Product

More than two years ago we embarked on a journey to bring our push infrastructure to Android and tackle the world of high scalability for mobile apps. We’ve detailed some of our past achievements like C500k in past blog entries. We’ve more than quadrupled the performance reported in that post, and have moved on to address the rest of our infrastructure as we march towards supporting billions of connected devices.

We’re now focused on finishing a massive rework of our messaging infrastructure to support our exponential growth in push notification volume. The result will be released with Segments.

We deal with lots of big numbers. Big numbers are often difficult to reason about. As a metaphor, we came up with “light up a stadium in a second” as our throughput goal. Specifically, we now have the capability to send a message in one second to every fan seated in the biggest stadium in college football, Michigan Stadium.

Here’s a high-level look at what we’ll be rolling out:

• Push Tag & Broadcast Service (codenamed Metalstorm) — Manages associations between applications, devices and tags. This new service supports extremely high push throughput and gives us the ability to perform complex tag queries for apps with hundreds of millions of users across a horizontally scalable architecture.

• Segments Data Storage (codenamed Penelope) — A customized, distributed database optimized for querying spatial information including custom location data.

• Message Routing Service (codenamed Gooey ButterCake) — Routing tier that uses a Sort-Merge-Join algorithm to assemble results from queries across multiple heterogeneous systems, for example application tags joined with device location information.

• Edge Message Delivery Service (codenamed Yaw) — Handles last-mile delivery to third-party platform push providers such as the Apple Push Notification System (APNS) with high throughput and low latency. Yaw manages TLS negotiation, message TTL (time to live) and protocol compliance across hundreds of thousands of connections all performing message delivery.

Helium, our end-to-end message delivery platform for Android devices, is optimized to work with this improved messaging infrastructure and works on an expanding universe of devices including Amazon’s Kindle Fire, Nook, and soon Tizen.

We’re also going to leverage Helium for companies moving away from native apps to HTML5. We built a C++ Helium client library for Linux and are working on Tizen integration (more detail on this effort is here). The new Linux Helium client architecture includes a web runtime plugin that provides JavaScript bindings for easy development of HTML5 browser extensions for push notifications.

How improved is the new infrastructure? Our initial dark launch of the new system delivered broadcast pushes at a throughput of over 100,000 messages per second, with a 90th percentile latency of two seconds to first message delivery. We also delivered tag pushes (one API call with arbitrary tags pushing to one or more devices) at over 100,000 messages per second throughput with 90th percentile latency of two seconds before first push delivery.

What does this mean for apps? If your app has 100,000 users, and the app triggers a push notification, your users will receive that message in less time than it takes you to complete a yawn. If your app has 500,000 users, and the app triggers a push notification, your users will receive that message in less time than it takes you to pour a cup of coffee. More than a million users? Pour that coffee, add sugar and stir.

We’re just getting started. This is the low end of what we can achieve with this architecture and we will continue to invest in throughput and latency improvements. Look for an upcoming blog post on the implementation details or better yet, see us talk about it live at upcoming events such as GLUE Conference and HBaseCon.

We’re still working on rollout plans, but this massive scalability for real-time push will be available for everyone who needs it soon. We’ve already moved many of our largest customers to the new architecture. If you have a need for speed right now, and think your system can handle these performance levels before we add configurable speed throttling, let us know.

We’re also interested in understanding your expectations for push notification delivery. Complete this brief survey to get an Urban Airship t-shirt.

This week in the Big Easy Urban Airship pulled off what was anything but—beating out stiff competition to win CTIA’s annual Emerging Technology Awards for the best Mobile Marketing & Advertising solution.

Our display and award at CTIA’s E-Tech Showcase decked out in beads.

Taking the top spot in a burgeoning category at one of the wireless industry’s biggest shows, was an incredible honor and speaks to the value that push notifications can drive for brands and app developers. It was just earlier this year that Forrester Research included push notifications as part of “The New Messaging Mandate,” and since then we’ve doubled the volume of push notifications sent for customers, cresting 20B on May 6^th.

Push notifications delivered over Urban Airship's history

When you get to massive volumes like this, interesting things start happening.  For instance, here is a case where one of our customers writes a story about another one of our customers.  Check out this interesting article about MyCityWay London24 written by The Guardian. It offers a great example of how mobile apps and push notifications will connect marketers to people in London for the Olympics.

You spoke, and we listened. That’s why we’re excited to introduce some changes to our Pro plan that will make billing more predictable for new Pro plan customers.

Current Pro plan customers and Pro In-App Purchase plan customers will not see a change in their account or billing terms.

We built the Pro plan that was introduced in September 2011 to meet the needs of customers who wanted the features used by high-push-volume organizations but didn’t have the user count of an enterprise company. The plan was configured to serve the needs of an organization serving up to 10,000 users for $199 per month, with $.01 per additional user.

Since the Pro plan was introduced, many of you that adopted it have acquired a lot more than 10,000 users in a very short time. The result—besides lots more app users and more success for you—was that your invoice amount changed from month to month. This unpredictability in cost created issues for some of our customers and prompted this change.

The new Pro plan pricing, effective on May 1, 2012, will be a flat rate per month based on the number of active app users for that month for up to 100,000 users. If you are a current Pro Plan customer and want to view your user count, or upgrade to the new, more predictable plan, you can do so at go.urbanairship.com.

In addition to the Pro plan pricing change, we are eliminating the Pro In-App Purchase plan option as most customers requiring this functionality went with the Premium plan for additional features like custom on-boarding services, Shared Access and User Insight reports. Also introduced today, our new publishing solution, Newsstand Publisher, combines all of this functionality and subscriptions in a single solution.

To see the updated plan details, check out the new pricing page. For more information about Newsstand Publisher, read the data sheet.

Many Urban Airship customers manage multiple apps and have several people including outside agencies that are assigned to handle app-related responsibilities such as composing push and Rich Push messages, evaluating messaging performance, and comparing app engagement metrics across their portfolio.

Today we’re happy to announce Shared Access capabilities added to our administrative interface that makes all of this easier by establishing functional roles for each app with user-assignable permissions. Urban Airship Premium Plan customers will see this new capability after they log in to the Urban Airship portal. The App Owner manages roles and assignments using a pop-up window in the App Details view. Individuals will only see the tasks assigned to them in the App Details view.

Owner's view of the app details

Shared Access makes it a lot easier to share the workload of managing multiple apps and reporting on results. To see how Shared Access works, get the Here’s How guide.

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.

Last week Apple announced a developer preview for their new OS X version, Mountain Lion, and one of the most talked about features is the Notification Center, which takes the system-wide notification system added in iOS 5.0 and extends it to the Mac. While Apple added push notification capability to Mac apps in its prior OS X update, in Mountain Lion the Notification Center makes notifications much more useful with built-in alerting and a centralized roll-up for messages you might have missed.

Last week we had our latest Free Friday, and I checked out the preview to see how Urban Airship’s iOS push capabilities worked with the new system. To my pleasant surprise, everything just worked. I was up and running from scratch in about an hour in Xcode, and I set up a few RSS feeds in the Urban Airship dashboard to alert my test app of breaking news.

This is one part of iOS that I’m glad to see arrive on the desktop, and I’m excited to see how developers will use Notification Center and push notifications in Mountain Lion. Are you a developer with a Mac App Store app, or are you working on one? We’d love to know how you plan to use notifications!

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!