News

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

As things here on the ship continue to elevate, we are excited to welcome Christopher Dean (a.k.a CD) to the team as our Chief Revenue Officer. Before joining Urban Airship he was the Head of Business Development and Chief Strategy Officer at Skype. CD comes to us with 20 years of Internet and IP communications experience in the B2C and B2B markets and has consulted with the likes of Apple, Adobe Systems, IBM, Oracle, and Placeware (acquired by Microsoft). So we are confident that he is going to lead our sales and BD efforts to the next level.

When he’s not ruling the boardroom he spends time with his lovely wife and three kids at their home in San Francisco, and spends time making air-dried Italian sausages, cycling, skiing and traveling to Portland (amongst other places). Read more about Christopher here. Welcome Chris!

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.