Conceptual deveopment

• Came up with idea from scratch with John
• Pitched tier 1 VCs

Software development

Search Engine

• Wrote an indexer and search engine for product data

Architecture

• Planned and executed a high availability, high capacity datacenter design
• Conceived and implemented a scheme to enable remote fulfillment sites to be added in a 'plug and play' zero-configuration method

Web Services

• Consumed SOAP and RPC/XML web services from eBay, PayPal, Google, Yahoo, USPS, Endicia
• Designed SOAP interface used by our packaging partner
• Created web service to enable automated box ordering

Account management

• User account system - identification
• Automated phone number verification
• Security system to track IPs, spoofing and identity forgery

Payment Processing

• Credit card verification, charging and refunds
• PayPal account integration - payments, transaction status and refunds

Geolocation

• Integrated 'dirty' postal tracking data with Google map display [[example][]

Image Processing

• Developed a fully-customizable, multi-page, automatically generated invoicing/customer instruction sheet [][example]]. Fonts, images and geometric primitives all drawn algorithmically.
• Wrote a custom Zebra printer driver to crop, scale, shift, rotate and annotate labels
• Code to take shipping labels from vendors, detect extents, crop and resize
• Implemented a multi-server, scalable image hosting system
• Implemented an extremely simple and reliable PDF generation system for remote invoice and label printing
• Thumbnail generation & watermarks
• Image filename repair

Shipping System

• Full integration with UPS and USPS: rate quote, label creation, label cancellation, insurance, tracking
• Off-line shipping calculation system enabling comparisons of many thousands of options per second.
• Address validation with automatic cleanup falling back to system to notify and collect fixed addresses from users
• System to pick best service based on shipment type (media or not), dimensions (incl. dimensional weight), address (PO Box only addresses for USPS), service speed rank, and customer preference
• Zip code cleansing / parsing / lookup

Product Data Services

• Code to detect product category and do intelligent shipping and listing things with it
• 'Data mining' to extract dimensions, weight and other features in a generalized way from unstructured, 'dirty' data
• Took product data, coalesced similar products and sorted
• Overcame eBay product data search problems normally limiting searches to one product category

eBay Integration

• Integrated with multiple Boxaroo accounts as well as multiple customers accounts
• Scanned eBay auctions to present users with shipping offers
• Categories: wrote an optimized downloader/updater. Implemented category auto-picker integration.
• Item listing with allowable day/date/time scheduling system
• Message system integration: routing to and from eBay users to our customers with filtering for off-eBay offer making and scams

Fulfillment

• Developed system to accommodate complex, multi-item and multi-box shipments
• Created system to select the best cetner from a network of fulfillment centers based on inventory, shipment distance and staffing
• Developed system to track multiple in-flight packages and synchronize them with customer-printed labels
• Developed system to send out boxes as soon as a sale is definite, then coordinate labels printed later with the boxes

Advanced Algorithms

• Implemented an algorithm to optimize shipping through packaging material analysis, carrier selection, order partitioning. (see the second movie on this page
  • Problem is of the class NP-hard; came up with strategies to scale to our need

Web Technology

• Developed a multi-request Ajax client and backend to increase throughput on eBay searches
• HTML cleansing and validation of user description data
• Auto coaching system to catch disallowed eBay keywords, OVERCAPITALIZATION, vulgarity, email/phone/URLs

Fund raising / Promotional

• Made some movies
• Made VC contacts, met with eBay & Google

Patents

• Filed for provisional patent
• Filed for final patent

Server Stuff

Administration

• Installed and administered...
  • VPN
  • Mail (Postfix + DKIM, DomainKeys, SPF support)
  • DNS (Bind)
  • Web Server
  • PHP
  • MySQL (with snapshots and a mirrored slave)
  • System backups / failover systems

Hardware

• Bought and/or physically built servers
• Secured colo, racked them up, set up dual-drop network
• Configured RAID-6 hot swap drives

-- MattWalsh - 13 Aug 2008