Now, instead of just relying on user in-app behavior and stated preferences to target messages, developers of apps with location data can look at where a user has been, in the last-minute or the last year. By combining both place and behavior data, Urban Airship is looking to help developers create more tailored messages that can drive re-engagement with an app, more sales and increase loyalty.

While other push messaging services have incorporated location data, Urban Airship isn’t just trying to create simple geo-fences that measure a user’s current proximity to a target. By incorporating historical data as well, it allows developers to target unique segments of users who have gone somewhere in the past.

For example, a developer can send a notification to anyone that’s traveled to a specific place over the last year. Or they can push messages to people who have visited Central Park or Madison Square Garden in the last day, week or month. A user who appears to have moved to a new location can also be targeted with a unique message.

Urban Airship has created 2.5 million unique geo-fences — everything from time zones and cities to neighborhoods or venues – that also allow developers to send different messages to people in the same area. For people attending a baseball game, for example, the local team’s app can push a survey or a special deal to people in attendance while alerting nearby users of available tickets. The Official London Olympics 2012 Join In app tested the service and sent more than 10 million location-based messages to people at Olympic venues and received a click-through rate of around 60 percent.

Location-based messaging and marketing has been touted as a potential game-changer in advertising, but it’s still struggling to fulfill its promise. But we’re seeing now with efforts from mobile ad startups Sense Networks and JiWire that combining place data with user behavior can create a lot more smart targeting of users. It’s not enough to just look at where a person is at the moment, you have to tie their historical movements together to better compose a behavioral profile of that user.

But I’m wondering how mobile app users will react when they realize how much of their historical data is being used to craft in-app messages for them. Right now, most apps ask users to opt into sharing their location data to help them find nearby things. But if my travel app starts asking if I want deals to go back to a specific vacation spot I visited, it might feel a little creepy.

Brent Hieggelke, chief marketing officer of Urban Airship told me developers will need to use some common sense in how they use location data. But he said users are now more aware of how their data is being used and they’re generally OK with it if it leads to delightful experiences. We’ll have to see if developers know the difference between delightful and creepy. But if done well, which will include more work than regular messaging, this could demonstrate the power of location-based services to users.

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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Urban Airship (see disclosure below) is investing big in its infrastructure, scaling its push messaging service to deliver 100,000 messages in a single second. As Airship begins to refine push marketing to take into account location, time and context, it becomes of critical that the company not only deliver massive volumes of messages simultaneously, but also to deliver them in as near real-time as possible, according to the company.

In Urban Airship’s blog, Director of Architecture and Delivery Erik Onnen wrote that the company has quadrupled its capacity and is now capable of pushing simultaneous IP missives to huge gatherings of people, a feature that will come in handy when Airship launches its Segments service this quarter. Using technology from its SimpleGeo acquisition last year, Airship will be able to customize push updates based on location and prioritize based on relevancy.

“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,” Onnen wrote in the blog.

Coincidently ESPN happens to be one of Urban Airship’s biggest customers, so the example is quite apt. At CTIA I sat down with Urban Airship CMO Brent Hieggelke and he explained that context and speed will be both key to both Airship’s future and the evolution of IP push beyond a mere marketing and notification tool. He said AirBnB uses Airship’s push for closing room transactions, so it’s critical that messages move at the speed of negotiation.

In the football example, a sports media brand like ESPN, which sends millions of score and news updates a day, could send you a completely different set of stats and information if the app was aware you were actually a spectator at a game, Hieggelke said. A Michigan fan might have set his preferences to receive updates every time a touchdown is scored. But if actually present at the game the app could automatically feed him play-by-play info and player profiles. Because the customer is experiencing the game firsthand, it’s of vital importance that the update is immediate, Hieggelke said.

“The possibilities are endless,” Hieggelke said. “The New York Times could detect I’ve left Portland and have arrived in New York and start sending me local restaurant reviews. Walgreens can detect you’re near a pharmacy and have a prescription that needs to be refilled. It then sends you an alert.”

Urban Airship just pushed its 20 billionth notification, and its growth trajectory is only getting steeper. To achieve that kind of scale, Airship is doing a lot of tinkering with its HBase and Hadoop database and analytics platforms. It’s rolling out new elements – with codenames like Gooey Buttercake and Metalstorm (my favorite) – that will manage associations between applications, devices and tags; parse location and presence information for millions of users; and assemble that information along with data from multiple outside databases into the notifications themselves. (If you’re curious, Onnen goes into much more detail in the blog post.)

Keeping the push name unsullied

In my conversation with Hieggelke, he also revealed that Urban Airship plans to start an industry education initiative called Good Push with the aim of reining in bad marketing practices using IP messaging technologies.

“For instance, location has been talked for a while as walking through a mall and having offers pushed to you left and right,” Hieggelke said. “That’s a terrible idea. We need to establish a certain level of trust.”

Push messaging is still a relatively new format, and it doesn’t yet carry the negative associations most customers have with other digital marketing formats like e-mail or pop-up ads. When downloading an app and prompted to allow push updates to an app, most customers give permission. But an increasing number of apps are abusing the practice, though Hieggelke wouldn’t name names.

It’s easy to guess at the biggest offenders. There’s been an increasing backlash against companies like Airpush that send ads directly to an Android smartphone’s notification bar, often without even referencing the installed app that’s generating the ad. The danger here is that questionable and covert practices like these will sully the entire push marketing ecosystem. The worst thing that could happen is if consumers start automatically refusing permission to apps to receive updates, Hieggelke said.

“If the consumer starts thinking of this like spam, it’s a shame because it’s such a powerful and useful tool,” Hieggelke said.

So far Good Push is only in its infancy. Airship is working with the Mobile Marketing Association to create a set of best practices for marketers, that Hieggelke hopes will establish a baseline standard for the industry.

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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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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A household name in PCs, Intel is conspicuously absent from the smartphones and tablets that make up the modern mobile computing market. Virtually all of those devices–hundreds of millions sold each year–use processors designed by ARM and manufactured by Samsung, Texas Instruments, Nvidia, and others. And that’s despite years of work on the Atom processor Intel has targeted for this space to no avail.

But mobility is about more than phones and the iPad, and the story of mobile computing is far from over. Intel has been trying to spur interest in devices such as the Ultrabook, a thin laptop geared for travelers, with a similar fund and will likely find its way into a commercially available phone or tablet running Android or Windows 8 at some point.

Hence the fund, which made its first investments Monday in Urban Airship, a startup that is building marketing and development tools for the mobile minded, and 4tiitoo, which is working on an open-source tablet operating system and hopefully received enough money to buy a new name.

“The fund is built to advance computing innovations based on Intel architecture in key areas such as digital media consumption, context-aware computing and infrastructure applications. While the investments will focus across multiple technologies and devices, key areas include cross-platform technologies such as HTML5, as well as experiences designed specifically for Ultrabooks,” Intel said in describing the mission of the fund.

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The $15-million Urban Airship deal was led by strategic investors Verizon and Salesforce, with participation also from existing investors Foundry Group and True Ventures. This is the third round of funding for the company, which has raised $21 million to date.

Urban Airship, which gives developers tools to incorporate services like push notifications and payments into their apps for iOS, Blackberry and Android devices, says in a blog post announcing the deal that it has seen explosive growth in the last year, with a 1000 percent increase in traffic to its APIs this month. Currently the company is processing some one billion notifications per month, with seven billion tallied so far this year.

The Verizon investment in Urban Airship points to how carriers continue to hold out hope that they will play a part the growth of mobile services, not just as passive networks but as active players. It’s not clear now whether Verizon already provides some of its billing and location services as a back end to Urban Airship, but something like this could well be on the cards. Salesforce, meanwhile, is seeing a lot of growth of its mobile services, and you can equally see how it would open up new doors of opportunity for a company like this to integrate Urban Airship’s offering into its wider framework enabling enterprise support systems.

Although we are still seeing a lot of money being pumped into smaller companies that are enabling different aspects of app production, there are also signs that there is some consolidation also starting to take shape. Urban Airship itself just last week acquired a competing platform, SimpleGeo.

Strangeloop. The $10 million raised by Vancouver, Canada-based Strangeloop, meawhile, is the second round of funding for the startup, which has now picked up around $22 million to date.

The actual investors have not been named, although TechCrunch reports that they are a group of “Canadian super angels.”

Strangeloop, which started life as a company focused on speeding up the load time for web pages as viewed on PCs, has more recently moved into offering its product for mobile web pages as well. Getting these, and the mobile web “apps” that are starting to appear in increasing numbers, up to speed will be essential if those promoting the mobile web over apps want to claim better performance: today, as a general rule (although not in all cases), native apps tend to show faster performance than those designed for the mobile web.

Through its literally-titled Mobile Site Optimizer product, Strangeloop offers different tools to enhance sites built on standards like HTML5 and SPDY from Google.

The company’s CEO, Jonathan Bixby, wrote in a blog post that the company has seen 200 percent growth quarter on quarter, and counts big names like eBay (NSDQ: EBAY), Visa and Travelocity among its customers.

He adds that the funding will be used to expand its business, particularly in Europe, Asia and Latin America — three regions where he says the company is seeing “huge market demand.”

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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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SimpleGeo helps mobile developers incorporate location-aware services into their apps, and the two companies have been working together for some time. In a blog post, Urban Airship CEO Scott Kveton laid out the plan for the combined company: to provide mobile developers with almost all of the behind-the-scenes tools they need to make their apps more interactive and in touch with the rest of the world, incorporating things like the push-notification systems that Urban Airship is probably best known for as well as mobile commerce tools.

It’s not clear how profitable a business we’re talking about here: Michael Arrington reported that the deal was worth just $3.5 million. But it does seem plausible that the companies are stronger together than they are separately, given that developers probably don’t want to piece together these services from multiple vendors.

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What companies like Appcelerator, Cotendo and Urban Airship–which all work with web developers to speed delivery of content to consumers–really worry about is the growing fragmentation of the software stack they work with as well as potentially hobbling patent litigation.

“Fragmentation is occurring at every layer for the stack–at the tools level, at the clouds themselves, the carriers and everything in between,” said Jeff Haynie, CEO of Appcelerator, speaking at the Mobilize 2011 conference on Monday.

Another, related issue, is the rise in IP litigation which makes nearly everyone nervous, said Scott Kveton, CEO of Urban Airship. ”The lawyers are killing it, and it’s a bummer because it’s stifling innovation.”

Patent battles are raging around the industry with Oracle’s ongoing litigation against Google for its use of Java in Android, as a high-profile example.

Perhaps more mundane a problem is the age-old issue of latency.

As more people demand richer and more dynamic content, there’s a technology challenge, said Shlomi Gian, GM mobile services for Cotendo. “As content gets more dynamic and less cacheable, we still want it fast. We want it as fast as our desktop. today it takes 10 to 12 seconds to load a page. That gap is an opportunity,” Gian said.

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Urban Airship, a Portland, Ore.–based notification provider (see disclosure below), told me it has hit 5 billion push notifications since it delivered its first message on June 14, 2009. The company took 1 year and 3 months to get to 1 billion notifications sent and took just another 11 months to push out another 4 billion messages. Now Urban Airship is delivering 520 million push notifications per month, or roughly 13,000 messages per minute.

The milestone is helpful in understanding how the game has changed for mobile developers. While they used to chase download numbers, they’re now seeing that it’s not enough to get users in the door; it’s about keeping them engaged over time. That’s how developers can keep monetizing them, through in-app purchases and mobile advertising. And one of the most effective things is a timely push notification that can alert a user to new content, an update, a local deal or some other message.

Urban Airship now has more than 20,000 iOS, Android and BlackBerry apps that use its messaging platform. And it’s helping enable more commerce and opportunities for developers. The company said it has enabled and authenticated 4.2 million transactions through its push notifications. Time in apps and app launches also increase with push notifications. A comScore study earlier this year found that 14 percent of Groupon and Living Social users engaged with those companies’ mobile apps after receiving push notifications.

“If I can grab a user back into the app, I can get them to purchase things,” said Urban Airship CEO Scott Kveton. “Push notifications are a great way to get people back into apps and consuming content over time.”

Urban Airship, which has also added Dylan Anderson as its new CFO, sees a bigger play than just mobile phones and is hoping to become a ubiquitous messaging layer between all kinds of connected devices. It’s working to make its notification system even more intelligent, using anonymized data to help determine the best and most effective times to deliver notifications. And because it can see across a number of apps on one device, it can also help direct messaging traffic, staggering notifications so that they’re clumped together. It’s something the company is working on and should help it become even more attractive to publishers.

The company is also building in location information into its notifications with its recent partnership with Simple Geo, which will team with Urban Airship on releasing a co-branded library for developers that leverages both messages and location. That will enable developers to push out location-aware notifications based on a user’s context, where they are, what’s around, what’s going on and other signals. That’s something we’ve talked about before, but it is ramping up as more publishers and advertisers look to better leverage location.

I asked Kveton if there are any signs of push-notification fatigue, and he said at this point, no. But that will be something to watch. People are responding positively to notifications now, but it will be important to not overwhelm users and devalue the power of notifications altogether by inundating them. The new Notifications Center in iOS 5 will certainly help by giving users more power over how they view and organize notifications.

When done right, notifications can really keep people involved in apps and be a primary way they interact with them, rather than launching them from their home screen. If users can come to trust that all the notifications are legitimate and helpful, it strengthens that relationship between publisher and consumer. And it opens the door for a lot of moneymaking opportunities. We still have a lot of apps that don’t utilize push notifications, but that should change quickly as developers learn the value of keeping the channel of communication open with users.

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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