Company

More than two years ago we embarked on a journey to bring our push infrastructure to Android and tackle the world of high scalability for mobile apps. We’ve detailed some of our past achievements like C500k in past blog entries. We’ve more than quadrupled the performance reported in that post, and have moved on to address the rest of our infrastructure as we march towards supporting billions of connected devices.

We’re now focused on finishing a massive rework of our messaging infrastructure to support our exponential growth in push notification volume. The result will be released with Segments.

We deal with lots of big numbers. Big numbers are often difficult to reason about. As a metaphor, we came up with “light up a stadium in a second” as our throughput goal. Specifically, we now have the capability to send a message in one second to every fan seated in the biggest stadium in college football, Michigan Stadium.

Here’s a high-level look at what we’ll be rolling out:

• Push Tag & Broadcast Service (codenamed Metalstorm) — Manages associations between applications, devices and tags. This new service supports extremely high push throughput and gives us the ability to perform complex tag queries for apps with hundreds of millions of users across a horizontally scalable architecture.

• Segments Data Storage (codenamed Penelope) — A customized, distributed database optimized for querying spatial information including custom location data.

• Message Routing Service (codenamed Gooey ButterCake) — Routing tier that uses a Sort-Merge-Join algorithm to assemble results from queries across multiple heterogeneous systems, for example application tags joined with device location information.

• Edge Message Delivery Service (codenamed Yaw) — Handles last-mile delivery to third-party platform push providers such as the Apple Push Notification System (APNS) with high throughput and low latency. Yaw manages TLS negotiation, message TTL (time to live) and protocol compliance across hundreds of thousands of connections all performing message delivery.

Helium, our end-to-end message delivery platform for Android devices, is optimized to work with this improved messaging infrastructure and works on an expanding universe of devices including Amazon’s Kindle Fire, Nook, and soon Tizen.

We’re also going to leverage Helium for companies moving away from native apps to HTML5. We built a C++ Helium client library for Linux and are working on Tizen integration (more detail on this effort is here). The new Linux Helium client architecture includes a web runtime plugin that provides JavaScript bindings for easy development of HTML5 browser extensions for push notifications.

How improved is the new infrastructure? Our initial dark launch of the new system delivered broadcast pushes at a throughput of over 100,000 messages per second, with a 90th percentile latency of two seconds to first message delivery. We also delivered tag pushes (one API call with arbitrary tags pushing to one or more devices) at over 100,000 messages per second throughput with 90th percentile latency of two seconds before first push delivery.

What does this mean for apps? If your app has 100,000 users, and the app triggers a push notification, your users will receive that message in less time than it takes you to complete a yawn. If your app has 500,000 users, and the app triggers a push notification, your users will receive that message in less time than it takes you to pour a cup of coffee. More than a million users? Pour that coffee, add sugar and stir.

We’re just getting started. This is the low end of what we can achieve with this architecture and we will continue to invest in throughput and latency improvements. Look for an upcoming blog post on the implementation details or better yet, see us talk about it live at upcoming events such as GLUE Conference and HBaseCon.

We’re still working on rollout plans, but this massive scalability for real-time push will be available for everyone who needs it soon. We’ve already moved many of our largest customers to the new architecture. If you have a need for speed right now, and think your system can handle these performance levels before we add configurable speed throttling, let us know.

We’re also interested in understanding your expectations for push notification delivery. Complete this brief survey to get an Urban Airship t-shirt.

This week in the Big Easy Urban Airship pulled off what was anything but—beating out stiff competition to win CTIA’s annual Emerging Technology Awards for the best Mobile Marketing & Advertising solution.

Our display and award at CTIA’s E-Tech Showcase decked out in beads.

Taking the top spot in a burgeoning category at one of the wireless industry’s biggest shows, was an incredible honor and speaks to the value that push notifications can drive for brands and app developers. It was just earlier this year that Forrester Research included push notifications as part of “The New Messaging Mandate,” and since then we’ve doubled the volume of push notifications sent for customers, cresting 20B on May 6^th.

Push notifications delivered over Urban Airship's history

When you get to massive volumes like this, interesting things start happening.  For instance, here is a case where one of our customers writes a story about another one of our customers.  Check out this interesting article about MyCityWay London24 written by The Guardian. It offers a great example of how mobile apps and push notifications will connect marketers to people in London for the Olympics.

Today Urban Airship is delivering a technical session at the Tizen Developer Conference to offer a demo and code-level preview of the upcoming Urban Airship library for Tizen and how the Helium push notification infrastructure will integrate to offer app developers a real-time messaging system.

Tizen is an open source, standards-based software platform supported by leading mobile operators, device manufacturers, and silicon suppliers. The Tizen SDK and API will allow developers to use web run-time and related web technologies to write applications that run across multiple device segments, including smartphone, tablet, smart TV and in-vehicle infotainment.

Push notifications on Tizen are powered by an open-source OS-level push daemon that manages state, user preferences, notification display, power consumption and network access. This daemon allows applications to register for notifications and associate tags or an alias with the device. It also offers an API that will allow developers to specify sounds and use icon badges and other notification types offered by the device.

The Urban Airship library will provide JavaScript hooks into the native push daemon along with drop-in web run-time sample user interface code that developers can integrate into their apps. The library will simplify the integration process and offer additional features that will allow developers to track app opens, time in app, push conversions, opt-in rates and ultimately the impact push notifications have on their users’ engagement.

Screenshots of Urban Airship’s Tizen phone demo including the lock screen, notification center and notification menu

Having delivered 20B push messages to mostly iOS and Android devices, we’ve seen the tremendous lift in app retention and engagement that push messaging delivers and are very excited to bring this functionality to a broader range of devices and consumers. Developers will leverage these real-time alerts to deliver the right information at the right time on the right device to their users.

It’s entirely possible that in the future your refrigerator may message your car’s heads-up display as you approach the grocery store with items you are running low on, which would then be transferred to your smartphone as you pull into the parking lot and turn off your car.

Today we’re rolling out some product changes in response to how our publishing customers have been leveraging Newsstand with our Subscriptions and In-App Purchase products.

The Guardian and Future Publishing are among the ingenious Urban Airship early adopters who released an app mash-up of Newsstand plus our Push Notifications, Rich Push®, Subscriptions, and In-App Purchase as a unified digital publishing solution on the iOS platform. The result has been stable and successful, and we’ve decided to mirror their efforts.

The result is Newsstand Publisher, a new, bundled Urban Airship solution that’s available now to Premium Plan customers. For more information, download the product sheet.

You spoke, and we listened. That’s why we’re excited to introduce some changes to our Pro plan that will make billing more predictable for new Pro plan customers.

Current Pro plan customers and Pro In-App Purchase plan customers will not see a change in their account or billing terms.

We built the Pro plan that was introduced in September 2011 to meet the needs of customers who wanted the features used by high-push-volume organizations but didn’t have the user count of an enterprise company. The plan was configured to serve the needs of an organization serving up to 10,000 users for $199 per month, with $.01 per additional user.

Since the Pro plan was introduced, many of you that adopted it have acquired a lot more than 10,000 users in a very short time. The result—besides lots more app users and more success for you—was that your invoice amount changed from month to month. This unpredictability in cost created issues for some of our customers and prompted this change.

The new Pro plan pricing, effective on May 1, 2012, will be a flat rate per month based on the number of active app users for that month for up to 100,000 users. If you are a current Pro Plan customer and want to view your user count, or upgrade to the new, more predictable plan, you can do so at go.urbanairship.com.

In addition to the Pro plan pricing change, we are eliminating the Pro In-App Purchase plan option as most customers requiring this functionality went with the Premium plan for additional features like custom on-boarding services, Shared Access and User Insight reports. Also introduced today, our new publishing solution, Newsstand Publisher, combines all of this functionality and subscriptions in a single solution.

To see the updated plan details, check out the new pricing page. For more information about Newsstand Publisher, read the data sheet.

Urban Airship is ready for one billion smartphone users – are you? Do you have a mobile marketing strategy in place to help meet business objectives and drive revenue? There are new rules for real-time mobile customer engagement that will help enhance users’ experiences with your brand and app and we are going to share them with you.

Join us for a happy hour seminar at our San Francisco office on May 2 at 3:30 to discuss how you can win on the mobile battlefield. Special guest Airbnb will share its success story and we’ll dive into key lessons learned for driving successful and sustained engagement strategies in the exploding mobile app market.

Come hungry and thirsty because there will be plenty to eat and drink while you mingle with your peers.

Space is limited so register today.

Many Urban Airship customers manage multiple apps and have several people including outside agencies that are assigned to handle app-related responsibilities such as composing push and Rich Push messages, evaluating messaging performance, and comparing app engagement metrics across their portfolio.

Today we’re happy to announce Shared Access capabilities added to our administrative interface that makes all of this easier by establishing functional roles for each app with user-assignable permissions. Urban Airship Premium Plan customers will see this new capability after they log in to the Urban Airship portal. The App Owner manages roles and assignments using a pop-up window in the App Details view. Individuals will only see the tasks assigned to them in the App Details view.

Owner's view of the app details

Shared Access makes it a lot easier to share the workload of managing multiple apps and reporting on results. To see how Shared Access works, get the Here’s How guide.

The Pew Research Center recently released a study that shows mobile news consumers, especially app users, are more engaged than their PC counterparts. They spend more time per session with news on mobile devices than they do on computers and read more articles per month. And in mobile, there is a move away from search as the universal content gateway, giving publishers an opportunity to grow direct relationships with consumers and capture more digital revenue.

Future PLC, which publishes more than 180 special-interest publications in the UK, US, and Australia, knows the power of a strong mobile channel. When Apple released its Newsstand feature, they approached Urban Airship to quickly implement subscriptions and push notifications into its app.

Leveraging Apple Newsstand’s interface, Future PLC automatically delivers the right content to each of its subscribers based on their individual subscription terms. Subscribers receive alerts when new content is available through push notifications, which result in an immediate engagement lift—much faster than email, search, SMS or banner ads.

Future PLC was one of the first to market on Newsstand and saw immediate results, including reaching its goals for single issue purchases eight months ahead of schedule.

Get the full story by downloading the case study.

Today we’re excited to announce our collaboration with the Intel AppUp^SM program to offer in-app purchase technology to Intel AppUp developers, increasing monetization of apps developed for Windows-based PCs and Ultrabook™ devices. Best of all, Intel will cover the in-app purchase costs through March 31, 2015 for developers enrolled in the Intel AppUp^SM developer program.

With virtual goods spending in the U.S. hitting $2 billion in 2011, both mobile and PC app developers have a growing opportunity to build features and content into applications that sustain engagement and drive incremental revenue. Urban Airship offers open source libraries and simple RESTful APIs that make it easy for developers to integrate in-app purchase functionality, enabling consumers to purchase upgrades, new content and complementary features directly within apps.  Urban Airship also manages receipt verification and content delivery of mobile purchases, replacing the need for developers to build their own IAP content server.

To date, we’ve powered more than 18.5 million in-app purchases for iOS and Android developers, and the relationship with Intel AppUp center will expand our services to a broader group of developers and apps across platforms. We’ve seen many customers achieve tremendous success with in-app purchase, including Future Publishing, which grossed over $1 million in incremental revenue in just 45 days after launching in-app purchase functionality for many of its 180 special-interest publications.

After our acquisition of SimpleGeo, many speculated exactly what we were up to. Had we simply made an acqui-hire? It’s true we picked up many talented new employees and established a second office in the heart of Silicon Valley. But our ambitions are much greater than that, and today we’re excited to announce the fruition of our efforts with the the industry’s first location segmentation push messaging service—Urban Airship Segments.

We are taking a different approach to location. One that deviates dramatically from the scenarios we hear everyday, where someone crosses an invisible line and is somehow then super receptive to whatever offer the nearest marketer wants to jam down their phone.

Urban Airship Segments builds off of what we already know, having served up more than 17 billion push messages for 60,000 apps each of which know something about its users’ interests and preferences. Now add to that the ability to know an individual’s location and context, not just where they are right now but where they are over time, with the ability to easily build on that with everything else you know about the user, and you end up with a powerful combination of insight that enables you to be much more targeted and precise in your app engagement strategies.

• A sports media company can send an offer to receive commentary from the Phillies dugout to users tagged ‘team:Phillies’ attending a Phillies/Red Sox game located in ‘Fenway Park’.
• A movie theater chain can send a ‘Hunger Games tickets go on sale in 12 hours’ message to users tagged ‘customer:ClubCardHolder’ and ‘preference:OpeningNight’, rolling out delivery based on users’ time zones.
• A news and entertainment company can offer a Guide to NYC Nightlife to users tagged ‘hometown:seattle’ and ‘device:ipad’ who are currently located in Lower Manhattan.

Simple conditional logic (And, Or, Not) will enable you to join location information with tags encompassing in-app behaviors, preferences and device profiles to build and save audience segments for messaging now and for later. So, targeting iPad users that were in a certain location during a certain time (now, or in the past) with preferences for particular content or product categories becomes possible.

Urban Airship Segments is an evolutionary step forward in ensuring that when you reach out to mobile users with a message, you make it worth their attention by being valuable and useful from the only perspective that matters—theirs.

Oh, and we haven’t stopped there. Also announced today, we have formed a strategic partnership with Meridian for indoor location targeted mobile messaging. Combined with Urban Airship Segments, you can go from identifying audiences with certain behaviors or preferences in regions down to a neighborhood-level, to delivering pinpoint targeted messages inside buildings. So, for example, retailers could use Segments to send highly targeted offers based on audience preferences and locations, and use Meridian to direct customers to the exact aisle location, serving-up location-based special offers or content to accelerate purchase decisions.

Standard iOS and Android device libraries are available today. Using these you can add location detection to apps now, and gather all the events necessary to enable location segmentation when the API and web tools launch later this quarter to all of our customers.