesk, I wonder whether they will slowly begin to switch to becoming full-time freelancers and we’ll thus see a growth in the number of hours logged by North American providers. We’ve already got some full-time North American-based freelancers on our site — take Keith S., for instance — who’ve left typical jobs and have never looked back.

What do you think? Do you see U.S. as the next outsourcing hub?

Every once in a while we hit a milestone at oDesk that makes everyone in the office stop and say “wow”. This morning we noticed that the 25,000th provider was going to join the network. We watched as the numbers approached this important milestone…

And here she is, our 25,000th provider:

Samantha K., welcome to oDesk!

Samantha and our extensive network of providers will find a variety of cool and interesting jobs on oDesk. Just browsing through the job posts Buyers have put up in the last few days, I found a job listing for a music video, one to write courses for airplane pilots and one calling for PHP/MySQL/HTML experts to create a graphics design website for a banner and magnet company. It’s neat to see all of the creative ways people are using our site.

To give you a sense of our growth, approximately 80 providers join our network each day. Our base of affiliate firms is also growing: currently, about 1,500 providers in our network are part of affiliate firms. In the last 90 days, oDesk providers have made nearly $3.6 million.

But we’re really not just about the numbers. People working in the U.S. and abroad have found job opportunities they would have likely not found locally and Buyers have seen great results. Here are some of the feedback comments Buyers posted on our site today:

“Shibu B. (of the Affiliate Firm Cabot Solutions) did a great job on this project and produced all deliverables on time. We’ll definitely work with him again in the near future.”

“Kostya is an excellent PHP developer and I would be happy to hire him again.”

So good luck job hunting, Samantha (and providers 25,001, 25,002…etc)!

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

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

(August 31, 2002)

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

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

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

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

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

SK - I still don’t like it..

OT - you would have liked it if it were sdesk

SK - har har..

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

SK - .

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

SK - stop it

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

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

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

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

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