Events

You know it was a good party when it takes a weekend of recouping to get around to the recap. Last week more than 200 people joined us for an open house at Urban Airship-San Francisco. Among the crowd were current and future employees, customers, investors and partners, as well a large contingent of entrepreneurs from Wieden + Kennedy’s Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE) who had meetings in the Bay Area the next day.

For the Urban Airship flight crew, this was a great opportunity to grow relationships and find new talent to support aggressive growth plans, as well as to celebrate our work and progress towards integrating geolocation into the mobile industry’s leading cross-platform push notification system.

Conversations were richly nourished by Bacon Bacon SF and lubricated by a full top-shelf bar and kegs of Anderson Valley Boont Amber. In addition, we got to show off our ultra-cool mural by Alex Pardee that was recently featured by Juxtapoz Art & Culture Magazine.

Courtesy of www.juxtapoz.com

If you think you have what it takes to join the Airship, don’t wait for the next party to let us know.

We have been talking a lot these days about Location Aware Notifications. As we have reported, we recently teamed up with SimpleGeo to deploy smart, contextual geo-aware push notifications to individuals via their mobile device. Some of the geo stuff freaks people out – we get that. The way that many people approached it with a “you walk into this spot and you get a DEAL” kind of freaked us out as well. Relevancy and intent should drive it, along with so many other factors.

The fact is that it is a little crazy, a tad awesome and a whole lot here right now. And most of the time people just like you are using it to engage in new ways with people, brands, and even things that aren’t there (AR).

But, as we’re hoping to present at the 2012 SXSW Interactive Conference, the combination of mobile + social + local is a powerful, yet misunderstood, communication channel. When people hear about it, they often conjure up a “Minority Report” world where companies track their every move to inundate them with marketing. And so they resist. The next-generation of SoMoLo, however, will delight people by providing highly targeted, context-rich communications that keeps the control in their hands. New technologies will leverage newly accessible data gleaned from user app usage, local search results, social streams and location to speak with people on their own terms, in ways that add meaning and convenience. Panelists will share their experiences with and advice on how to leverage SoMoLo data to engage mobile users in ways that personalize content to keep consumers coming back time after time.

We have assembled a kick-ass team of experts – some of the smartest people in the business, including Matt Galligan from SimpleGeo, Jeff Rohrs from ExactTarget and Chris Messina from Google (he invented the hashtag too) – to discuss in depth how companies can balance convenience + privacy concerns to help people appreciate the value in contextual mobile experiences.

Please vote for our panel. We are already planning some good stuff for our trip to Austin. This conversation is just beginning….

OSCON is one of our favorite events, not just because it’s hosted in our hometown. The speakers are great, the OS community is vibrant and the conference is well organized.

Urban Airship is happy to be one of the sponsors of the show this year, and we are especially honored to have several team members on stage with some killer presentations:

• Scott Andreas: Designing and Implementing Asynchronous Distributed Systems: Challenges, Strategies, and a Million Things That Go Wrong
• Erik Onnen: Lean Big Data for Mobile
• Eric Holscher: A Completely Open Source Django Website

As our friend, we are able to extend a 20% discount off any registration package with code OS11UA.

Events at Urban Airship

We’re opening up our event space at the Airship for some neat-o hack-y events. Come on by.

• Celebrate everything PhoneGap at the first-ever PhoneGap Day on Friday, July 29. We’ll have phones, apps, js frameworks, tools and delicious beers for all to enjoy. In addition to some hacking with other PhoneGap addicts, there will be a few afternoon talks on getting started with PhoneGap, high-speed demos, and short presentations from PhoneGap developers including folks from Dojo and IBM. All of this is followed by a PhoneGap party! There’s no ticket charge, but we’re asking folks to register ahead of time as we’re expecting a full house. Whether you can make it for the whole day or just the morning, we want to see you there! Register here.

• API Hackday PDX On Saturday (following OSCON)from 8am-8pm, join us for an all-day coding fest focused on building apps and mashups with APIs. Hear from some of the country’s top API-focused companies on tips, tricks, and tools for building the next big app. At the end of the day, teams and/or individuals get a chance to present their work to a panel of judges and win kickass prizes. Also joining us in sponsoring this free event are SimpleGeo, Twilio, SendGrid, Apigee, PHPFog, LinkedIn & Mashery. Over $2K in prizes! Register here.

Visiting Portlandia

If you haven’t been, Portland is a wonderful place to live and work, with a vibrant, eclectic, talented, and diverse population. There is much to inspire the mind and spirit. You may find you love it here and want to call Portland home. Good news: Urban Airship is looking for a few good mates to join the ship. Check out our openings. Stay a while.

If you haven’t visited, let us show you around our fine city. We’d love to chat about python, clouds, data, mobile, airships, coffee, cats or whatever. Contact us at @urbanairship to set something up, even if you just need directions, we locals are here to help.

Food carts

Carts are the business when it comes to quick, tasty and cheap eats. Portland is home to more than 200 – look for the carts pods, where you can keep your options open.

Team Favorites:

• Ziba’s Pita’s: At the corner of SW Alder and SW 9th is a wonderful cart that serves Bosnian pitas—delicious fillings baked inside curls of flaky crust. Try the spinach & feta full plate, with a cucumber salad and ajvar on the side.
• DC Vegetarian: Sometimes fake meat is what you want. Vegetarians and vegans should head over to DC on SW 3rd between SW Stark and Washington. The steak & peppers is great; also try the BLT sub w/ avocado.
• The Frying Scotsman: Pretty awesome source of fish & chips. Find it in the mega-pod at SW 9th and Alder.
• Taqueria Las Piedritas: Really cheap and really good tacos at NW 4th and Davis St.

The downtown carts are an easy MAX ride. This site maps the carts and pods as well as provide reviews. Come hungry.

Other Eateries / Adult Beverages:

• Produce Row (204 SE Oak St) has a fantastic back patio and happy hour until 7pm. This spot is in walking distance to the Convention Center. Get a whisky/beer pairing, like the Pale Rider (Terminal Gravity IPA and Blanton’s Single Barrel), or the Bourbon Ginger cocktail. Bonus for vegetarians: a good house-made veggie burger.
• Also on the East side, Bunk Sandwiches (621 SE Morrison) serves up hearty meat-ful sandos until 3pm; after that, head to Bunk Bar, 1028 SE Water St., which adds live music and a tavern-like atmosphere to the sandwiches.
• Downtown, Kenny & Zuke’s is the hookup. Happy hour is from 3-6pm.
• And for late-night grub, the $3 gyros+fries at Berbati’s after 11pm is a good choice. Berbati’s offers a wide array of entertainment, from monthly local art shows to pool tables, pinball and quality live music.
• If you want to hold a menu at the table, please refer to this infographic from our friends over at the the Bureau of Betterment.

Hang-out and Relax

• Backspace (115 NW 5th Ave) is a coffee shop, art gallery, Internet cafe, and all- ages venue. The coffee is good, the wifi is fast, the vegetarian sandwiches are excellent, and because it’s right at a Max stop in Old Town, the people watching is hard to beat.
• Ground Kontrol Classic Arcade (511 NW Couch St.) is recognized as one of the best arcades in the U.S. It is known for preserving games from the Golden Age of arcade games. It also serves as a venue for djs, live bands and Rock Band events.

Quality Coffee:

• For wifi action and longer-term “coffee-shopping,” check out Stumptown Coffee Roasters (multiple locations).
• If coffee is the goal (and not wifi or working), head to Spella Caffé at 520 SW 5th downtown, and get some fantastic hand-pulled espresso and a nice chat with the owners. If you’ve got a sweet tooth order an affogato (gelato with a shot of espresso poured over it).
• Another addictive spot is Barista, where the coffee menu changes regularly. Order a shot of whatever is on tap for the day.

If you stick around for the weekend, the annual Oregon Brew Fest is a good time.

A good round-up of goings-on is here. And here you can learn all about Portland.

How are you measuring the success of your app?

Many people are measuring success by looking at their download count. Although this is a useful metric, this data point alone could be leading you to a misinformed conclusion. At CTIA this week, the focus was on repeat engagement, getting people back into apps after the initial download. As mobile marketing has become more important, so has the need to measure success with informative data.

Mobile Marketer has a good round-up from the show:

“Download numbers are pretty deceptive… We’re looking at active and repeat users – those drive the ad impression and monetization.” Michael Scogin, vice president of mobile at MTV, New York

“We want to be one of those 10 applications that you go into and utilize and see value from overall use.” Beth Jacobs, general manager of mobile at The Washington Post, Washington

Ryan Kim over at GigaOm also brought up the deceptiveness of app downloads in his column today. ” Instead of flashy numbers, show me user loyalty. Everything else is churn. By sticking with download numbers, I wonder how many are masking the fact that most of their users don’t come back at all.” He points to data results from Localytics that show the most loyal app users (those who come back 10+ times per month) are—despite being the smaller number—are “more impressive over time and more lucrative.”

Our take:
We could not agree more that engagement is the key tenet of mobile app success. Engagement drives monetization as well as brand identification. Companies that can create great in-app experiences and can get audiences back into their app will win in the next generation of app development.

One of the most effective solutions to the challenge of reengaging audiences is push notifications. There’s no trickery in this strategy: companies that use push effectively will get more users re-engaged with an app. No use of push = less engagement and poor use of push = annoyed users who opt out and / or delete the app entirely. With the right balance, push notifications remind users why they downloaded the app in the first place, offering them a reason to open it again, and creating a feedback loop with the brand behind it.

We know it’s still February, but you can’t start thinking about your SXSW strategy early enough. And because Urban Airship will be in full force at SXSW, and we wanted to give you a few tips on how you should be preparing.

And when you’re down there, make sure you come by our mobile party, the Big Bang Bordello, at Emo’s on Friday, March 11th at 8pm. It’s going to be off the hook.

By just about any account, the announcement on Tuesday from Verizon looks to be the launch of the iPhone on the much-heralded carrier’s network. The reality is that while this is great news for a whole new swath of customers for the iPhone, its also a huge boon for mobile app developers.

Mobile publishers now have a huge opportunity to reach a whole new swath of users with their apps. We learned in our 2010 Mobile App Developer survey that devs are looking hard at how they can succeed on multiple platforms and Android continues to dominate that conversation. Giving Apple a new carrier to sell their phones on domestically will be huge for their bottom line and that of the developers on iOS.

I spent last week at CES in Las Vegas and saw a whole bevy of new connected devices with a fair chunk of them running Android. Motorola had some compelling new offerings as well as Vizio, the world’s leading LCD TV manufacturer, also announced new phone and tablet offerings based on Android that work with their TVs. All of these devices and all of these options means ever-connected mobile devices and the apps that run on top of them are here to stay. We couldn’t be more excited here at Urban Airship as we know our customers will continue to need tools and services to engage and monetize their apps over time on all of these devices.

We look forward to the announcement on Tuesday.

You can’t move into a 25,000 square foot building and NOT throw a party. So we’re doing just that:

Mark your calendars and hope to see you there! Invites coming soon!