App Successfully Approved by Nuance!

Today our app was approved by Nuance, a third-party software as a service (SaaS) that we are using in our best upcoming app ever, PlaySay Survival. Nuance has a high calibar for partners they work with. We've really appreciated their expedited support in working with us these past few weeks in making our app a winner for us both.

Why are we using Nuance?

Nuance is the best voice recognition software in the world today. It's what Apple's Siri uses. Two thirds of the Fortune 100 rely on it. It's what our friends at Vocre use. Nuance has state of the art voice technology and we're stoked to have them as partners. 

I suppose this lets you know that voice will be a critical component of our upcoming application. After all, aren't the most fun aspects of learning a foreign language being able to comprehend and speak it? Survival in any country would be extremely difficult with just the ability to read and write.

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Our Lean Startup Process

The amount of startups has exploded in recent years due to the radical decrease of costs of building a technology business. Startups like us take advantage of such to be learn in our operational costs and are also jumping on the bandwagon of being lean in our software development process. 

In my last post I covered our Customer Development process. I'll now briefly cover our Lean Startup Process which is embodied in the employment of three systems: 1) open source and free software, 2) agile software development and 3) customer development.  

Open Source & Free Software

At the forefront is free infrastructure software (i.e. Open Source) like Ruby on Rails and extremely affordable computing software (i.e. Cloud Computing) like Heroku and Amazon's Web Services. 

Agile Software Development

In a nutshell, we build only what we need to build to validate that week's hypotheses. To dramatically reduce waste we strive to ensure that changing our software isn't a daunting task. We focus on completion over perfection to get the product out early and often. We break down and estimate all development tasks and continually cut features, simplify and restructure to make our release goals. Everything is continually tested to find bugs in order to prevent them as much as possible. Creativity is optimized as we're continually improving the product as opposed to making it 'perfect' as we initially assume. 

Customer Development

All product development is focused on rapidly iterating according to the product and business hypotheses we've proven from our customers. I covered Customer Development in full in my last post.

Sign up for beta access to PlaySay's biggest product yet! http://signup.playsay.com