A little while back I wrote about how open-source work serves as a great resume builder. Today, I had the pleasure of speaking with OStatic.

- A message from their site:

Our goal is to increase the adoption of Open Source Software by helping users find viable projects and applications that fulfill specific needs, evaluate them against available alternatives and collaborate with their network of trusted peers.

OStatic seems to fill a great need in the IT world. I browsed around today and already feel a bit more enlightened about the vast number of great open-source projects out there. It is an excellent tool for discovery of new projects as well as information and resources around each project on their project pages. Here’s the page for Subversion.

We think that this is a great resource for buyers and providers to find, evaluate, and collaborate around open-source projects and hope that oDesk users will find it to be helpful.

I just wanted to give readers a little preview of our new and improved website that is scheduled to launch next Wed, Mar 18th. We think it will appeal to our visitors that are looking for long-term relationships with value-added tools in the Manage and Pay components of our offering. We tried to simplify the homepage and make it more clear where to go and what to do. Here’s a peek into our sandbox:

- Top of new homepage

- Bottom of new homepage

- Tour page

- Tour page zoomed in to show feature

- Who Uses oDesk page with testimonials

- FAQs page

What do you think?

With tonight’s Oscars only hours away, we’re delighted to know that oDesk hasn’t been left out this awards season.  The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) has named oDesk a finalist for the 2008 CODiE award in the Best Human Resources Solution category!

From the SIIA’s press release announcing the finalists - "Established in 1986, the Codie Awards celebrate outstanding achievement and vision in the software, digital information and education technology industries."

There were over 1,000 products nominated this year, so we’re thrilled to be on the CODiE’s shortlist.

CODiE winners are announced in late May after a vote by the SIIA membership.

Geeky guys in blue shirts and khaki pants? Silly made-up domain names? 23-year-old CEOs? Twenty-somethings flocking to Palo Alto to strike it rich in the land of opportunity?

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).

It’s that time of the year. People are putting up the Christmas trees, hanging lights outside of their homes, shopping like crazy (or not)… and reviewing their plans for next year.

Yep, it’s time for companies to plan for 2008. Every business, large or small, looks for ways to improve their product and cut costs. While browsing through Business Week, I came across a great article on the topic: Ten Penny-Pinching Ideas for 2008 by Gene Marks. Among his suggestions (geared toward small businesses):

- Set up remote access (we think this is a great idea, too). If someone’s on the road or wants to work from home, they’ll have virtual access to the office.

- Create alerts. Remind yourself of when someone hasn’t paid, when you need to pay bills, when you need to check up on a project or meet a deadline.

- Invest in smartphones (particularly if you have remote workers). Keep in touch no matter where you are (a blessing or a curse, depending on how you look at it.)

Some suggestions we would like to add:

- Outsource your company’s T-Shirt design. oDesk recently needed some new designs for our swag, and rather than bog down our Marketing department, we hired a provider to do the job. About 15 hours and $150 later, we had seven designs to choose from and our provider is now building us a custom Printmojo store.

- Do your own marketing. Check out the Duct Tape Marketing Blog for ideas and tips. Hire a provider to create professional looking HTML newsletters or write press releases and then post them yourself on sites such as this one.

- Outsource your customer service. Staffing a live chat system like phplive.com can be a burden, but plenty of stay-at-home moms and dads in the U.S. have excellent English skills and are looking for work. Consider bringing in reps at $8-$20 an hour to meet your customer service needs.

- Create a blog. Not too familiar with the blogging world? No big deal. Find a Wordpress developer to set up your blog and customize your theme. Content is always king, so make sure you find a writer who really knows your subject.

Good luck on the planning. We hear eggnog and a little bit of mulled wine can go a long way on helping you get through the holidays

We wish all our our oDesk providers and buyers a Happy Thanksgiving!

This is really a holiday where many of us reflect on all we have to be thankful for, and here at oDesk, we’re grateful for many things. Just today, thanks to our amazing network of hardworking providers and diligent buyers, we hit a record of 4,002 hours worked in one day.

So it is with many thanks that we acknowledge your hard work on oDesk, and we hope you have a wonderful holiday with family and friends.

We’ve all been there. It’s a gorgeous day outside, the sun is shining, birds are singing, and you have to go to work. You pick up the phone, practice your best hoarse, scratchy voice, and when the voice on the other line says hello, you launch into your spiel:

“Yes, cough, cough. How are you doing, sir? Me? Well, I have a terrible cold today, cough, cough. Odd, isn’t it? No, no, I didn’t feel bad yesterday, it must be one of those 24-hour bugs that’s going around. Probably best to stay home, so as not to get the other employees sick.”

Your way of looking at it: Hey, I’m just taking it easy for one day, right? No big deal.

Your employers’? Absence Abuse.

Business Week has a great article out right now by Michelle Conlin looking at the problem of absenteeism at work. According to the research cited in the article, only about 85% of labor costs pay for actual work. The rest is vacation and those “sick” days everyone takes every once in a while.

But too many “sick” days has become an issue for some companies and they’ve begun to take action. Some have begun monitoring carefully who’s been calling in sick and how often. In some workplaces, if you call in sick too many times, disciplinary actions begin.

There are many reasons people call in sick. Some are genuinely ill, others just need a day off. But some employees are simply dissatisfied with their jobs and are loathe to go to work. The article mentions the experience of one unit within a manufacturing company that was calling in sick significantly more often than other units within the same firm. The culprit ended up being the manager, whom many employees disliked (and thus took sick days to avoid). Once the problem was identified through focus groups and the company took steps to resolve it, absenteeism dropped. But the company would have been slower to identify and resolve the issue had it not been keeping track of sick days.

So as a company, how do you lower your absenteeism rate? One solution is to allow your workers to work from home. Research by staffing agency Randstad shows that productivity for home-based agents is up to 45% higher than for on-site employees — and that some of this increased productivity is accounted for by reduced employee absenteeism (for more, see World of Work, 2007).

Home-based workers are also more likely have higher job satisfaction, up to 25% higher as compared to in-office employees. As we saw from the experience of the manufacturing company with the large absenteeism rate in the one unit, unhappy workers are more likely to skip work.

The idea of suddenly allowing their employees to work from home with no oversight makes some managers a little wary. Understandably, of course. If your workers still manage to surf YouTube at work, what’s to keep them from doing that at home all the time on the company’s dime?

That’s where the beauty of the oDesk Work Diary comes in. When an employee is logging in time remotely, managers have access to screenshots of the employee’s monitor at 10 minute intervals. Keystrokes and mouse clicks record activity levels. It offers managers peace of mind: when Johnny says he’s “working from home,” he really is working from home, (and his Work Diary shows it), he’s not watching football.

Easy enough for everyone to understand: if you’re working, you’re getting paid. If you’re watching football (unless you happen to be a referee!), you’re not.

The sudden turn of events in Pakistan over the last few days has been nothing short of frightening. As we scanned through the headlines, our thoughts here at oDesk quickly turned to the 1,000+ oDesk community members residing in Pakistan. Many of us here in the office have made connections with providers and buyers residing in the country, and we know many of our buyers have established important connections with users there as well.

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.

As anyone who has been watching the oConomy Facts tab on our homepage will know, the oConomy has been growing rapidly.  It wasn’t until yesterday, though, that we learned just how fast our revenue growth has been when compared to other young companies.  We’ve been named a Rising Star on Deloitte’s 2007 Technology Fast 500.   A special category, the Rising Star list ranks the 20 companies that have been in business a minimum of three years, but less than five years, that showed the highest percentage of revenue growth over the past three years (2004 to 2006).  Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 is a ranking of the 500 fastest growing technology, media, telecommunications and life sciences companies in North America.

We love winning awards.  We’re gunning to win a spot on the Fast 500 list once we’ve been around long enough to be eligible, so please keep the feedback coming and let us know what we can do to better serve you.  Thank you!