We announced the acquisition of SimpleGeo at the end of October 2011. Since then we’ve been evaluating how to proceed in a way that benefits all parties involved: SimpleGeo and Urban Airship customers plus both companies. After many internal conversations and discussions with a variety of clients, we’ve come up with a new direction. To summarize that approach, here’s the email we sent out today to all SimpleGeo customers to let them know about our plans since the merger:
Dear Customer:
As you know, this past October, Urban Airship and SimpleGeo merged to combine mobile customer engagement with location and context-based services. Since then, we’ve maintained the status quo with respect to SimpleGeo’s products: Places, Context, and Storage. In the meantime, the newly combined team here has been busy speaking with customers about what services they would find most useful to deploy from the combined entity.
As a result, during the first half of this year we will introduce significant new features to Urban Airship’s high performance push notification services that allow our customers to take advantage of location and context to better segment and engage their mobile audience. As just one example, customers will have the ability to send push notifications to users on specific device types, in specific geographical areas, during specific time frames, e.g., iPad users who have been in the SOMA neighborhood of San Francisco within the past 7 days. The ability to fine-tune audience segmentation for push notifications will increase relevancy to users, provide new app capabilities which will lead to higher customer engagement and satisfaction rates, and deliver increased return on investment. We’ll share more with you in the coming weeks and months as we can.
In order to deliver on this aggressive vision in the shortest amount of time possible, we need to focus our product development efforts. So, after lots of internal discussion and customer conversations, we will wind down the availability of the current versions of Places, Context, and Storage over the next few months. We will do everything we can to minimize the impact to customers as we look to end the availability of these services on March 31, 2012. For more details on this change, see our FAQ document.
We have already lined up a partnership with Factual to provide continuity for all customers using the Places service. The folks at Factual are on standby to ensure as seamless a hand-off as possible to their services. We also have an additional list of replacement services in a migration path document on our support site. In addition, we will not be charging for usage of any of the Places, Context, or Storage services for their remaining availability period or for past usage to date, as a thank-you for your patience and understanding during this transition.
Because we want to continue our relationship with every SimpleGeo customer, we are offering existing customers of the SimpleGeo services up to six months of our Urban Airship Pro Plan for no monthly charge (see the offer details in the FAQ document).
We are extremely excited about the future of adding location and context into our mobile customer engagement products. We look forward to working with all of our customers to help them innovate with these new capabilities to make their mobile initiatives even more successful.
Sincerely,
Scott Kveton
Co-founder and CEO
Urban Airship
Today I’m excited to announce the acquisition of SimpleGeo. You can read Jay Adelson’s post here.
Both Urban Airship and SimpleGeo started two and a half years ago and I’ll never forget when Crash Corp Inc. (the original SimpleGeo) launched as we both went live with our new sites on the same day with the same font; Museo. We’ve known each other over that entire time and shared lots of discussions and even did a partnership deal in the last couple of months. As we continued to talk and engage we realized that putting our two companies together would make for a really interesting offering for our combined customers.
We’ve learned that our customers (brands, retailers, etailers, media, social networking sites, games and others) want more than just generic tools. Instead of building blocks they want a complete solution that can be used by the entire company to help engage, monetize, locate and understand their mobile user base. Urban Airship will fold in the SimpleGeo product suite to offer a complete set of solutions for our ever growing customer base. Urban Airship is now the leading platform for mobile cloud services in the market. This is a fantastic win for both Urban Airship and SimpleGeo customers and investors.
Obviously there are many things that we need to work out while we make this transition and we’ll be working closely with existing customers from both companies to make sure they are up to speed on our future plans for the combined roadmap.
We’re excited to be continuing to build the business, excited that the SG team is joining Urban Airship, excited about having an office in San Francisco and most of all excited about the next phase of PaaS that we’re going to dominate in years to come.
Read the full press release here
Location has long been the Holy Grail in most marketers’ minds. Looking back to the days of ValPak coupons, newspaper inserts, hyper-local TV ads, and even the people you see spinning signs in front of furniture and fast food stores on the corners, you’ve seen how the approach has worked but the execution has been poor. Often times the engagement tactic does not work or does not appeal to the consumer in a way that is contextually right for them. That was the approach we originally saw with mobile, apps and location. We aimed not to replicate it but instead chart the course in a whole new way. We are thinking about location aware combined with contextual relevance as opposed to the “YOU ARE HERE”.
The notion of “geo-fencing” (wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geo-fence), although early and not generally welcomed by the majority of consumers, was akin to this old approach of just throwing stuff at you when you were in reach. You might as well have taken a look at your store from above, drawn a circle around it and then placed someone with a coupon, sign, ad, etc at every possible point of intersection. Sure the block-and-tackle approach worked early-on for some pioneers in the space, but with mobile being such a personal and intent driven ecosystem, we saw the interactions shrink and the feedback become soured. The last thing we wanted as a mobile solutions software provider would be to go out early and not take the time to think through a solution that would empower our customers and developers to align for success.
On my afternoon walk with a co-worker yesterday I explained it as we navigated the streets on our way to caffeine. This is not simple geo-fencing. In that vein I would have circled a zip code or city block and painted in what I wanted the imposed action to be. For example, you have my coffee app and I want to sell you iced coffee. Instead, using advanced data points gives us deeper more desirable alerts to the actual app user and supports the goals of the brand.
Using defined locations and past behaviors (store has three locations in a zip code, user typically enters X store) and using the weather (it’s 92 degrees) then send them an opportunity to get an iced coffee at the most directionally relevant store. It is as much about you as it is about the weather. Each is variable and each drives an appropriate action. He got it, but I also used lots of arm gestures, frantic pointing, and no white board… it was close.
So we spent the past six months having conversations with customers, app developers, consumers, and technology partners getting down to the basics of what was needed and what would allow people to use geo location with context and purpose in a way that provided value. Our goal is to always do business with the best, so of course we turned to our friends at SimpleGeo. After some face-to-face ideation on both sides, and finally a shared vision we are now ready to provide a set of building blocks that will allow both Urban Airship and SimpleGeo customers alike to harness the awesome strengths of both systems combined.
What you will get:
- Access to all the data in SimpleGeo Context on an app by app basis (zip code, county, city, country, weather, state and federal political data).
- Enhanced Tag system by automatically tagging devices at the platform level with location information provided by SimpleGeo Context.
- Added Boolean Tag functionality which lets you address you audience with complex AND, OR, and wildcard functionality.
- Enhanced Urban Airship Reports over time to expose views of your audience by location when adding geographic context to our system.
Just like the invention of Oreos and Milk, Butter and Popcorn, or my favorite, Gin and Tonic, we are combining the goodness of both to make something that becomes better. What really has me excited is that this solution allows our teams to focus on roadmaps and massive system growth, but folds in the brains of two amazing teams who spend each day thinking and interacting with people actually using each system. Really could you ask for more than that?
You should note we are not going to release the end-all be-all solution. Instead our teams have decided to approach it as a three-phased project that will add complexity to the products as we believe the market is maturing. On top of that, having two companies and product roadmaps, we have found that some of our coming releases can be leveraged against each other as well as the behaviors we’ve seen from Urban Airship’s 200 million app installs. Yes, some monstrous Big Data brewing for mobile devices, engagement, context and now location.
I’m not sure about you, but as someone whose phone is never farther than arm’s reach, the ability to have notifications that provide greater functionality to me, based on what I want and my relationship with a brand/app is huge. I am looking forward to the my next Foodspotting alert that drives me into not just the locally raised, ergonomically fed, hand-washed, organic chicken taco cart… but the one that I am most likely to be walking towards, that my friends have rated that you know I will like. Or the happy hour alert I get based on weather data, offering me a cooling Penicillin at Teardrop lounge or a buttery Basil Hayden (neat) when the weather cools. Ah geo, context, and push are already sounding as tasty as an Oreo and Milk mashup.
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