Ed Menendez
Voxy.com Launch!
Voxy helps you learn a language from life. That means, doing things you would do anyway but learn a language while you do it. Like reading about the NFL lock-out in Spanish. If you're learning English, an English version is also available here.
The iPhone app has reached #1 in the AppStore for education apps in 14 countries. Android app is coming any day now too. Both apps support location based learning. Are you near a bank and need to figure how to linguically maneuver through a transaction? Voxy can help!
One of the fun things about building this site in Django is how well Django handles changes in company direction and the associated functionality. The app has iterated, very quickly, through many different versions and Django has handled everything in stride.
The site and associated mobile APIs were created in Django 1.2 using PostgreSQL 9 along with the usual suspects of South, Sentry, django_extensions, debug toolbar, boto, celery with RabbitMQ and also dbgettext, photologue, django-rosetta and newcache. APIs we use are from SimpleGEO, Twilio (SMS), WordNIK, Recurly. And everything is deployed on Linode except for a server to translate audio using Natural Reader 10 running on Windows @ Amazon EC2. We use Cherokee web server with Varnish for load balancing, fail-over and cache.
The company is a great a example of human-resources in the cloud (HRC). Voxy is technically based in uber expensive NYC. However, investors are probably pleased to know, that we’ve implemented the best resources available from around the world, not just the most expensive talent we can find in NYC. This is both a cost savings and a quality up-bump. In our case, it also helps to have developers that speak many languages other than English.
The dev team in alphabetical order is: Anton Kolechkin, Ed Menendez, Esteban Feldman, Julia González Anaya, Rudy Menendez, Scott Bossak.