Last month mobile leaders and legends joined Urban Airship’s Mobile Roundtable to talk about the future of mobile. Two key themes really stood out so we put these videos together to share the conversation. Check out the teasers below or visit urbanairship.com/goodpush to view the feature films.
Brands Going Mobile TEASER
The Need For Good Push TEASER
Catch the whole conversation at urbanairship.com/goodpush
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.
Today we’re excited to announce our collaboration with the Intel AppUpSM 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 AppUpSM 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.
Today we’re releasing an updated iOS library to our developer community that removes all UDID-gathering functionality. Apple deprecated this field in the summer of 2011, and is now moving to disallow it. We’re happy to support Apple’s direction and think it makes sense for app users and the entire mobile ecosystem, including Urban Airship.
Our push notifications only reach users that have opted in to receive push, and the ability to opt in or out is important. We think that eliminating the ability to identify users automatically via their device identifiers is the right thing to do. Privacy really matters to app users, and we want our developer community to be able to honor users’ privacy concerns with tools that follow the latest best practices.
The UDID has been a part of our libraries primarily for support purposes when looking up user transaction histories in our Subscriptions product. It has always been transmitted and stored as a hashed value to help guard users’ privacy. Since our services do not require the UDID, we’ve changed our approach to tracking app installation identifiers only. With this change our developers can expose a unique user ID through their app settings that will continue to allow for support lookups. This identifier is unique to Urban Airship products and services, and has been present in our previously distributed libraries for more than a year.
Our iOS library has always been open sourced, and developers are welcome to view the changes we’ve made if that speeds your time to market. Or, simply download the latest version and upgrade your iOS project to use this new library. If you use Subscriptions in your app, you will also want to expose the user ID within your app in order to continue using our support tools. You don’t need to worry about your existing install base, as all our services are backward-compatible with this change.
We have a support FAQ that covers common questions about this change. As always, if you have any additional questions don’t hesitate to contact us.
In the midst of an uncharacteristically cold and wet Austin, mobile legends and leaders came together at the W Austin under the shadow of the Airship, to discuss what’s right and what’s wrong with mobile today.
This was the Off-Broadway, unauthorized version of SXSW Interactive, where small group conversations covered topics and real-world examples that you would never hear on the stage in a room of 600+ people. Companies and brands that typically command respect were slayed for mobile strategies that mirror their 50-year-old approaches to advertising. It was no-holds-barred discussions punctuated with today’s best practice examples and visions of the future spawned by some of mobile’s top thinkers. It was an opportunity for all of us to press reset on what we are doing in marketing and advertising to start anew with mobile.
We had planned for the conversations and videotaping to occur on the Urban Airship Mobile Roundtable, but our parade got rained on, and no matter how much us Portlanders were able to think of it as liquid sunshine it just wasn’t going to fly with the electronics.
Which only goes to prove how incredibly smart we are to have partnered with the amazing people at the W Austin, who enabled our back-up plan to proceed without a hitch. After stimulating indoor conversations in our cozy taping room, we took to the streets for some fun on our Mobile Roundtable.
Photo by @DanielBurwen
At night, we flew in unparalleled style, party-to-party, creating smiles on every face we passed.
Until it came time for our own party featuring The Bright Light Social Hour and RAC, co-sponsored with Apigee, Heroku and Twilio.
RAC brought the party to a crescendo
Over the coming weeks we’ll post videos from the Mobile Roundtable and would love to hear your reactions and thoughts on the future of mobile.
It’s not often, at one of the biggest interactive festivals in the world, that one can expect to be picked from the crowd as the best or worst of anything…there’s a wide playing field. Yet, we’re happy to report from an unusually chilly and wet Austin, that the SoLoMo Redefined panel delivered by our own Scott Kveton, Google’s Chris Messina, ExactTarget’s Jeffrey Rohrs and Matt Galligan was one reporter’s session of the day.
It’s an interesting read, sharing an unabashed on-the-ground perspective, along with an intriguing theory on what the height of urinals says about Texas’ political environment.
And yes, it’s wet in Austin:
Today is shaping up to be a great day, chock full news and momentum around Urban Airship’s mobile messaging and monetization platform. At Mobile World Congress we learned that Urban Airship was named one of the Top 25 Global Mobile Companies by tech news site Informilo. We’ve had countless meetings at MWC with future partners and customers, and we just signed another app development platform—Buddy—as a strategic partner that will offer our products to developers using its solutions. Topping it off, we just surpassed more than 14 billion push notifications delivered since starting less than three years ago.
Push notifications, as sexy as the name sounds, are ushering in an entirely new communications channel that couldn’t be more personal, immediate and effective. Messages appear on home screen of smartphones, whether the triggering app is open or not, offering an unprecedented ability to engage directly with consumers any time, anywhere.
Push messaging is a privileged opportunity because consumers must opt-in to receive them, and as such we’re happy to announce enhancements to our analytics and reporting services that will enable customers to better hone their messaging strategy based on mobile users’ behavior.
The new Unique Opt-In Report, available to Premium Plan customers today, offers critical analysis of the number of distinct users opting-in or out of your app’s push notifications over time. It focuses on the number of unique users versus aggregate totals to offer insight into which notifications produce the desired results and which don’t so that campaigns can be quickly adjusted.
With this new reporting capability, companies can focus on making every push a good push.
Urban Airship is committed to making it easy for app developers to build engagement and monetization into their apps. As such, it’s extremely important for us to pursue partnerships with complementary solutions that together help make mobile easier, more successful and more profitable.
We are pleased to announce that Buddy Platform Inc. has joined Urban Airship’s strategic platform partner program and will utilize Urban Airship to power push notifications and Rich Push® for iOS, Android and Blackberry apps developed on its platform.
Buddy is a fully cross-platform, hosted cloud backend for mobile app developers. Buddy’s hosted collections of APIs can be called by apps on any connected device on any OS platform to power end-to-end scenarios like geo-location, photo albums, user accounts, friends & group lists, messaging/chat, analytics and push notifications. With Buddy you can forget about writing server-side code and focus entirely on building out your app experience.
Buddy joins a host of other development platforms that have partnered with Urban Airship including Appcelerator, Cabana, Kinvey, PhoneGap and ShoutEm.
There’s more room on the Airship so let us know if you want to come aboard.
The buzz around SXSW is reaching a fevered pitch and we’ve slowly released details about the Urban Airship Mobile Roundtable including a who’s who list of mobile industry speakers. Since we plan to soon announce the lucky few of you confirmed to hitch a ride with us, we thought we’d let the cat out of the bag with a final artist rendering of our vessel.
While our ambitions and growth are sky-high, we’re still a down-to-earth startup, so we won’t be taking flight in an actual dirigible…at least not this year. However, from the fresh spring air in Austin to the small group setting with some of mobile’s top people, we promise an exhilarating, thought-provoking ride.
We’ll share some actual pictures of the Mobile Roundtable once the build is complete. We’ve been fortunate to work with ADX, a unique collaborative center for design and fabrication, to help us bring the Mobile Roundtable from concept to reality.
If you don’t catch us on the Mobile Roundtable, we’re speaking on SoLoMo Redefined on Friday, March 8th, and together with Apigee, Heroku and Twilio are hosting GET.DOWN SXSW Sunday, March 13th, at the Pure Volume House with live performances by The Bright Light Social Hour and RAC.
Last week Apple announced a developer preview for their new OS X version, Mountain Lion, and one of the most talked about features is the Notification Center, which takes the system-wide notification system added in iOS 5.0 and extends it to the Mac. While Apple added push notification capability to Mac apps in its prior OS X update, in Mountain Lion the Notification Center makes notifications much more useful with built-in alerting and a centralized roll-up for messages you might have missed.
Last week we had our latest Free Friday, and I checked out the preview to see how Urban Airship’s iOS push capabilities worked with the new system. To my pleasant surprise, everything just worked. I was up and running from scratch in about an hour in Xcode, and I set up a few RSS feeds in the Urban Airship dashboard to alert my test app of breaking news.
This is one part of iOS that I’m glad to see arrive on the desktop, and I’m excited to see how developers will use Notification Center and push notifications in Mountain Lion. Are you a developer with a Mac App Store app, or are you working on one? We’d love to know how you plan to use notifications!
