Partnerships

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.

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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Today at the Verizon Developer Conference in Las Vegas, Verizon Wireless announced it has selected Urban Airship as its preferred provider of smart-phone push notifications for mobile apps developed across the Verizon network. Today, two of our company founders will take the stage in front of hundreds of Verizon Wireless developers to explain the benefits of push notifications and how they help organizations add value to their mobile endeavors.

We see this as a huge validation of the new mobile channel, especially the potential of push notifications to deliver ongoing value to mobile apps after they’ve hit the market. Businesses that have integrated our AirMail Push mobile messaging services into their apps have realized tremendous benefits, from increased usage to actual revenue gains.

We’re thrilled to be partnering with Verizon Wireless, who like us, seeks to help developers create and enhance the value of their applications. By expanding the number of tools available, including AirMail Push, to members of the Verizon Developer Community, the carrier is providing cost-efficient options for smart phone developers.

Verizon developers: Welcome! We are looking forward to working with you. We’ll be providing interested parties with tools and resources to guide development, produce higher quality applications and capitalize on Verizon’s powerful mobile device distribution. Here is some info to help you get started.

Push Messaging Overview

Push notifications optimize mobile apps. They strengthen user engagement, open up monetization opportunity and provide valuable insight into the effectiveness of mobile campaigns. Using the Urban Airship mobile services platform also helps developers scale their applications.

Engagement
One of the problems you, like any mobile publisher, face, is how to get your users back into your app once it has become available and downloaded onto their devices. You might see some inertia from your users, who might forget about your app and let it sit unused on their devices. A push notification sends a short message to your users—from within the app—that not only provides information relevant to them but also serves as a reminder for them to go back to the app. Your app users win too; because they opt-in to control which push notifications they want to receive and how they’d like to be notified (via badge update, sound or text alert).

Monetization
The more users use your app, the more they engage with your brand, organization or service. This engagement, of course, opens up revenue-generating opportunities for up-selling additional relevant content to users. It also helps your business develop sponsorship and marketing options. (Of course, the push notification itself is not a medium for direct marketing to users; but savvy publishers can turn that increased user engagement into opportunity.) Mobile messages are also the perfect complement to in-app purchase content delivery – if you have additional content that users might be interested in, what better way to let them know about it than directly from the app?

Information
Push notifications provide unique insight into app user behavior. You can track which messages prompt the most response; what times of day are most effective for sending messages; which devices or time zones or platforms spur the greatest engagement. Understanding your user behavior will help you decide how and when to tailor messaging campaigns to specific users or to users meeting certain patterns. This data helps you glean valuable insight to improve your mobile outreach.

Scale
Urban Airship’s cross-platform infrastructure helps you maximize your reach. From one API, you can send millions of messages across the Android, Blackberry and Apple iOS platforms. At the end of the day, you don’t really care which devices your users carry in their pockets; you just want them to use your app.

Technology
Our solid technology is based on the following principles:

• Provide a simple user and developer experience
• Scale
• Deploy easily as a SaaS solution
• Offer one API to reach any device
• Construct a flexible API upon which developers can build
• Leverage the power of the Amazon EC2 infrastructure
• Build a strong technology foundation using Memcache, Cassandra, Python and Java

How We’ll Work With Verizon Developers

Urban Airship will open its AirMail mobile messaging technology to the Verizon developers network. Any developer considering offering push notifications will be able to work directly with our team of engineers. Urban Airship will also provide code libraries and integration and technical support to guide development and ensure that you successfully integrate our AirMail mobile messaging tools. Our developer resource page has tons of info, including API documentation, to get you started.

Why Urban Airship

We’d like to think it is our warm smiles and generous personalities that wooed the Verizon execs, but we hear it is our demonstrated market leadership in mobile – the nearly 1 billion push messages we’ve delivered to more than 60 million unique devices on three platforms—and of course our solid technology and end-to-end mobile services platform.

Got questions?

Contact us however you’d like. Visit our support site or our IRC chat channel (#urbanairship on irc.freenode.net); we have a contact us form on our site; we host support forums… and we even use email (support@urbanairship.com) and the telephone. There is always more than one way to connect.

UPDATE: Phonegap has changed significantly since this blog post. Please download a complete working iOS/Phonegap 1.0.0 sample: https://github.com/urbanairship/ios-phonegap-plugin from GitHub, and follow the readme.

PhoneGap is an awesome open-source project by the guys at Nitobi that provides tools for building cross-platform mobile applications using HTML and Javascript. Using the plugin provided here you can begin sending push notifications from Urban Airship to your PhoneGap application quickly and painlessly.

The first thing you’ll need to do is download: the plugin and sample code.

To get started, create a folder named Plugins in your project folder if it does not exist. Then add PushNotification.h and PushNotification.m to it. Now copy PushNotification.js to /PROJECT_PATH/www/. Note that the plugin sample code also contains an index.html. We won’t be using it in this example, but is provided for reference.

Import PushNotification.js via a script tag in the <head> of your application.

<script src="PushNotification.js" type="text/javascript"><!--mce:0--></script>

Now in some <script> tags you’ll want to add the following code to your application. The block below handles registering your application for push notifications with Apple and then sending the device token Apple returns to Urban Airship for registration.

// app key and secret for your Urban Airship application
var HOST = 'https://go.urbanairship.com/';
var KEY = '';
var SECRET = '';
 
// When this function is called, PhoneGap has been initialized and is ready to roll
function onDeviceReady() {
    navigator.pushNotification.startNotify();
    registerAPN();
}
 
// Register device for push with Apple.  success and error callbacks passed along
// with the push features your app is requesting
function registerAPN() {
    navigator.pushNotification.register(successCallback, errorCallback,
        { alert:true, badge:true, sound:true });
}
 
// Callback when receiving notification.  This method is only called
// when your application receives a push notification while it is open.
PushNotification.prototype.notificationCallback = function (notification) {
	var msg = '';
	for (var property in notification) {
		msg += property + ' : ' + notification[property] + '\n';
	}
	alert(msg);
};
 
// when register APN succeeded
function successCallback(e) {
    alert("Device registered. Device token: " + e.deviceToken);
    registerUAPush(e.deviceToken); //register token with UA
}
 
// when register APN failed
function errorCallback(e) {
    alert('Error during registration: '+e.error);
}
 
// register with Urban Airship push service
function registerUAPush(deviceToken) {
    // open the client and encode our URL
    var request = new XMLHttpRequest();
    request.open('PUT', HOST+'api/device_tokens/'+deviceToken, true, KEY, SECRET);
 
    // callback when request finished
    request.onload = function() {
        if(this.status == 200 || this.status == 201) {
            alert('UA push service successfully registered.');
        } else {
            alert('Error when registering UA push service.\nError: '+this.statusText);
        }
    };
    request.send();
}

You can also check out index.html included in the sample code for a more detailed implementation.

Now, you’re good to go. Your application has registered that device with Urban Airship. All you have to do to send a push notification to that device is send an HTTP POST request to Urban Airship’s REST API.

Once you have this working, it’s trivial to take advantage of other Urban Airship Push features such as tags, aliases, broadcast, and auto-badge.

We’re looking forward to seeing what kind of great things people build using PhoneGap with Urban Airship – be sure to drop us a line when your app goes live!

Appcelerator is a popular method of quickly building iPhone applications using HTML and javascript. We’ve worked with the Appcelerator folks to bring you some basic steps for how to integrate Urban Airship into your application.

The first thing to do is make a call to registerForPushNotifications which will asynchronously return the result of the registration to one of the callback functions you provide.

var APP_KEY = '';
var APP_SECRET = '';
 
Titanium.Network.registerForPushNotifications({
    types:[
        Titanium.Network.NOTIFICATION_TYPE_BADGE,
        Titanium.Network.NOTIFICATION_TYPE_ALERT,
        Titanium.Network.NOTIFICATION_TYPE_SOUND
    ],
    success: successCallback,
    error: errorCallback,
    callback: messageCallback
});

Read more »

We here at Urban Airship have been working hard on a lot of really exciting new features and products that we can’t wait to show off. Today we’re excited to announce our partnership with PointAbout to bring Urban Airship Push to their Appmakr.com service via our new Partner API. You can read more about it here.

Appmakr is a service that helps you quickly build a complete iPhone application for submission to the iTunes store without knowing anything about iPhone app development. In all, PointAbout’s Appmakr has built more than 3,000 apps for the iTunes store. We are really excited to add push functionality as a possibility for all of their customers.

We’ve had a great relationship with Point About and its only getting better with the integration of push into Appmakr. We’re looking forward to helping them integrate AirMail in the near future as well.

We continue to push the envelope in providing new services for our customers and partners. Point About was able to take advantage of our Partner API that allows our partners to automatically provision our push services. If you’re interested in learning more, please contact us.