Ultralingua Celebrates 15th Anniversary as Minneapolis Developer

Online, February 6, 2012 (Newswire.com) - Ultralingua, a local language software company, has come a long way from its humble beginnings in 1997 as a start-up in a language professor's garage. Fifteen years later, Ultralingua has grown into a popular tech business with sales around the world.

Ultralingua, best known for their quality applications for iPhone and iPad, makes Spanish, French, German, Italian, and other language software for, travelers, and business professionals.

"We couldn't be happier about what we've achieved through the years," Jeff Ondich, Ultralingua's CTO and founder said. "We have created bigger and better products than we could have imagined back when we got started, and we've really enjoyed getting to know our fans."

Ondich was working as a computer science professor at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota when a friend asked him to help develop an electronic French-English dictionary called "Le Franglophile."

Ondich started working on the dictionary as a side project, and sold the first one a year later. After a few more years he had developed seven software dictionaries with unique qualities that made linguists quickly take notice.

"Our software is individually localized for each language area. We wanted to make the most comprehensive software with slang words, conjugations, tenses, forms and much more," Ondich said. "To do this we soon realized we needed experts in each of these languages to check over our data."

Ultralingua eventually grew to nine employees in their local Minneapolis office and seven language specialists around the world who review every entry in the dictionary software to ensure its applicability and accurateness.

Today Ultralingua products span iPhone and iPad, Mac, Windows and other mobile platforms with 13 language options in multiple combinations and thousands of dictionary entries. They continue to focus on products for mobile devices, providing language apps that can be accessed without an Internet connection for language learners on the go.

"None of this would have been possible without our loyal supporters around the world who recognize the quality of our software, so to them we want to say again and again, thank you!" Ondich said.

To celebrate, the startup is offering discounts on their dictionary software via their Ultralingua's website and the iTunes App Store in the month of February. For a complete timeline of Ultralingua's history and their special video message to their customers visit their birthday page at http://www.ultralingua.com/birthday.