testing: October 2008 Archives

Most of the people that know me, know by now that I left IBM back in September and went to a startup named tinyprints.  They do wedding invitations, birth announcements, holiday cards, etc...  I took a week off between jobs and headed over to the Eastern Sierras and Boundary Peak with Timber and Wookie to do some camping and hiking.  It was a fun trip, and when I started at tinyprints I immediately jumped into the deep end.  I was brought in to lead the test team, and we had a lot of testing to do before we launched lots of new features and functionality on October 1st.  So I worked day and night every day for my first 2 weeks until we did the launch.  It was kind of like the movie Gladiator where Maximus first goes to Rome and gets thrown into a battle where his team is supposed to get slaughtered.  It starts out being chaotic, but he gets his cohorts organized and actually wins the battle.

But now that I've been here a little while longer things are going more smoothly.  It is quite a bit smaller than IBM, and the culture is different, but I think the adjustment is going well and I'm enjoying my work.  And it is nice to work on something that lots of people will actually see and use.  So if you are having a baby or getting married or having any kind of occasion you really should check out tinyprints and weddingpaperdivas.  And if you email me I can send you a coupon code to save 20 %.

Woohoo!  Our product actually got launched!  My last product at IBM (more on that later) was the IBM eDiscovery Analyzer.  It is basically a search engine that allows companies to search through email and it is targeted at the legal search and discovery market.  A typical business case is say you are a large company that is getting sued for patent infringement.  Typically what you would do is sequester the email of all the people that worked in that area.  Then you will send the email to a company that specializes in looking through the emails for the actual emails that are relevant to the case.  But the companies that specialize in looking through the emails do it manually and they charge a lot of money.  So in comes IBM eDiscovery Analyzer.  It can crawl your emails, run analytics against it, and allow you to search through the email by keyword, subject, date range, To, From, CC/BCC, top senders, top recipients, top phrases, etc... so that you can slice and dice the data any way you want in order to find the emails that are relevant to the case.  Here are a few articles about it:

1. IBM Expands eDiscovery Portfolio with eDiscovery Analyzer
2. Our Announcement
3. Rueters Article