Urban Airship Migrates to Hybrid-Cloud — Introduces Carrier-Grade Ubiquitous Mobile Communications Platform for Connected Devices — Bets on Push Notifications

San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) June 07, 2011

Today at the annual Apple developer conference, WWDC, Urban Airship unveils key elements of its enterprise strategy for mobile messaging, including a huge infrastructure investment in its realtime messaging platform; introduction of Urban Airship Helium, an end-to-end push messaging platform; and the general availability of premium push notification and reporting tools specifically designed for marketers and executives.

 

Two-Year Anniversary Marks Sustained, Explosive Growth

In two short years since Urban Airship formally launched at WWDC in 2009, the company has established itself as a leader in navigating the complex and rapidly growing industry of mobile apps. When Apple introduced APNS at that conference, the first app to use the service in the App Store (Tapulous Tap Tap Revenge 3) had push notifications powered by Urban Airship.

Since then, the company has delivered roughly 4 billion individual messages on behalf of its customers.

 

Interest in push notifications has continued to gather steam; Apple’s Notification Center, introduced at WWDC 2011, offers clear validation of push messaging as a highly relevant and popular communications medium. According to the company’s keynote presentation, the iOS platform has delivered 100 Billion push notifications across every iOS application. The new Notification Center makes it much easier for users to consume, manage and act on incoming notifications. This better organization and higher visibility translates to more opportunities for businesses to drive engagement on mobile.

 

Urban Airship Unveils Details of Heavyweight Infrastructure Strategy

Urban Airship successfully transitioned its entire mobile services platform to a new hybrid-cloud infrastructure, co-hosted on physical hardware at Carpathia Hosting and virtually hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This infrastructure upgrade positions Urban Airship to continue to scale and easily meet the needs of a growing base of larger customers with more sophisticated mobile messaging needs. The hybrid-cloud architecture enables Urban Airship to deliver on its stable, scalable, low latency, and high throughput mobile messaging platform.

 

The main benefit of dedicated infrastructure is increased capacity, flexibility and speed. Additionally, it hosts the companys data-intensive reporting and analytics services on high performance systems designed for an optimal combination of vertical and horizontal scaling.

We are reliably sending millions of notifications per day, and our customers are requesting even more sophisticated push messaging, says Mike Herrick, VP, Urban Airship. The connectivity, geographic footprint, cloud elasticity and customized kit all combine to provide a robust mobile messaging platform. The reputations of AWS and Carpathia Hosting and our relationships with both, gives us confidence that Urban Airship is running the best possible hosting platform in the world.

 

Urban Airship Helium

The company formally launches Helium, a complete end-to-end messaging stack for mobile communications. Helium is a mobile service that allows application developers and other third parties to send messages directly from their servers to customer mobile devices. Similar to Apples APNS and Android C2DM, Helium provides low latency, high efficiency push notifications by controlling all aspects of queuing and delivering messages to target applications, from origin to recipient. Urban Airships Helium maintains a persistent IP connection to apps integrated with the messaging platform without the need to connect to outside servers.

 

Helium is designed to be a white label notification solution, offering carriers, device manufacturers and others a secure reliable messaging solution that they can bake directly into their products.

 

The new world of mobile communications is in its infancy and we are going to continue to be amazed by its potential to deliver completely new ways of communicating through technology, says Scott Kveton, CEO, Urban Airship. We are having some very interesting conversations around Helium right now and seeing some innovative concepts emerging.

 

Urban Airships new Android Embedded Push product, released into General Availability today, is built on Helium and delivers on the promise of the new messaging stack. Response from extensive beta testing was extremely positive and validated Urban Airships alternative option for messaging to Android devices. This option offers low latency and high throughput, which leads to a better user experience and lays the foundation for enterprise features like quality of service, return receipt and secure transport.

 

Push Composer and Reports Generally Available for Marketers and Mainstream Business Users

Urban Airships Push Composer and Reports products, introduced in February, have also been released into General Availability today. As mobile becomes mission critical to business, executives need data that will help inform their decision making processes with actionable, measurable results. Reports provides critical quantitative data on mobile app engagement, including application opens, length of user application engagement and user response to specific push notifications.

Push Composer is a simple web-based interface for crafting, scheduling, and sending push notifications. Non-technical users can now easily engage their mobile audience in real time, without the need to make an API call or include a developer.

 

“Using Push Composer will let us create custom user experiences by allowing our customers to select details about what content they are interested in. This helps us know our customers better and gives us the ability to send personalized content to individuals and groups of individuals based on their different tastes,” says Shahruz Shaukat, Director of Technology at Earwolf, a one-stop-shop app for comedy podcasts. Urban Airship Push Composer is terrific all around. It’s just easier.

 

About Urban Airship

Urban Airship powers the worlds most successful mobile apps. Providing breakthrough technology, Urban Airship makes mobile marketing far more engaging, effective, and efficient. Top brands depend on Urban Airship to ensure their mobile app initiatives are scalable and profitable. Verizon, Dictionary.com, Groupon, Tapulous, and Warner Bros. are just a few of the thousands of companies that utilize Urban Airship’s innovative platform to reach and engage target audiences and increase app revenue streams through push notification, rich messaging, in-app purchase, subscriptions and data tracking. The venture-backed company was recently named to Fast Companys list of the most innovative companies and listed as one of the top 300 start-ups in the world. The company is actively hiring for positions in its Portland, Oregon headquarters.

 

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About The Author

Ibrar Ayyub

I am an experienced technical writer holding a Master's degree in computer science from BZU Multan, Pakistan University. With a background spanning various industries, particularly in home automation and engineering, I have honed my skills in crafting clear and concise content. Proficient in leveraging infographics and diagrams, I strive to simplify complex concepts for readers. My strength lies in thorough research and presenting information in a structured and logical format.

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