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

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

Go to Red Herring TV’s website.

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Abid Mohsin

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

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!)

oDesk pix here

Last Friday’s Late Lunch 2.0 was a smashing success, as documented in photos here and here, also nice photos on the PR 2.0 blog.
Thanks to Mark & Terry for bringing folks by to checkout oDesk, and to Jeremiah for the terrific Long Tail writeup on oDesk. A great time was had by all

PALO ALTO, CA (September 27, 2006) — Today oDesk (www.oDesk.com), an Internet startup that provides a marketplace for hiring global technical talent and web-based tools to manage remote teams, announced an $8 million Series B investment led by Benchmark Capital. All previous oDesk investors also participated in the round. The new funds will be used to expand market growth and accelerate product development. Kevin Harvey, general partner at Benchmark Capital, will join the oDesk Board of Directors. A top-tier Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Benchmark Capital has been an early investor in leading technology companies such as eBay (EBAY), Handspring (HAND), Juniper Networks (JNPR), Red Hat Software (RHAT), and MySQL.

[read the rest of the oDesk Benchmark financing press release]

Hola oDeskers! This is Dave McClure, O’Blogging for the first time here at oDesk. (and yes, i am Irish in addition to being a geek Abid & I are here in wonderful San Francisco at the Future of Web Apps conference, learning about all the latest & greatest web development technology, companies, products, and people. The conference is being held at the beautiful Palace of Fine Arts, home of the Exploratorium.

This morning, Mike Arrington of TechCrunch gave a great presentation on ‘What’s Next for Web Apps‘. He decided to pick a few winners (and losers), and some upcoming startups he called Ones to Watch… and oDesk was lucky enough to be chosen! Thanks Mike

Among other companies Mike talked about, here were the list of Winners (acquired), ‘Very Good Bets’, and ‘Ones To Watch’:

• Winners (got acquired): Writely, del.icio.us, Userplane, Flickr, Weblogs, Inc., Myspace, Bloglines, Truveo, Grouper, Skype, Newroo

• Very good bets: Digg, Facebook YouTube, Photobucket, Zoho, Stumble Upon, Popsugar, PlentyofFish, Netvibes.

• Ones to watch: Jobster, Riya, Zillow, Flock, Sharpcast, Rocketboom, 1-800-FREE411, oDesk, Second Life, WordPress.

(note: Mike is a Dogster investor, but being a humble A-lister he didn’t select them as a ‘One to Watch’… but we think Ted Rheingold & friends are building an awesome company, and just announced a new round of financing from some terrific investors. congrats Ted!)

credits: screenshot & blog post above is courtesy of Dan Farber, one of the sharpest guys in the techreporting universe & blogosphere, shown here interviewing Ted at the conference:

Adrian Bye of DM Confidential just spoke our CEO, Gary Swart.

Here’s the interview. Enjoy.

We are on Techcrunch.com

Read about us here:

oDesk Provides On-demand Skills

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Abid Mohsin

Aaron reflects on oDesk’s pros and cons in this insightful post. First the good news.

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.

Community is at the heart of oDesk. So we thought you would like to know that we have caused quite some discussion since our launch last week.

We’ve been picked up in the blogosphere- for example, here and here. Mashable, on of the highly regarded blogs covering Web 2.0, has dubbed us Rent a Coder 2.0. We’re still mulling over the moniker. There is also quite some back and forth about oDesk and the challenges of remote development.

Meanwhile, our Business Week profile seems to be generating debate about the merits of outsourcing. Some see offshore development as ineffective and bad for American jobs. The other camp sees oDesk as an innovative company pioneering free markets and transparency.

(Though the debates don’t totally miss each other. At the Mashable blog, an American programmer says he doesn’t feel threatened by globalization and looks forward to oDesk.)

As always, we encourage our community to participate and share their candid thoughts on these interesting topics.

Notable tech blog alarm:clock carried an item on our funding yesterday. There is a quick summary of the funding news and a bit about oDesk.

alarm:clock is a great blog featuring the latest in the tech businesses. We check it regularly.

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

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

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

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

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