Product

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 we’re happy to introduce you to the first of many efforts geared towards improving our web application. We’ve spent a lot of time talking to customers and seeing what pain points they were hitting. We’re just getting started on this, so expect to see lots of improvements in the coming months.

The changes we’re rolling out today are primarily related to the navigation in our web application. In addition to visual updates, the new streamlined navigation is designed to get you around your applications and account details quickly and easily. The new application menu includes type-ahead searching so you can find applications based on their name, iOS bundle ID, Android package, or application key, regardless of how many you have in our system.

We’ve also introduced application icons into the mix. You can upload an image for your application and we’ll display it throughout the site. Use the same icon file that you include in your app. This great visual cue will help you ensure that you’re on the right app, or help you find the one you’re looking for.

With this update, we’re setting the stage for some really exciting changes that are coming soon – changes that address some long-standing feature requests and allow us to do some really amazing things with the dashboard. As our customer base grows, the needs of our users changes, and we’re really happy to begin addressing some of those today. We love feedback so let us know what you think.

Stay tuned!

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.

It’s another exciting week here at Urban Airship. I’m at the Intel Capital CEO Summit where we have just announced Intel Capital’s participation in our series C investment announced last week along with Salesforce.com, Verizon, Foundry Group and True Ventures.

And I had the good luck to be interviewed here at the event by Jon Fortt who covers technology for CNBC.

As we’ve built Urban Airship we’ve been thinking about ways we can really advance the platform– not only with new features– but also to find ways to push deeper into the devices themselves. Along with this investment we’re announcing a business collaboration with Intel’s Software & Services Group.

This is the first of many such collaborations with handset OEM’s, chip makers and hardware manufacturers. The Urban Airship platform continues to gain momentum and relevance both by adding new features but also by providing a complete mobile platform embedded directly into devices. We could not be more excited.

Today we’re adding Rich Push™ Composer to all existing Pro and Premium accounts, as well as anyone who has signed up for our 45 day trial. Much like Push Composer, this new wizard allows you to build and preview Rich Push™ messages for your audience. Rich Push™ is a product that we’ve had available for quite some time via our API, but it’s always been missing a certain something on the front-end. That certain something was a user-friendly interface, which we proudly bring you today with this launch. We think you’ll agree.

Rich Push™ Composer is just the beginning of the interaction. After adding our Rich Push™ Inbox to your app with our embedded iOS library these messages will live on for each of your app’s audience members. The Inbox has full management control for your users, with read/un-read marks, and the ability to delete messages. Indeed if you use our Rich Push™ API, you can also manage their Inbox for them remotely. If you want to remove a time-sensitive message from their list, that capability is in your hands. App users will see beautiful rich HTML messages that overlay your app cleanly, and a familiar Inbox format. Customize the default look and feel to fit your app, or use our sample off the shelf. If your app demands a truly compelling user experience we’ve also built in a Javascript to Objective-C bridge into the iOS library. You can have dynamic Rich Push™ messages which take an action directly in your app, like taking your user directly to a In-app Purchase view.

We’re only scratching the surface of Rich Push™, and now with a full Composer you can see its power immediately. Sign up for a free trial today to get access to Rich Push™ Composer and let us know what you think!

With the launch of iOS5 we’ve been busy updating all our phones around the office and watching the adoption numbers go up. But along with the new Notification Center comes a whole new set of visual styles for Push Notifications on the iPhone, iPod, and iPad. So we’ve updated Push Composer with a few new previews to cover the new visual landscape that is Push on iOS5! We’ve also added a few new features to boot. There are three new ways that notifications can appear, and a bunch of new user controls for governing these new features.

Lock Screen Preview

The most common view will be “Lock Screen” notifications, which are similar to previous iOS versions but with a new style and sans buttons.

Pull Down Display Preview 

This pull-down view displays all your unacknowledged notifications in an aggregate view (by app) and lets you launch the app from any specific notification or clear them all. Each of these is now available in full preview mode within Push Composer.

Banner Notification Preview

Additionally there’s the new “Banner” notification that rotates into view at the top of the screen when your device is in use, even within other apps.

Push To A Deep Link

But that’s not all. We’ve also added the ability to send Key/Value pairs of data directly with any push from within Push Composer. What this means is that you can include a “deep link” to a specific place, page, or story within your app. This long-standing API feature is now available directly through the web interface in composer.

Improved Byte Count Accuracy

We also improved the byte counts for your message composition to more accurately reflect the total space remaining in your message, especially around non-English characters.

 All of these additions join the previously available preview screens (for users on iOS3 & 4, and Android) as well as other great features like Scheduled Notifications, sounds, badges, and tags. Timezone calculations have also received some updates. Anything you can do within a Push message in our API can be accomplished with Push Composer.

Get started with Push Composer now!

Today, we expect that Apple will offer more insight into its new “Notifications Center” that will be baked into iOS5. We expect a lot more app developers will want to get smart about the best way to incorporate push notifications into their app, and so I wrote up some thoughts for our friends over at Adotas. Please feel free to share it around and we’d really like to see other thoughts and ideas in the comments if you have them.

Apple iOS5 And The Power Of The Push

Push notifications are about to really take off, and make a lot more sense. That is the power of Apple. But what will happen first?

The medium will gain momentum with the debut Apple’s iOS5, because the system’s new notification center makes push messaging more consumer friendly on iOS devices. Next, I think the real value of push notifications will become glaringly apparent as businesses realize its ability to get customers actively engaged with mobile content and applications.

This is also an enormous, and welcomed, shift for developers. It gives them another mechanism and medium for driving customers to interact with their brand while creating additional touchpoints, or engagement, with those customers. This is the new holy grail for mobile.

A Growing Push for Businesses

The expanding market for push notifications is timely and reflects its increasing relevance to businesses. The industry has learned that obsession with driving downloads is ineffective as a long-term strategy: Despite the money invested in developing mobile applications, only about 5% of mobile apps are used 30 days after they’re downloaded by customers.

Focusing on downloads is also becoming passé: It’s akin to the first waves of web marketing, when driving page views was the goal. In today’s mobile environment, businesses want people actively engaging, better yet, spending money while they’re at it. And do this on a continued basis, which is what success is all about.

Push notifications serve these business objectives because they can reach mobile customers, stimulate interactions with them, even if they are not using the app or their device at the time. Customers are responding. For example, according to a recent study by comScore, 14% of consumers representing Groupon and LivingSocial users said they engage with the app after receiving an offer sent via push notification to their phones. This is not surprising and the engagement rates are certain to grow as push matures and businesses become more familiar with it.

Push works because it takes advantage of mobile as an intent-driven platform. It focuses on the customer’s reasons and motivations for using a device, such as shopping, following sports scores, or playing a game, and it creates conversations with the users around those activities. But it’s also about real-time social sharing of content, like music, pictures, and video.

In addition, when you consider that most devices now are location aware, messages in real time become even more compelling. Finally, apps can be designed to include rich media such as video, audio, maps or actionable content like coupons or voter polls to a message, which enriches the entire experience and strengthens the overall appeal.

Businesses like push notifications because they generate a wealth of metrics that can be used to analyze the success of their ads, get to know their customers better and create one to one relationships that are more effective. The technology can generate quantifiable statistics on many variables that indicate, among other things:

• how often customers return to an app;
• how much time they spend with it;
• if they take an action requested by an ad;
• if they unsubscribe; and
• most important, how the app performs against others in its category.

A company will be able to tell, for example, if it is losing subscribers in a category that other firms are excelling in, and if this is the case, it can adjust its approach accordingly to better compete.

The SMS Angle

General trends in the mobile industry favor increased use of push notifications. For example, numerous research firms are projecting that app-to-device messaging will become a much more significant part of the SMS market.

A2P promotions delivered via push notifications should do even better than that. Push-based A2P notifications are easier to respond to, because the notification takes the customer straight to the app without requiring clicking through to a URL. The analytics that push notifications generate give it value that SMS can’t provide. And push is less costly and more valuable to brands, carriers and consumers than SMS.

Companies have of course embraced messaging via SMS because it can reach almost all handsets. But it is short-sighted to focus all of a company’s campaigns on SMS. It is not particularly easy to build programs and services around SMS, for one thing, but also the margins for SMS-based campaigns are razor-thin. SMS fees are assessed on a per-message basis, and depending on the type of message used and its destination, SMS messaging can cost an company up to 3 cents per message.

Push notifications, which travel over the mobile data network, are easier to build and distribute and as more and more mobile data networks are deployed around the world, the addressable market for push notifications will increase. Nor are push notifications limited to mobile. They can target any device that is connected to the Internet and the more screens the customer engages with, including connected TVs, set-top boxes and gaming platforms in the home, the more opportunity this will bring.

Finally, push services do not incur SMS fees and they can be purchased according to a variety of flexible pricing schemes that can be friendly to any business. Prices can be based strictly on the number of devices or the number of installed apps receiving the notifications, which can allow distribution of unlimited messages to those devices or apps.

So we look forward to seeing what Apple and iOS5 can do to bring more mobile innovation to the market, and are prepared to make that easy to take advantage of when designing and launching apps.

Read The Full Article

Version 1.0.6 of our iOS client library is now available.

This includes our first round of iOS5 support; like everyone else, we’ve been testing the iOS 5 betas and have found a few things that need fixing along the way. We will release another library update with additional features and fixes once iOS 5 is released.

The release out today contains full support for Newsstand and Auto-Renewables.  Check out the new library now.

Newsstand

Newsstand applications are new to iOS 5. They are normal apps that live inside the Newsstand folder and have a dedicated iTunes Store. Additionally, Newsstand apps can download new content in the background even when the app is not running. This ensures that users have their latest news and periodicals waiting for them each morning in an easy-to-find location – the Newsstand!

Urban Airship has support for Newsstand built directly into our Subscriptions product. When you create new content, you can choose to send a Newsstand Push Notification that corresponds with the content’s publish date. This special Push Notification will trigger the background download of that content within your app. All you need to do is follow Apple’s instructions for turning your app into a Newsstand app, and integrate our library with Subscriptions. Then the next time you publish content, check the Newsstand box and it will be waiting for your users when they wake up.

FAQ:

Q: How can I get access to Newsstand?
A: You need a Premium account.

Q: Do I have to use Subscriptions in order to use this feature?
A: Yes, if you want our system to send the once-a-day Newsstand Push automatically with your content. You can generate this Newsstand push yourself using our regular Push API as well.

Q: When will this be available?
A: It is available today, however it only works in the Apple Sandbox currently, until iOS 5′s official release. It requires a premium account to access.

Q: Do I need to upgrade the Urban Airship Library to use this feature?
A: Yes, you will need to upgrade to 1.0.6 in order to take full advantage of this feature with Subscriptions

Q: What exactly does the new library provide?
A: We give you helper classes and example code for receiving the Newsstand Push Notification and processing the content_id contained with it into a background download. You still have to implement all the library, issue, and bundle specific changes as well as delegate callbacks that are required by the NewsstandKit Framework.

For further information please reference Apple’s developer documentation on NewsstandKit and what’s new in iOS 5.

Auto-Renewables

Our Subscriptions product now has full support for iOS Auto-Renewables. This includes every standard period and feature from the iTunes Setup for Auto-Renewables, as well as continued support for non-renewing subscriptions. Auto-Renewables gives your users the power of seamless iTunes Account support for subscriptions, including restore and account management through standard iOS integrations. You will no longer need an email based restore workflow (but it’s still there if you do).

If your app is currently using non-renewing subscriptions you can use our latest iOS library to transition to Auto-Renewables – we support both systems in use at the same time. All you need to do is add your iTunes Shared Secret to the Urban Airship setup for Subscriptions, and then create the Auto-Renewable products in iTunes and your Urban Airship app setup. Content publishing works just as it did before. Auto-Renewables is available today to all current and future Subscription users!

Frequently Asked Questions:

Q: Does Auto-Renewables require a library update?
A: Yes. You will need to upgrade your application to our 1.0.6 iOS library.

Q: Is Auto-Renewables tied to iOS5?
A: No. Auto-Renewables is available now and does not require iOS5 to function.

Q: How does Apple’s “opt-in marketing incentive” work with your solution?
A: If you configure an opt-in incentive amount of subscription time for users who volunteer their address info, that time will automatically be added to the subscription they purchase. You don’t need to setup anything on Urban Airship’s side for this to work. Simply configure it in iTunes Connect and the opt-in information will appear in the iTunes Sales reports over time.

Q: Can I use both non-renewing subscriptions and auto-renewable subscriptions at the same time?
A: Yes, but we recommend you use one or the other. Apple is moving towards auto-renewables over the long term. Additionally if you offer both, you will need to support both the email restore feature, as well as the regular In-App Purchase restore process that works for Auto-Renewables.

Details on this release

This release has been tested with Xcode 4.1 and 4.2, though it is easiest to pair 4.0.2/4.1 with iOS 4 and earlier releases, and keep iOS 5 betas separate for now. There are a few key changes to be aware of if you’re using our default user interfaces for StoreFront, Subscription, or Rich Push inbox.

• StoreFront, Subscriptions and Inbox affected by changes to the modal display API.
• Rich Push inbox UI is affected by changes to the Tab Bar Item view hierarchy.

In each of the above cases you can upgrade your application to use the UI files in the “Airship/UI/” folder that corresponds to the Urban Airship product you’re using.

iOS 5 Notification Center will work automatically with Urban Airship Push and you don’t need to do anything to take advantage of that new feature. We do recommend upgrading to 1.0.6 in order to be prepared for the next step on iOS.  Get it now.

Please send any feedback or bugs to support@urbanairship.com.