What made you want to start the Magnet Idea Lab?
At Magnet Forensics, we pride ourselves on constantly talking to customers. That dialogue helps us drive great ideas for new solutions. The Magnet Idea Lab enables us to involve customers in the process of evaluating ideas and shaping new solutions to best serve them.
Plus, we just love getting to talk to our customers and this gives us another chance to stay connected, even as the world continues to work through issues surrounding the pandemic.
What excites you about this program?
I just love those moments where you think: “Wow, I didn’t realize you could use a tool like that!” It changes the way you look at something. Because we’re in the molding process for these products and concepts, we have so much freedom to explore different avenues and make sure they’re in a good place before we invest even more resources into bringing them to market.
It’s the same spark of creativity I felt in the early days of Magnet Forensics. It’s a rush of inspiration to take a product, collaborate on it with colleagues and customers and work to make it better so that it can help solve real problems in the world.
Why do you think the community should participate?
I think many of us at one point, have wished we could have a direct line to the people making a product so that we could let them know how to make it better.
This is a great chance to broaden the impact of the work our customers do in their investigations. By playing a part in the Magnet Idea Lab, they could be contributing to a product that could help solve a case halfway across the world. It’s the same feeling we get day in and day out — and I can tell you, there’s nothing quite like it.
Have any interesting products come out of the Magnet Idea Lab?
Our first tool to come out of the Magnet Idea Lab was Magnet IGNITE, a cloud-based early case assessment triage tool. Magnet IGNITE performs covert, remote scans on target endpoints and can help examiners quickly identify data exfiltration. We’ve had great feedback on Magnet IGNITE and we’re offering it at no charge until December 31, 2021, for those who haven’t tried it out yet.
We also have a beta called Project Prague available in the Magnet Idea Lab right now. It allows users to search across cases for specific identifiers that have been tagged by examiners in Magnet AXIOM, while also offering cross-case analytics.
There are many other projects ongoing in the Magnet Idea Lab, but you’ll have to join to find out more about those!
What’s in store for the Magnet Idea Lab going forward?
We have some really interesting projects and concepts that we’re currently working on and there are some great opportunities for participants to beta test them, participate in focus groups, check out exclusive demos and meet with a member of our Product team one-on-one to share feedback. Head over to www.magnetidealab.com to learn more!
