This is yet another sign of the growth of over-the-top messaging services that utilize mobile data services on smartphones. While companies have often relied on SMS through providers like Sybase 365 to interact with consumers, marketers are evolving with their consumers, who are spending more time in apps on smartphones. With the Sybase Push 365 messaging service, Sybase 365 can offer a full suite of mobile messaging services beyond just text messages.

Under the partnership, Urban Airship will provide Sybase 365 with developer tools and resources to help its customers integrate push messaging into their apps. Sybase 365 customers will also get an online dashboard to create and analyze their messages. Interestingly, Sybase 365 said it will also be offering the services to its 900 carrier customers and OEM partners.

Greg Dunn, VP of product strategy at Sybase 365, told me he doesn’t see the addition of push notifications as a threat to traditional SMS and MMS messaging. Instead, he said it gives marketers another tool to interact with consumers. Push notifications have unique capabilities that allow companies to send out more dynamic messages than SMS with rich media, longer text lengths and the ability to redirect a user to any point in an application.

For Urban Airship, the partnership should provide a big bump in usage. Sybase 365 delivers 1.8 billion SMS and MMS messages a day. Urban Airship notched its 10 billionth message in January after launching in 2009 and now the company is up to 19 billion messages sent.

Though Dunn believes that traditional text messaging will continue to grow, I have to believe that the rise of in-app messaging will help slow that growth. We’re already seeing some operators with declining SMS revenue thanks to messaging apps. Sybase 365 is smart to prepare for a day when marketers send more messages through push notifications, which are cheaper than traditional text messages. This won’t happen immediately and text messages will still serve a role for enterprise customers. But as the world moves toward more in-app communication for both text and voice, that means companies like Sybase 365 have to adapt.

Disclosure: Urban Airship is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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The idea is to give developers an unobtrusive way to talk back and forth with their app users, so they can share important information, promote their other apps and obtain feedback. This can be an important way to maintain engagement and retain users, who studies have shown are quick to discard apps.

Developers who integrate Appsfire’s App Booster SDK, which takes about 20 minutes and is built for iOS right now, can create an inbox that sits inside their app that uses a bubble icon to notify a user when they have a message. When they tap on the icon, users can see their list of messages from the developer. Tapping on a message can provide more information, a link to an app store or a website, or pull up a form so they can email back a message to the developer. Developers could use the inbox to welcome new users, notify them of updates, provide tips about the latest updates, warn users about app maintenance issues, cross-promote an app, or invite users to provide feedback, share online or rate an app.

Many apps currently use push notifications to engage users and notify them. But Ouriel Ohayon, the founder of Appsfire, said half the time users don’t agree to receive notifications. Some developers turn to ad networks to promote some of their other apps, ask for email addresses or use services such as Crittercism, which can create a support forum for users to help answer questions about crashes and other problems. Others rely on “i” or “more” buttons to offer more information. PlayHaven offers a marketing platform that can insert HTML5 windows inside an app that can be programmed with ads and messages.

But Ohayon said developers haven’t had a simple way to create an inbox inside an app that encourages communication between a user and a developer. He said that can be critical in guiding and engaging users.

“Think of it as the equivalent of a newsletter for applications; instead of being sent by email it’s sent inside the app by the developer. You will be able to reply to the developer. This communication loop is not happening,” said Ohayon. “We are enabling that situation which is really required and demanded by users but not expressed.”

Ohayon said developers can send out and manage messages using a simple dashboard, where they can compose notifications and target who receives them. In early tests with a few developers, Ohayon said App Booster has improved engagement by up to 50 percent and experienced click-through rates of at least 15 percent and up to 50 percent. He said the key is that it is not intrusive but still a personal and effective way to talk to users.
Ohayon built the system to solve Appsfire’s problems first and is hoping other developers can find value in the same solution. That could help turn them on to Appsfire’s paid app discovery tool, which is the company’s main product.

I think App Booster should be appealing for users. Some apps send too many push notifications or send out a lot of requests to rate apps. I would prefer something more subtle that allows me to pull messages when I want to see them. And for developers, it still allows them to open a two-way dialogue right inside the app. That’s helpful. Instead of relying on getting email addresses or using Facebook or Twitter, a developer can communicate from within the app itself. Developers should obviously avoid spamming users, but if they provide real, valuable messages, users will likely see this as an asset and something that improves their relationship with the developer.

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The latest round, which included participation from existing investors True Ventures (see disclosure below) and Foundry Group, brings Urban Airship’s total funding to $21.6 million to date. The Portland, Ore. company is looking to build out its business team, scale-up its infrastructure internationally, expand in Asia and Europe next year and add more features to its platform.

Urban Airship first got attention as a push notification provider, allowing developers and publishers to easily add messaging to their apps and devices. It also offers in-app purchasing, data tracking and subscriptions and recently bulked up its location services through the acquisition of SimpleGeo.

Urban Airship has become a favored tool of developers and publishers and has sent a total of 7 billion push notifications, with a rate of 1 billion a month now since launching in June of 2009. The company has more than 20,000 customers including most of the top media brands and is on 300 million devices.

With the acquisition of SimpleGeo, Urban Airship has become a more complete back-end service provider, one focused on delivering smarter, more context-aware tools necessary to keep mobile users engaged. That’s the name of the game and developers and publishers are increasingly looking to providers who can be more of a complete resource for them.

“Our customers are trying to navigate mobile and they want us to deliver not just tools and building blocks, but a full back-end solution they can integrate with their content and their marketing teams can get in front of,” said CEO Scott Kveton.

Kveton said Urban Airship is talking to manufacturers about building its service directly into more devices such as TVs and set-top boxes. He said with the Salesforce.com investment, Urban Airship is building a Heroku plug-in and looking for more opportunities to work with Salesforce, which he said is complementary for his company.

Salesforce in 2005 launched AppExchange, a marketplace for cloud computing apps. I asked Kveton if Salesforce might be a potential acquirer of Urban Airship and he said the company values its independence now, but we’ll have to see what happens. Verizon last year selected Urban Airship as its preferred provider of push notifications for mobile apps on its network. There could more synergies between Urban Airship and Verizon going forward as well as the carrier looks to get closer to developers.

Urban Airship is poised to take a share of a mobile app development services market that is forecast to grow to $100 billion by 2015 along with the exploding mobile app market. As Urban Airship showed with its purchase of SimpleGeo, there’s plenty of consolidation to come as many of these development tools get bundled together into one offering. We’ll see if Urban Airship manages to stay independent but it’s off to a strong start so far.

Disclosure: Urban Airship is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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That has increased the importance of mobile push notifications, which are poised to become even more vital tools for developers as they look to retain and engage users. Many developers already employ notifications to send out alerts, offers and remind users of updates. But now, the messages are taking on even more significance, because developers are being judged more on how often users are coming back to their apps. Android Market and Apple’s App Store both altered their app store ranking formula recently, apparently rewarding apps that have better regular use by users. Apple has also started rejecting apps that use cost-per-install ad campaigns, which was apparently targeted for manipulating the download numbers of apps that used it to gain users. Now with fewer tools to drive downloads, it becomes even more important to hold on to the users they have.

“2009 and 2010 were about the number of apps and downloads but it’s not about downloads anymore,” said Scott Kveton, CEO of Urban Airship, (see full disclosure below) a major push notification platform. “It’s more about the users who come back again and again. Even if it’s only 10 percent, that’s still huge. We’re still early on in the mobile game and getting users and engaging them is critical now.”

Retention Already a Challenge

Even before the app store changes, retention was already an issue for mobile developers. A study last year by Localytics found 26 percent of apps were only opened once. If you factor apps that were opened less than four times, the rate is 55 percent. But if you can get users to agree to notifications for things they care about, it can keep people coming back. Dictionary.com, for example, started pushing out notifications for its Word of the Day earlier this year and saw active usage grow by 6 percent.

That’s why it’s becoming critical to keep users involved in the app, because even a modest increase in usage means saving an app from abandonment and potentially making more money through advertising and in-app purchase. One obvious way is to just build a really good app. But with all the software on people’s phones — 48 apps on the average iPhone and 35 on Android devices — it’s still a challenge to get people to come back. Notifications, when used well, can keep a conversation going between an app maker and their customers. As Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures noted recently, if you have good notifications, it keeps users involved in more apps, even if the programs are buried on hidden screens or files. Notification inboxes can almost become the new home screen for users, who don’t have to delve into apps as often.

“I think notifications will become the primary way that we consume on the mobile device and may be the reason we move away from downloadable software and back to web-based software on our mobile devices.” Fred Wilson

Keep It Relevant

There are still a lot of pitfalls for utilizing notifications. If users aren’t prepared for the flow of messages, the notifications can quickly become seen as spam. At that point, consumers will either delete the app or turn off the notifications, which ends the chance to keep talking to that consumer. Kveton put together a white paper on the best practices of notifications recently, noting that developers need to get users to opt-in with a clear value proposition about why they’re being asked to receive them. Users need to be given ways to configure their notifications. And most importantly, developers need to figure out the best way to reach their users, which can be an art.

Jonathan George, CEO of Boxcar, a notification platform, said it’s all about understanding the threshold of users, and learning to stay within their limits. He said the majority of iOS users only get one message every three days. But it’s important to be mindful of what is too much and when is the best time. Apps that push out notifications at the same time every day might be missing out on opportunities to hit users when the message may be more relevant to what they’re doing. When it’s done right, with user consent and notifications that have value, it can strengthen the relationship between users and the app, he said.

“Because it’s opt-in, it’s like getting a card from your grandmother,” George said. “You know generally what it is, but you’re excited that it’s coming because it’s relevant to you.”

George said notifications are becoming a major marketing channel that can surpass SMS text messages. He said 25-30 percent of the time, users open notifications within the first 30 seconds, about twice as high as SMS messages. And it’s easier to measure the effectiveness of notifications because they can use rich analytics. Notifications can also be built with rich media, allowing for more appealing and effective messages.

Opportunities Abound

The growing popularity is opening up opportunities for Urban Airship, Boxcar and Xtify, another push notification service. Kveton said since launching in June 2009, Urban Airship is being used in 13,000 apps and has delivered 3 billion notifications, including almost 1 billion in the last quarter. Boxcar has built a notification inbox service developers can plug into, allowing users who download Boxcar to get notifications from multiple apps through a single manageable inbox. It’s an idea that works well especially on iOS, with its simple and sometimes annoying notification system. But it will likely be something we’ll see more fully fleshed out on all platforms as notifications grow in popularity. Even with the growth of notification services, there are still a lot of apps that don’t use push notifications, something these companies are looking to correct.

Xtify recently put out a new plug-and-play tool called Xtify Retain, a free self-service notification platform that allows developers to easily set notifications based on pre-configured times or after certain periods, such as a number of days after the app has been opened or last used. Josh Rochlin, CEO of Xtify said it’s all about helping developers keep customers, rather having to spend more money to get new ones. Already, 2,000 developers have downloaded the Retain SDK. Rochlin said Xtify made the Retain tool free and is looking to make money off of premium services around location-based notifications and analytics.

“The least expensive acquisition of a user is the one you save from the dead pool,” said Rochlin. “This is about keeping apps out of the dead pool.”

Disclosure: Urban Airship is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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If you are new to chatting, the three major players in the market are AIM, Yahoo and Microsoft (what market are they not part of?). While AIM remains at the top of the mountain (offering great integration for MobileMe customers), rival Yahoo is making it harder for users to stay attached to AIM’s service. For those who aren’t completely satisfied with what AIM has to offer, Yahoo! Messenger is a great alternative or supplement and is a bit more robust, with support for adding users of Microsoft’s MSN Messenger service.

Yahoo has been vocal about its dedication to the iPhone platform, and its support is appreciated and apparent. Unlike AIM, Yahoo! Messenger for the iPhone also supports sending/receiving photos via your built-in camera. It also exists as a free application, and isn’t cluttered with ads like AIM’s free counterpart. Several unique features of Yahoo! Messenger are also supported, including its popular “Buzz!” feature. In true iPhone style, you activate it by simply shaking your phone.

If you are someone who enjoys chatting with users who do not use either service, Yahoo! Messenger also features the ability to send messages to mobile users over SMS, saving iPhone users from SMS charges (similar to AIM).

Having used both AIM and Yahoo! Messenger on my iPhone, I’m a bit biased towards Yahoo’s offering. With better support for seamlessly moving between mobile and desktop use (actually forcing me to sign off my desktop), this keeps me from “losing” messages in one location, unlike AIM. During testing, I kept inadvertently leaving AIM “signed on” on my iPhone and messages were being routed there, instead of showing up in iChat, on which I was logged in as well.

Yahoo! Messenger for iPhone is a free download on the App Store. Check it out and let us know what you think!

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Remember when you had to click on an application to make it active, and hit refresh in order to find out if anything new had happened? It’s been a long while now, since most desktop programs can run in the background and notify you when something requires your attention. The iPhone approximates that same functionality via the newly introduced push notification features, though apps aren’t actually running in the background, so special support is required from app developers to enable it.

As far as I’m concerned, push has already been a game-changer. My iPhone is now my dedicated IM client, lets me monitor any and all Blue Jays games no matter where I am, and keeps me on-task with my to-do list. But that’s not all. Thanks to a new app called Prowl ($2.99, iTunes link), my iPhone can keep me abreast of pretty much anything, via my Mac and a useful app many will already be familiar with, Growl.

Growl, in case you aren’t aware, is an open notification platform for OS X that supports a wide variety of applications. Basically, it alerts you via an on-screen pop-up and/or sound when one of its supported applications receives a message, finishes a task, and so on. So, for example, using a Mail plugin, I receive a Growl notification whenever I get an email, or when I’m mentioned or receive a DM on Twitter via Tweetie’s built-in Growl support. It’s a very handy tool to have, especially if you keep your dock hidden, as I do, or if you’re working with many different applications on multiple screens.

Now you can receive Growl notifications on your iPhone, too, in the form of push notifications, thanks to Prowl. I can’t even begin to explain how useful this could potentially be, depending on your usage. Already, I have it set up to notify me of new mail (which works better than Apple’s wn push mail, in my opinion, because it allows me to see the sender and some content of the received message), let me know when I receive new @ replies and DMs via Twitter (which I can then check out in Tweetie), and alert me whenever Transmission finishes downloading or seeding a torrent file.

Not only can Prowl alert you of whatever Growl can, but it can also receive custom alerts sent from a web interface. When you set up Prowl, you sign up for an account that’s necessary for syncing Growl on your computer with Prowl on your iPhone. Using that same login, you can go to the Prowl web site and send yourself messages. Any applicable content in that message will be automatically hot-linked, like emails and phone numbers. Very handy for sending a contact number to yourself for future reference.

Prowl is potentially the most effective application of push I’ve yet seen on the iPhone platform, especially if you’re already using Growl (which you should be). The best part is that it’s limited only by Growl itself, which is infinitely expandable, so long as developers keep supporting it. Probably the best $3 I’ve ever spent in the App Store.

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Slowly but surely, push notification apps are trickling into the App Store, as you can see from this handy little list by AppAdvice.com. Some of them are less than impressive, since they offer strange niche functions that I could never picture myself actually using. Beejive IM came out last week, though, which has become by far my most-used app since, and now Remember The Milk (Free with RTM Pro account, iTunes link) is available, as of today, with push features.

A to-do app with push might just be the thing I need to get me to buckle down and actually use a to-do app with some kind of consistency. Sure, RTM for the iPhone requires that you have a Pro account with their service, which is a $25-a-year subscription, but I actually already have one from when the app was first released. Yes, I signed up many months ago and haven’t exactly taken great advantage of that subscription since, but version 1.1.0 gives me reason to believe I may actually begin to get my money’s worth.

The problem, for me, with to-do apps (whether they be desktop, web-based, or iPhone apps), is that for them to actually work, you kind of have to check them consistently. Sure, most allow you to send email alerts when a task’s due date is approaching, but my email comes in with such frequency that it’s very easy for a task reminder or two to slip through the cracks as I tackle more urgent messages. Now, RTM for iPhone will send me push notifications in the form of text alerts whenever a task’s due date is approaching, at a time determined by me that I set up via the web through my account settings. Audio alerts are oddly omitted from this version, but developers say that the addition is included in the next update.

Is it worth the $25 price of admission, when there are probably one-time purchase apps with similar features on the way as we speak? That depends on your to-do tasking practices. If, like me, you like the added convenience of having your list accessible from any Internet-connected platform (and offline, too, via Google Gears), then RTM, with its attendant free iPhone app, might be what you’re looking for. You could also hold out for Appigo ToDo’s push features, which are included in an update that’s already been submitted to Apple. Either way, if you’re looking for some way to get things done more efficiently, this implementation of Apple’s push could be the most practical yet.

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The big day is only a week away, and it looks like no one is more keenly aware of that fact than Apple. Those enrolled in the iPhone Development Program received an email late today telling them to go download a developer preview version of AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) in order to further test Apple’s push notification servers. Included in the email was a special code redeemable via iTunes.

Unlike the AP News app, no specific expiration date is specified for the AIM preview, though the email does state that the app can only be installed on iPhones using the 3.0 GM Seed. Most likely, next week when everyone upgrades to the full, final version of 3.0, this version of AIM will no longer be operational.

The beta app doesn’t boast any new feature additions or functionality beyond the push notifications, but they are definitely impressive. Unlike with AP News, when we were basically at the mercy of its schedule in terms of receiving pushed content, it’s fairly easy to engineer a received message in AIM. I tested it out with a number of people, including myself, just to make sure things were running smoothly, and they definitely were.

New messages bring up a notification window, with the message and the user name of the sender, and play the AOL chime that has become permanently associated with the AIM brand identity. The app icon is also badged with the number of unread messages, and it does increase if more than one message is received. New messages replace old ones, in terms of the content of the notification window. I can see rapid-fire AIM conversations becoming very aggravating unless they introduce some way to customize how you receive consecutive messages from the same user.

Potentially annoying or not, this true test of push notification in a more user-controlled setting is very promising. If possible, I’m now more impatient for next Wednesday to arrive, after which point I’ll be relieved for exactly two minutes before I begin anticipating next Friday and the official release of the 3G S. Heady times for Apple fans.

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