We've been working on upgrading our payment system so that it's integrated with the ClearSMS application.  This means that you don't have to go through the external cart to buy credits. 

We'll it took 3 times the amount of time we had expected (banks are ruthless), but we're finished.  This reminds me of a post I had read a while back from a Web start-up, that they had spent more time writing the payment system than the actual product.  I said to myself - no way! I don't believe it...

As you may have noticed on our Web site, the sign-up procedure for a new account is automatic and instantaneous.

On the other hand, requesting a custom logo takes about two days, and the approval process for buying credits takes about half a day.  Why?
 
We are very cautious about m-spam and we require these manual steps to ensure that our users are serious and also willing to agree to our anti-spam policy.

This helps keep ClearSMS fast, safe and secure.

We've just finished tuning the SMS relay engine.  Even though ClearSMS is simple to use, under the hood, it's pretty complex.

We adjusted the load balancing so that even if you're sending millions of messages, they'll get there reliably.  For international users, we minimized the encoding length, so that no matter what language you're using, the available words are optimized.

One thing we didn't touch was the user interface.  It's actually very cool... except maybe for the colors.  Kyriakos designed it, and we don't want to hurt his feelings, but somebody's got to break the news to him.  

We'll keep you posted.

We've just launched ClearSMS, and we're excited.  We've got stories to tell, but maybe we'll leave it for another blog.  The important thing is the product, and you.

It took a lot of work to develop the software.  So people ask, "How many things can it do?"  The answer; it does one thing, and it does it well.  "How about the features?" As few as possible.  Why? because the longer the list of features Web software has, the more cumbersome, unproductive and slow it is. 

We're proud of ClearSMS, it's fast, it's smooth, it's easy-to-use.  But that doesn't mean anything if it can't help your business.  We think it can.