Pling is a version 1.5 product, past Alpha and Beta stages, launched in-market. Significant updates have been deployed that fixed early bugs and add more scaling capability, continuing to grow but with much more to build out to achieve our vision.

We have a four-person engineering team: iOS development, OSX development, back-end development and front-end development. The code is developed in Python programming language. We spent $350,000 USD on the development of the platform.

We were inspired by older voice technologies like Intercoms and “retro futuristic” visions of communications like the 1970s “Mail Call Letter Pack” and the Jetsons’ “TeleViewer” and “Talking Alarm Clock.”

Our vision is to bring nuance back to communications. We are building the smartest audio software system fully dedicated to fast, easy-voice communications for teams, groups and enterprises to talk and work more naturally.

Pling for Professionals offers a robust voice communication platform for use across devices. We aim be a go-to social enterprise, like Google Docs, Dropbox, Basecamp, and Evernote.

Product Features:

- Pling for Professionals: Admin, directory, groups, archive, encryption, deletion

- Pling Messenger:

Platforms: Android Mobile, Windows Mobile, Windows PC.

Features: send attachments, URLs, Photos with audio annotations Voice to Text or Voice Search Tagging, Saving, Sharing messages.

- Pling Platform: API that allows third parties to add short audio functionality to their website

- Public Channels: follow people’s audio channels

The response to Pling has come from both classic tech investors and strategic companies in the telecom space.

We invested our own seed capital and have closed a “Series A” round of financing of $1 million at a $5 million market valuation. Pling is set up as its own company with an eight-person engineering and product team and 12-18 months of runway. Our investors include a venture capital firm, a global telecom company’s venture fund and a series of top angel investors.

Pling owns the entire technology stack from user accounts to front and back-end technologies.

The human voice is a difficult thing to engineer in technology products. Asynchronous voice messaging like Pling is different technically speaking than synchronous voice technology, like Skype. Maintaining feature parity between mobile and desktop applications requires complex engineering. We are not just building a mobile app, but an innovative new platform system.

Pling offers a new twist on human voice technology: short, asynchronous, audio messaging between individuals and groups.

Since the significant investment by external venture capitalists and angel investors, we have had a 12-18 month runway and product roadmap as a true startup business.

We plan to iterate further, build more features, extend to more platforms like Android and Windows, make its API available to other developers, expand our distribution and user base with more paying Enterprise version customers and bring short audio messaging to all parts of the web.

Our intent is to grow Pling into a revenue generating business very quickly with the “Pling for Professionals” product in the first year. It is possible that other larger technology or telecom companies may see it as an acquisition target, but our intent is to grow it as a sustainable stand-alone business.

Key stages in the development timeline:

- “Lean Product Plan” was put together in late Summer 2012 and greenlit by Board of Directors

- Visual Design was done in late Summer 2012.

- Back End Development was done in Fall 2012.

- OSX App Launched publicly in the App Store in December 2012

- iOS App Launched publicly in the App Store in January 2013