Industry

The crew is on the ready, the flight plan is set and the blueprint for a SXSW experience you won’t soon forget is coming to life. Over the next month you’ll be able to follow along in our journey as we bring Urban Airship’s Mobile Roundtable to the streets of Austin for SXSW; it’s beginning to take shape.

Last week you learned that we really are planning a mobile, mobile leadership event. With round-trips jumping off from The Screen Porch at W Austin, and a secret, ultra-cool way station, a few of you will have the opportunity to mix and mingle in small group discussions led by mobile, marketing and developer luminaries.

People like Andrew Mager, Chief Listening Officer at Spotify, and Chris Messina, Developer Advocate at Google, will spark a wide variety of discussions, from how mobile is changing content, marketing and consumer behavior, to how industries can adapt to seize new opportunities.

Head on over to our event site and submit your email address to get updates on how you may be able to hitch a ride with us in Austin.

This is the first in a series of posts that explores some of the things we’re doing behind the scenes in Urban Airship Engineering. Over the next few months, members of the engineering team will offer insight into how we operate, lessons we’ve learned, open source projects we have created and some of the challenges we face serving hundreds of millions of instances of apps connecting to our services every day.

Culturally and from a process standpoint, Urban Airship Engineering is focused on learning and adapting through continuous improvement. We wish we were smart enough to have invented these techniques, but luckily we didn’t have to. The way we conduct product development day to day is an adaptation of ideas in various books including the Poppendieck’s books on Lean Software and David Anderson’s Kanban.

“Value Stream” is a term that originated with Lean Manufacturing meaning to analyze and design the flow of materials and information required to bring a product or service to a consumer. The whole idea is to drive out waste, deliver fast, build quality in, and engage all of the people involved in the value stream so that great products emerge. Urban Airship has had a lot of success with Kanban and Kaizen. Don’t let those words scare you off if you don’t speak Japanese, they just mean “billboard” and “change for the better,” respectively. This post explores our high-level history in applying these concepts and how we’ve begun to scale our process across our SF and PDX offices as necessitated by bringing Urban Airship and SimpleGeo together as one company last October.

Model What’s Happening Now and Let Improvement Emerge

We started with Kanban and Kaizen when I joined Urban Airship in October 2010. The engineering team at the time was following an adaptation of Agile/Scrum and while it was producing results, it wasn’t working as well as we wanted it to in serving all the needs of a venture-backed startup. We adapted our operating model to a starter version of what is described in Anderson’s Kanban book. A great thing about Kanban is starting is easy; you just model the value stream as it is and define work-item types that are meaningful to the team (e.g., Bug Pack, Minimum Marketable Feature, Business Enablement, Refactoring/Technical Debt). Each work-item that is in process, planned, or recently completed gets hung up on a physical board with lanes that indicate the current value stream.

Every morning we have a Product Development Boardwalk. This is a standup style meeting where we walk through every work-item on the board in no longer than 15 minutes. We rotate the facilitator of this meeting every day to keep it fresh and make sure that everyone knows the process well enough that they can lead the team through it. This establishes shared context for everyone on what is happening in the value stream. It’s amazing what smart people can achieve together when they have the same context! Physical Kanban boards are still unrivaled for enabling this.

We tweaked our value stream a bit here and there as we learned from successes and failures. We introduced new work-item types, changed WIP limits, added exit criteria, added lanes, split lanes etc. We broke out a separate board right next to Product Development for Customer Development & GTM (Go-to-Market). We made these changes based on insights from our monthly Operational Review & Retrospective and from 5 Whys from production incidents and other defects.

A Year Later: SimpleGeo Acquisition, Investment and Development Partners

In October of 2011, Urban Airship acquired San Francisco-based SimpleGeo, took on a new round of financing and executed some major business agreements that would cause the company to grow even more quickly than it was already. In order to keep work-items flowing, it was time to begin to scale our value stream.

Urban Airship is a very in-person company. In order to make our value stream work across offices, we decided to replicate it in both locations. To achieve the same feel we had when it was just PDX, we now alternate facilitating offices every week. Individuals in the facilitating office also rotate every day. We’re still working out the kinks to be sure, but it’s working and is a lot of fun.

Our Kanban board was showing it’s age even before these events occurred. We had grown engineering four-fold and with that it was getting harder to see everything and achieve shared context. In order to address this and begin to scale into small sets of focused teams, we introduced horizontal lanes for each major part of our product line. We have kept the meeting wide open to anyone who wants to participate or observe, but now just the engineering leadership team (leaders of functional areas, program managers, product managers, tech leads, team leads, etc.) attends the Product Development Boardwalk every morning. Many of these leaders maintain what we refer to as a “Zoom In” Kanban board, which is focused on a specific functional area or work-item that rolls up to the main Product Development board.

The Product Development Kanban board in PDX (left wall) and Polycom unit with the replica board in SF

The SF Polycom unit displaying the PDX Kanban board

A real live Product Development Boardwalk meeting with Wade Simmons from SF facilitating via Polycom

The SF Product Development board (notice the glare from the warm California sun)

An example “Zoom In” Kanban board (far wall) in our Messaging Feature Room in PDX

Looking Forward

Change is constant at Urban Airship. As we continue to grow our team, scale to a billion devices using our services and build new features and products, we’ll keep making adaptions to how we operate in Urban Airship Engineering.

Tools / Technology

We use the following tools and technology to power our Kanban:

1. The biggest baddest magnetic white boards we can find
2. The most powerful magnets we can find
3. Magnet pictures of our people
4. White board markers
5. Colored note cards (indicate different classes of service)
6. Colored markers (to indicate different work-item types (e.g., Minimum Marketable Feature, Bug Pack)
7. Polycom to power the video conferencing between offices
8. Google Hangouts and Skype for Zoom In video conferencing
9. LeanKitKanban – web-based Kanban board we use to help sync the SF and PDX boards. It also produces some great metrics and graphs that we use to understand what is happening across product development (e.g., Continuous Flow Diagram, Cycle Time per lane, per work-item type, etc., Card Distribution Diagrams, Efficiency Diagrams, and even a Process Control Diagram)
10. JIRA – we use it to track details of work-items and as the electronic record we reference in source control, etc.

It’s official! Generation Connect is here and it’s on SNL. Check out their hilarious spoof on push notifications and please remember to look both ways before crossing the street.

In a world that’s more connected than ever, push notifications can expand our view, our insight and our actions beyond the 3-10 inch screen we religiously carry. Together with leading app developers and partners we are evolving mobile messaging to drive greater value for consumers and brands alike. We have sent more than ten billion push notifications for many of the world’s leading brands and mobile apps. Check out some of our real-world applications here.

Over 10 billion push notifications served!

Everyone at Urban Airship truly believes in the power of push notifications. We all work hard to deliver the promise of improved mobile engagement to our customers. So it is with great excitement that we announce the inclusion of push notifications in a new report by Forrester Research called, “The New Messaging Mandate”, which can be purchased here.

For the first time, an independent analyst firm recommends Push Notifications, along with traditional mail, telemarketing, email, social media and SMS, as a must have communication channel. Forrester has a great history in anointing significant technologies at the right time, and having them include push notifications in this report is very telling. Mobile messaging is becoming the most real-time, customer focused channel, but it is just really getting started, and push notifications are playing a very significant role. See the Press Release

Forrester has a real knack for timing as their report comes out around the same time that we see our 10 billionth notification sent since we launched two years ago. It’s exciting to see the path Urban Airship has taken over these past two years.  It was only a few months ago, in August, that we saw our 5 billionth notification. Since then we have seen an acceleration of new customers and users.

For fun, take a look at two fun graphics mapping our:
Journey to 5 billion notifications
Adventure from 5 billion to 10 billion

The introduction of iOS5 brought Newsstand, which made mobile subscriptions a reality for publishers. Now 8 of the top 10 publishing companies rely on our service to manage daily subscription content and send breaking news alerts to their users. Along with Newsstand came Notification Center, which created a better user experience for receiving push notifications. This improved experience has increased the number of pushes that users are open to receiving and brought new confidence to enterprise organizations that send notifications through their apps. In December when Amazon released the Kindle Fire, based on the Android operating system, they opened up a whole new audience for our Helium customers to message to.

Thank you Forrester for including us in your research.  Thank you customers and developers for trusting us to deliver on our promises. Thank you team for continuing to take Urban Airship to new heights.

Today App Design Vault chose Urban Airship as the #1 tool on their 32 Top Resources Mobile App Developers Should Know About list.  We are thrilled that the folks at App Design Vault feel so strongly about the services we provide.  We love our customers and hope that they find value in this list.

[Source: iPhone App Design]

All industries across the globe are talking about mobile apps, their impact in 2011 and what opportunity they hold for 2012. Today we saw two interesting moves that prove out what everyone is talking about. Two great app development shops, Ubermind and Small Society, were acquired by enterprise organizations who are investing to make mobile apps play a bigger part in their business.

Ubermind was acquired by Deloitte. An interesting move by Deloitte and a sign that they are making bets in Mobile to broaden their offering significantly. Read what Ubermind and Deloitte had to say about the acquisition.

Small Society, was acquired by Walmart Labs. Small Society will now be working solely for Walmart brands and we are sure they will be delighting consumers with their mobile innovations. Read what Raven and James from Small Society are saying about joining Walmart.

News around consolidation in our industry is nothing new or surprising. Mobile apps are a booming category with many players and we have seen plenty of consolidation amongst the playing field. What we find interesting about this news is that two great app development shops were picked up by big enterprise players.  This adds real merit to all of the talk around the growing need to invest in mobile apps.  Congratulations to these two talented agencies and to the companies who invested in a better mobile future – We look forward to seeing your continued innovations.

At Urban Airship we are committed to making it easy for app developers to create engaging mobile experiences and we are always on the lookout for companies that share our vision.  We are excited to announce that Cabana and Kinvey have joined Appcelerater, PhoneGap and ShoutEm as Urban Airship strategic platform partners.  As strategic platform partners they offer Urban Airship products to the apps developed on their platforms.  Through these partnerships we will can offer developers our powerful engagement and monetization products through these app development platforms, working together to build a more successful mobile future.

Appcelerator is a mobile development platform for javascript developers.  Appcelerator Titanium lets you build native mobile, tablet and desktop application experiences using existing web skills like Javascript, HTML, CSS, Python, Ruby, and PHP.  Check out their video to learn more.

Cabana is a browser based mobile app development platform that changes the way apps are made.  They achieve this through the combination of a highly visual drag and drop development environment, an innovative graph based visual programming system, and the Cabana Exchange, a component marketplace that contains functionality from some of the top mobile app service providers. Check out their video to watch it in action.

Kinvey is the first Backend as a Service that makes it ridiculously easy for developers to setup, use and maintain a cloud backend for their mobile apps.  Check out their video to learn more.  Kinvey will make it easy for you model your data, drop in libraries, API’s and add your own code, and synch your data on an ongoing basis.

PhoneGap is an HTML5 app platform that allows you to author native applications with web technologies and get access to APIs and app stores.  PhoneGap leverages web technologies developers already know best including HTML and JavaScript, allowing you to build your app using web standards but still deploy it out across multiple mobile platforms.  Check out their video to learn more.

ShoutEm native mobile app maker.  Their platform allows you to build slick native apps for iPhone, Android and iPad. ShoutEm integrates with your website, your YouTube and Flickr channels and take all that content across mobile platforms.  Check out their website and learn more how easy and simple it is to build the app these days.

We are excited to partner with these powerful app development platforms and will keep working hard to create more opportunities to make it easy for developers to use Urban Airship’s app engagement, monetization and reporting platform. If you don’t already have an app, check out these platforms to see if any is right for you. If you already have an app and want to see your app audience more engaged with it, see how Urban Airship can help.

Apple’s Newsstand launched with the release of iOS 5 on October 12th, and by any measure, it appears to be a big win for Apple and for publishers alike. Since the iPad took the technology world by storm 18 months ago, it’s been an interesting time for publishers with several notable App Store rejections, industry confusion about how to implement tablet subscriptions, and a fair amount of criticism of Apple’s 30% revenue share. It appears now that Newsstand is the real deal, delivering on the iPad’s promise of a new dawn for publishers. Huzzah!

Not all major publishers came out of the gate with Newsstand titles, but a handful made a splash. Urban Airship customers The Guardian and Future Publishing were notable early adopters. The Guardian released a long-awaited update to its popular iPad reader, and Future Publishing launched nearly 60 new magazine titles on their custom-built publishing platform, including Future Music, Total Guitar, and Mac | Life. The New York Times, Conde Nast, Rodale, and others were all early to market as well, contributing to a great selection of Newsstand titles from which to choose.

The early success of the platform bodes well for traditional publishers that are under increasing pressure to produce big revenue gains in mobile distribution. Here at Urban Airship, we’re excited to see so many customers using our tools to achieve this success. We have been fortunate to work with many large publishers since the early days of Urban Airship, and have built a compelling product offering for this segment of the market. “Urban Airship is a Direct Marketers dream”, said Richard Walker, who oversees distribution and marketing at Future Publishing.  He also noted that, “The impact on our customers has been a better user experience, and the opportunity to discover new publications in Newsstand.”

Here’s a bit about each of the components we provide that make up our complete offering:

• Newsstand library support. Via our iOS library, Newsstand apps are configured to handle Auto-renewable subscriptions and single-issue purchases via Apple’s In App Purchase, integrating with the Newsstand framework easily.
• Content Delivery. Urban Airship hosts & delivers the physical magazine & newspaper content and verifies purchase receipts with Apple, making that content available to the end user on multiple iOS devices and restorable in the event that a device is reset.
• Push Notifications. Push is a key piece of the puzzle for a properly functioning Newsstand experience. Notifying subscribers of new available content, breaking news, or live in-app discussions is a key engagement driver, bringing end users back to your app again and again. Push Notifications also wake up the app and trigger background downloading when new issues are available, eliminating the need to wait around while the new issue downloads. Content is preloaded while you sleep and available for you right away.
• Audience Segmentation. Our flexible APIs allow publishers to collect preference information from end users, e.g., alert settings for Political & Entertainment stories, location information, “Quiet Time” preferences, and more. By allowing users the ability to opt in only for the most contextual alerts at the most appropriate frequency, volume, and times, publishers maintain optimal access to this communication channel. Use our Tags & Aliases features to run drip campaigns, associate mobile users with profiles in your CRM, and offer a highly personal and contextual user experience.
• Free (seed) content. It’s important to include a suitable amount of free and/or preview content for non-subscribers, or as our customers like to think of them, “future subscribers.” If a free app has no useful function without requiring a purchase, then it will most likely be deleted faster than you can say Qwikster. Urban Airship supports “free” content, such as back issues, that can be listed alongside single-issue sales and subscription options.
• Reports. Know thy users. Understand how your users are interacting with your app, which types of messages are most effective for which constituencies, peaks and valleys of app usage, and more. Our reporting tools round out the third pillar of any successful digital distribution strategy. Engage, Monetize, Analyze! (Rinse and repeat, naturally)

It’s been 18 months since the iPad was announced. Some called it a big iPhone. Publishers held out high hopes but ran into early disappointments, and even today, struggle with their digital content strategies. Today, Newsstand is paying off, and visionary companies like Future Publishing and The Guardian are taking the lead.

Contact us if you are interested in adding Newsstand and Subscriptions to your app.

As a marketer, it’s exciting to see companies large and small using Push Notifications to drive business goals.  The customer case studies we have produced over the past few months make it clear that Push is a powerful tool for business.  We’ve seen them deliver a daily dose of learning for Dictionary.com, make radio social for Jelli, and drive commerce for Swirl.  But like Peter Parker’s uncle Ben used to say, “with great power comes great responsibility”.

In the changing media landscape, it’s important to remember that the mobile user is in complete control of his/her experience.  Unlike radio, TV and print, mobile users will not tolerate broadcast advertisements sent to their mobile devices.  Misusing Push Notifications to serve only the needs of the app, ahead of the needs of the customer, is the quickest way to get turned off.  Follow these recommended practices of Push to assure a long lasting relationship with your users.

• If you remember only one thing remember this.  Every mobile user is an individual, treat them as such.
• Use notifications to solve a problem or delight customers, within the scope of your app.
• Segment your audience and deliver targeted Push paired with targeted content to deliver the best possible experience to your customers.
• Use timing to your advantage by incorporating quiet time preferences and optimize to times when users are most engaged with apps.
• Make it easy to opt in and opt out of notifications, location and social features.
• Measure engagement driven from Push and optimize.

If our recommended practices aren’t for you, make sure to follow the terms of Apple’s iOS agreement.

“You may not use the APN or Local Notifications for the purposes of advertising, product promotion, or direct marketing of any kind (e.g. up-selling, cross-selling, etc.), including, but not limited to, sending any messages to promote the use of Your Application or advertise the availability of new features or versions.”

At Urban Airship we believe the future of mobile will largely be driven by real time alerts and updates, based on personal context like location and preferences.  We are excited to welcome the SimpleGeo team and are dedicated to building products and services that will deliver our vision and ensure the success of our customers.