Software Testing Blog

On Wednesday, Mashable announced the finalists in its uber-competitive Open Web Awards competition.  And after 450,000 votes for more than 80,000 different sites and blogs, I’m proud to report that your humble software testing blog (that would be us) has been named one of the five finalists for the “Top Corporate Blog”.

If you know how popular Mashable is in social media circles, you know that this is a big deal.  We take a great deal of pride in using the uTest blog to bring you the latest news from the software industry, best practices on mobile app testing, uTest company info, and original content (from us and guest posts from some of  our top testers).  So sincere thanks and congratulations to the entire uTest universe… we couldn’t do any of this without our amazing customers, testers, investors and friends in the media.

And if you want to help us go for the gold, you can vote for uTest in the final round every day between now and December 12th!

Just a quick note to share some good news from inside the halls of uTest.  On Friday night, our marketing team attended the awards event of the SNCR at the Harvard Faculty Club in Cambridge, MA.  This event included blue-chip brands like HP, Intel and Stanford University, as well as innovators like HubSpot.

The SNCR holds this event to recognize companies that are exploring new and innovative avenues of communications and marketing.  We were fortunate enough to be among those companies and agencies who were honored for our use of new media to build and engage our community.

It’s great to be counted among those who are pushing the limits of social networking, blogs, forums and other forms of media, but we’re just getting started.  We’ve already established a vibrant presence on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, but we’re always on the lookout for new ideas.

So with that, I’m inviting you to drop us a comment or shoot us a note with your thoughts about how we could make our social media more useful, informative or entertaining.

Thanks to you, uTest blog traffic has more than doubled since the beginning of ‘09.  And since our relaunch in mid-May, we’ve use this space to share breaking industry news, testing events and meetups, uTest company info, and original content from around the QA industry through our guest bloggers and “Testing the Limits” interviews.  That’s why we need your help to get the Software Testing Blog into the running for Mashable’s Open WebAwards in the “Best Corporate Blog” category.

So if you like the uTest blog, this is your chance to cast your vote and  support uTest and our community. Here’s how it works:

1. Go to http://mashable.com/owa/votes. (You must be signed into your Facebook or Twitter account.)
2. Then simply Nominate: http://blog.utest.com for Category: “Best Corporate Blog”
3. Voting is once per day, so please don’t be shy!

Thanks in advance for your help, and keep your fingers crossed for another big win for uTest and our community! Send us a note with any questions.

I’m thrilled to let you know that last week uTest was internationally recognized, wining the 2009 WebAward for “Outstanding Website” by the Web Marketing Association.

A big thank you to our partner Boston Interactive for helping us incorporate a more human face to uTest’s website and revamping it to reflect uTest’s community-centric business model.

As you know, we relaunched our website back in May 2009, and four months later, we’re already receiving high honors for it! Now in its 13th year, the WebAwards is the premier annual website award competition that names the best websites while setting the standard of excellence for all website development.

During this year’s competition, more than 2,000 sites from 45 countries were nominated in 96 industry categories. Entries were judged on design, copy writing, innovation, content, interactivity, navigation, and use of technology.

The new uTest website has enabled us to bring the real-world stories of our customers and testers to the forefront of the web experience to increase visibility into uTest’s global testing community of 19,000+ and enhance collaboration among software professionals worldwide. We’re honored to be among this year’s winners!

To see all 2009 award wins, check out uTest’s Awards Page!

With a GREAT first year behind us (thanks for all the birthday wishes), we’re looking ahead to what’s next! To kick things off, uTest has been nominated for the Forrester Groundswell Award in the “B2B – Embracing” category.

Stemming from the bestselling book groundswell by Forrester analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, the Groundswell Awards recognize the year’s most innovative social platforms.

VOTE HERE!

With uTest’s recent website relaunch and the addition of community-centric apps (like “Meet the Testers”), discussion threads, forums, and social networking sites, we think we have a good shot, but we need your support.

See the full submission here for a quick refresher on our latest social technologies: http://www.utest.com/my-forrester-groundswell-award.

Read more…

Busy couple of days at the AlwaysOn event (#aoss09) in Palo Alto, CA…

As previously mentioned, we were named to the AlwaysOn Global 250 list of emerging private companies.  Well, at last night’s ceremony, they officially recognized the list, and we were named the overall winner in the “SaaS and Enterprise” category.

This morning, Doron presented the uTest story during the CEO showcase.  The room was packed with startups, entrepreneurs, VCs and media.  Afterward, we conducted demos and discussed, among other things, crowdsourcing, software testing, mobile apps and overall startup life.

This afternoon, we had a series of great discussions with bloggers and journalists, including:

• Steve Bell (@sbell22) from Startup Trek (video interview & article available here)
• Mark Boslet from TechPulse 360 (@techpulse360)
• New York Stock Exchange (NYSE)
  
• Svetlana Toun-Sambell, EDU Research Group

It’s always cool to see what other startups are up to.  It’s even cooler that so many of them approach us, and already know our name and story! If you’re in the Palo Alto area, and want to meet up, please shoot me a note.

Just a quick post to let you know that uTest was just named a Finalist for “Best New Company of the Year” in the 2009 American Business Awards (a.k.a. Stevies). We’re excited to be recognized by the ABA, especially since our general availability launch was just 10 short months ago!  It’s been a whirlwind run for us during that time:

• Acquired a whole slew of new customers
• Expanded into gaming and mobile app verticals
• Raised $5.2 million in a B round of funding
• Won a bunch of awards
• Launched an entirely new site with new community apps and tester-only forums
• And doubled the size of our team so we can move even faster!

But there’s no time to relax… we’re adding new customers and testers every day, and rolling out new features in our platform.  Plus, there are always more bugs to be squashed and apps to be launched!

One last note on the Stevies — More than 2,600 entries from companies of all shapes, sizes and industries were nominated in more than 40 categories. The finalists that uTest is up against  in the  “Best New Company” category are Aster Data Systems, Carpio, Evolve IP,  HubSpot, Jivox, Mazooma  and  Zuora.  The Stevie Award winners will be announced on June 22 at an event in NYC.  Shoot us a note if you’re going to be in midtown Manhattan, and we’ll see if we can set something up.

Sincere thanks again to our testers from around the globe, and to our customers for your ongoing support.

In case you missed The Big News, uTest was just named to InformationWeek’s First Annual Startup 50. As you may have guessed, the award was given to the top 50 technology startups, most of which were in the SaaS business.

After several days of online voting by InformationWeek readers and thorough vetting by their editorial experts, winners were selected based on the following:

• Innovation and the ability to inject new ideas into business processes (that’s us)
• Value, reflected in lower costs, increased sales and higher productivity (check)
• Enterprise-readiness -  i.e. whether the product/service scales (ditto)

We don’t like to brag (much), but based on the criteria, we felt we were a strong candidate. Of course, none of our recent successes would be possible without our global community of QA professionals and our customers. The skill and scope of our testing community continues to draw the attention of the media, and subsequently, dozens of new customers looking to test their web, desktop and mobile applications.

Once more, a big thanks to all of our customers, testers and anyone who voted for us as one of the top technology startups to watch. Much appreciated!