UrbanAirship
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Urban Airship to gain Tello's PassTools, look to Passbook
The in-app push messaging company with a fun name, Urban Airship, has acquired a company named Tello that will help Airship to gain a foothold in the creation of passes, loyalty cards, tickets and coupons that work with Apple's iOS 6 Passbook app. Tello developed a platform called PassTools that makes it simple for small businesses to create their own coupons or loyalty cards after realizing (acccording to Tello co-founder Joe Beninato) "that it was very difficult for people who weren't engineers to build these passes." The marriage of the two firms should make it possible for Urban Airship to sell Passbook passes to big brands like airlines and chain stores through push messaging services, and then provide local businesses with what they need, which is usually limited to loyalty cards or discount coupons. Tello's a small company -- it has five full-time employees -- and all of the staff will remain in their existing Palo Alto office.
Urban Airship and TUAW want to give you a ride on a real airship
Urban Airship is the name behind a lot of successful mobile apps, providing push notifications, "rich push" (adding HTML, video, and more to push messages), reports and metrics on user engagement, and in-app purchase support. The Portland-based development tool provider wants to take a TUAW reader for a ride on a real airship on June 15, 2012. The Bay Area is home to one of two Zeppelin NT airships in the world, this one owned and operated by Airship Ventures. If you meet the requirements to fly, will be in the Bay Area on June 15th, and have a sense of adventure, you can win a seat on the Zeppelin Eureka for an awesome flightseeing trip over San Francisco Bay. Here are the rules! Read the WWDC Ride Terms and Details and understand them. Share this post at least once on Twitter (please don't spam Twitter). To enter, fill out the form below completely and click or tap the Submit button. The entry must be made before June 12, 2012 11:59PM Eastern Daylight Time. You may enter only once. One winner will be selected and will receive a sight-seeing trip aboard the Zeppelin Eureka valued at US$375. Click Here for complete Official Rules. Loading...
Urban Airship delivers 5 billionth push notification
Urban Airship is a company that works with developers to power and send out push notifications through the various applications on your iPhone, and it recently announced that the five billionth push notification left the company's servers. The company has been sending push notifications since June 14, 2009 (when they were first opened up to developers by Apple in iOS), and it's now sending out 19 million push notifications a day. That's notes from games, to-do apps, Twitter apps, and all of the other various reasons that all of your apps have to pop that little window up. Urban Airship isn't the only company sending these things either -- there are many more notifications going out, through various servers and setups. It took Urban Airship just over a year to reach 1 billion notifications sent, and traffic is still climbing, too. And the inclusion of a notification management system in iOS 5 means that we'll see even bigger growth with this feature. And that's not all: Urban Airship also says that in-app purchases have been mushrooming as well, with 4.2 million so far in just its company, and even more through developers directly. iOS is really "pushing" new ways for developers and users to interact. Show full PR text Urban Airship Delivers 5 Billionth Mobile Push Notification Mobile services platform start-up also hires first CFO August 22, 2011-Portland, ORE- A short two years since Urban Airship formally launched, the company has established itself as a leader in its ability to navigate the complex, multifaceted explosive-growth industry of mobile apps. Push notifications-short, real-time alerts sent from within apps direct to users with the app installed on their device-are quickly joining email, social networking and SMS as a critical communications channel. Urban Airship sent the first push notification for any app in the Apple App Store on June 14, 2009. Since then, interest in push notifications has continued to gather steam: the Urban Airship messaging platform powers an average of 520 million push notifications per month, roughly 13,000 messages per minute. Successful brands onmobile are engaging their customers with compelling, relevant information that extends the utility of their app. Several brands, including ESPN, Yahoo, Slate, msnbc.com, dictionary.com, Groupon and LivingSocial use Push to deliver ongoing content such as advertisements, deals and special sales, news stories, podcasts and playlists, weather and traffic alerts, transactional receipts and sports scores. It took the company's thousands of app developers 472 days (1 year, 3 months, 15 days) to hit the 1 billion notification mark. As context, it took Twitter 3 years, 2 months and 1 day to hit 1 billion tweets. "I'm amazed at the growth we've seen in such a short time. Our team has delivered on the vision of a ubiquitous messaging layer for any connected device and we're just getting warmed up over here," says Scott Kveton, CEO of Urban Airship. "The market is rapidly adopting push notifications as a critical communications channel, and it's clear that mobile is changing everything." App Messaging by the Numbers · As of August 21, 2011, Urban Airship has delivered 5 billion push notifications. · Twenty thousand active iOS, BlackBerry and Android apps run on the Urban Airship mobile platform. · Year over year, the number of notifications Urban Airship has delivered increased from 834 million to 5 billion, a 500% growth rate. · Urban Airship delivers, on average, 520 million push notifications every month, 130 million per week, 19 million per day, roughly 13 thousand messages per minute. · In-App purchase continues to gain momentum. Thus far, Urban Airship has authenticated and enabled more than 4.2 million transactions. The company hits the 5 billion milestone as it embarks on the next phase of its growth. Dylan Anderson is joining the executive team at the company as CFO, VP of Finance and Corporate Secretary. He will oversee strategic growth and help drive capital needs as Urban Airship continues to make traction with significant larger-scale enterprise-scope partners. Anderson, a seasoned start-up veteran, has more than 18 years of financial and operational leadership in early-stage, innovative companies. He brings strong credentials in fund raising, M&A, and both pre- and post-IPO companies. Most recently he was CFO for Max-Viz, Inc., a VC–backed avionics technology company, where he led the finance, legal, HR and administrative teams. "Dylan is joining the team at the perfect time," says Kveton. "As the deals we are doing start to become more and more complex, we need someone intimately familiar with sophisticated revenue models and experience structuring full-service, SLA-level contracts." About Urban Airship Urban Airship powers the world's most successful mobile apps. Providing breakthrough technology, Urban Airship makes mobile marketing far more engaging, effective, and efficient. Top brands depend on Urban Airship to ensure their mobile app initiatives are scalable and profitable. Verizon, Dictionary.com, Groupon, Yahoo, and Warner Bros. are just a few of the thousands of companies that utilize Urban Airship's innovative platform to reach and engage targetaudiences and increase app revenue streams through push notification, rich messaging, in-app purchase, subscriptions and data tracking. The venture-backed company was recently named to Fast Company's list of the most innovative companies and to the Red Herring Top 100 North American Startups. Urban Airship is based in Portland, Oregon.
Apple trademarks AirDrop
Apple introduced AirDrop as one new feature included in Mac OS X Lion. AirDrop is a file sharing service that lets you easily send files to other nearby AirDrop users. Apple now owns the trademark for the service, apparently acquiring it from Urban Airship, Inc. The trademark application was submitted last year by Urban Airship, Inc., and the AirDrop service was launched last year. The service was advertised as a way for Android app developers to easily promote their applications. Android app developers could sign up for the service and send promo codes to reviewers and for giveaways. AirDrop is no longer on Urban Airship's website, and the trademark was transferred to Apple effective June 9. Details on the agreement and any money associated with this transfer are not available.
Found Footage: Urban Airship's AirMail takes push notifications to the next level
Here's an exclusive TUAW video preview of Urban Airship's latest product, AirMail. Like their other products, AirMail is powered by a precompiled drop-in library that developers add to their iPhone applications. AirMail adds a whole new spin on push notifications by transforming them from lightweight messaging into a more durable and interactive product. Normally push notifications give a simple heads-up to users along the lines of "You have mail" or "Someone tweeted your name." AirMail goes further. It uses the iPhone's push notification infrastructure to enhance two-way communications between service providers and their customers. As this video shows, push notifications are no longer throwaway products. Using AirMail, they can be stored and referenced through an in-app library. Applications can create message histories that persist well beyond the life of a normal push message. What's more, those notifications can involve the user in a multi-directional process, whether confirming that they have taken their pills (as shown here), are ready to take a meeting, or that they acknowledge that a security alarm was triggered in error, among other uses.
