Radical Technology Decisions

Designing Pay4Bugs, our new global software testing marketplace, provided us with much more flexibility in our technology choices when compared with designing our company's namesake product Attigo Virtual Language Immersion.  Attigo's target market is the education market.  Schools and educators, understandability, tend to be relatively conservative when it comes to adopting the latest and greatest in Internet technology. In comparison, the Pay4Bugs software testing service is designed specifically with developers that design tomorrow's cutting edge software products in mind.

One of the reasons it takes so long for new technologies to make it into widely used products is because of the traditional business school approach to evaluating risk. Using this approach, anything new and not widely used is labeled as risky and therefore undesirable while anything in widespread use and with a track record of success is considered safe and desirable.  When applied to technology start ups, this approach goes on to say that creating a new product is risky enough without having to troubleshoot fringe technologies, explain new processes to customers or risk alienating x% of your potential audience because their system does not support your choice of platform.

With Pay4Bugs and the early adopters we expect will make up the bulk of its audience, we decided to go out on a limb by incorporating some new technologies and making some decisions about the platforms we support that are not yet mainstream but that we either think will have the potential to in one way or another make for a better user experience.

The decisions we made are as follows:

• OpenID-based login as an option for customers
• OpenID-based login as mandatory for testers.
• Dual stack IPv4/IPv6 from day 1
• No support for IE6