EL SEGUNDO, CA. (Top40 Charts/ iRise) - iRise, the world's leading application definition software company, today announced that Fuzz, a new breed of music company, used iRise to simulate its entire Web site to accelerate its time to market. Fuzz (www.fuzz.com) is the first to tightly integrate a next-generation music label, a powerful artist promotion platform, and a feature-rich interactive community of artists and fans.
Fuzz used application simulations to create content and deliver features on its site to artists, fans, and industry insiders so they could provide feedback. Using the simulation technology, Fuzz optimized its engineering resources, responded quickly to customer requirements, and accelerated its development cycle – all critical to Fuzz when it launched its beta site in mid-March this year. Using iRise to visually prototype the Fuzz Web site/application prior to launch accelerated the entire development process by three months, and enabled the company to respond to much more feedback from its customers than it would have otherwise.
In less than three months, the Fuzz community has grown exponentially, mainly through word of mouth. Fuzz bands and music fans already represent 53 countries. Fuzz is taking the helm as the first music company to tightly integrate an artist promotional platform, fan community, and music label. Fuzz is unique because it is taking artist promotion to a whole new level, empowering artists to take control of and manage their music careers as a business, connect more deeply with fans and engage fans to connect with other fans to discover, share, review, influence and buy music.
'In launching our Web site we were also launching our business, so every day counted in terms of attracting great talent, capturing critical feedback from artists and music fans, and introducing a new business model,' said Jeff Yasuda, Fuzz CEO. 'Responding to the artists' needs is especially critical to our business and being able to do that rapidly without wasting development cycles was invaluable. iRise helped us to get there, as well as differentiate ourselves from other music-oriented sites.'
A core team of developers at Fuzz used iRise iDocs, interactive blueprints that are portable, encapsulated simulations which can be emailed to stakeholders and developers, to achieve these benefits:
Speed time to market for launching the Company – The Web site is the business application and Fuzz accelerated its time to market with shorter development cycles;
Create highly usable services for target audiences – Fuzz leveraged Rise simulations both for up-front user testing and also to demonstrate value to artist and fans, thereby channeling interest into immediate site users. The site provides bands with a suite of tools to upload, price, market their music and promote it via blogs, calendars and so forth. For fans, the site offers an easy way to create a profile, interact with bands and other fans, listen to and buy music; and,
Rapidly respond to the marketplace – Fuzz continually analyzes feedback from the site, in the form of Web site metrics and user comments, to promptly incorporate new features and functionality.
'The depth of the simulation in iRise is better than anything on the market,' said Fred Matteson, vice president of engineering for Fuzz. 'Optimizing our engineering resources, responding quickly to customer requirements, and accelerating time to market were all critical for Fuzz. Rapidly simulating a rich version of the site so we could get artist and fan feedback before we started coding helped us respond quickly to our constituents and deliver what they wanted from the get-go.'
'The music industry is ripe for a ground-breaking service that shifts the power back to the artists and the people, and Fuzz is serving as that change agent,' said Emmet B. Keeffe III, chief executive officer and co-founder of iRise. 'Using Fuzz, artists now have a one-stop-shop to manage their music careers as a business, without having to rely on limited attention from a label for promotion or their MySpace page to grow fans and sales. Fuzz is helping to level the playing field for musicians and building its business on artist-friendly practices and we're proud to be part of this revolution.'
