Check this out: Age of the Contractor article was posted in the New York Times.

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.

We’re psyched! oDesk made the short list for the Red Herring 100 Global 2007!

Drawing from a pool of 1,800 promising, privately-held companies from around the world, editors at Red Herring Magazine selected only 200 companies as finalists. In the next round, the top 100 companies will be announced at the Red Herring Global 2007 conference to be held in Seattle on Dec. 3-5. Companies are chosen for their financial performance, innovation, management, global strategy and ecosystem integration.

We’ve been working on making oDesk a standout startup for freelancers and IT companies and have been working on even more features to improve our product and customer experience. We’re excited to be considered for this distinction and look forward to seeing the results!

Learn more about the Red Herring Global 2007 on our website.

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

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

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

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

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

We’re blushing 

Today we received the Standard of Excellence Award in the Professional Services category from the International WebAwards.  oDesk received high marks for its innovation, design, content, technology, interactivity, copy-writing, and ease-of-use.

Produced by the Web Marketing Association, the International WebAwards names the best Web sites in 96 industry categories and sets the standard of excellence for Web site development.

The best part is that we’ve been working on a major update to the oDesk user interface that should make oDesk even easier to use.  The new interface will be available very soon.

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Abid Mohsin

Hello oDeskers,

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

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

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

This week we reached a major milestone in the marketplace - $10M has been spent on outsourced technology jobs through oDesk!

We’re very excited about the news and we know we have our buyers and providers to thanks for this achievement, so thank you!

Michael Arrington and Rafe Needleman both covered the news, about which we’ll be sharing more details on Monday. Stay tuned!

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Abid Mohsin

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

Here’s the quote:

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

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

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

We have great company, too.

Gary and Brian talk to Robert Scoble about how oDesk works.

Learn how oDesk can help you get hired:

• Interview - 17 min 48 sec
• Demo - 7 min 49 sec

Interview:

Demo:

Here is the blog post on Robert Scoble’s blog. Many thanks to Dave McClure for introducing us to Robert.

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Abid

Lots of people are interested, O’Reilly too! So we decided to partner and create cool visualizations and maps of the skills, rates and work happening within the oDesk global economy. Check out the first things to come out of our partnership on our beta staging server:

http://beta.odesk.com/economy/

“As business moves online in the Web 2.0 era, we have access to an array of new data sets about our business activities. Using these newly available sources, the O’Reilly Radar team has developed new techniques to analyze and visualize emerging technology trends. We’ve worked with Amazon to analyze data on technology book sales, with Simply Hired to analyze online tech job listings, and with Technorati to analyze blogs. Now we’re pleased to partner with oDesk to get access to their data on global supply and demand for technical projects and programmer hourly rates, to find out what’s hot and what’s not in technology,”

… says Roger Magoulas, Research Director at O’Reilly. Read the entire press release here.

Here’s are two visualizations to get you guys started:

See all of them at http://beta.odesk.com/economy/

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Abid Mohsin

Last month oDesk won an SMB20 award from PC Magazine for innovative use of technology in small business. To be honest, most innovation comes out of necessity — both startups & small businesses need to be scrappy and frugal if they plan to survive.

In a followup online webcast with Jim Louderback, our CEO Gary Swart gave a brief description of several online services oDesk uses internally to help run our business (see slide 4 below). Gary then gave this summary of 7 habits oDesk practices in choosing & using online tools (apologies to Stephen Covey).

lately it’s become easy to find inexpensive hosted solutions that are quite powerful, and can make a real difference for startups and other small businesses as they’re getting rolling. not everything works perfectly just yet, but tools like QuickBase, Skype, Wordpress, and Google Docs can make life easier for folks on a budget.

(note however some free solutions may not survive the next few years of online competition, so it’s probably important to be able to export your data just in case!)