Water Cooler

Providers on Elance come from all over the world and from a wide range of industries. Today we're highlighting three newly hired providers: Xander Bennett, Maria Fernanda Cassias and Ross Glenn, who hail from Australia, Brazil and South Africa.

We launched several changes to the website today, including:

• Enhanced visibility for Teams from provider profile pages
• Simplified Business Terms process for employers and providers
• Change in hold time for payments made by employers to providers

Teams
Teams, launched earlier this year, is a new way for Elance providers to organize as a team and work together, making it easy for multiple individuals to work together and manage jobs within one provider account.

As an Elance provider, you quickly become aware of the popular skills requested by clients. You may have all the skills you need for the work you want to do, but could you be missing out on something? Is there room for you to expand your knowledge and open up new job types?

In most cases, a website content management system (CMS) is not just an option for success of a website, it’s a requirement. Two of the more popular CMS choices around today are Drupal and Joomla.

But how do you make sure your CMS system is configured properly for search engine marketing (SEO)?

Read below for a short SEO to-do list that will help draw traffic to your Drupal or Joomla website.

Barack Obama and John McCain differed on many things – social issues, economics, foreign policy and more. One of the things that also differentiated their campaigns was their use of technology. What can your business learn from how two politicians, in the most closely watched contest in most of our lifetimes, used technology?

Traditionally, Republicans have led Democrats in the use of technology to reach and organize local organizers to drive “get out the vote” campaigns. However, in this election, according to all “Monday morning pundits” one of the reasons the Obama campaign was able to rally an army of volunteers and voters was due to its superior use of technology.

What about your business? Are you investing in the right technology and strategically using it to maximize productivity in your business?

Here are some technologies you should be investing in and planning to maximize for 2009: