“The time for experimentation on mobile has passed,” says Scott Kveton, CEO of Urban Airship. “It’s nearly impossible to build a business around a 99-cent app. Apps have to provide ongoing value, both to the user and to the brand.”
With this week’s release of Reports and Push Composer, Urban Airship intends to deliver just that. Here’s how Marshall Kirkpatrick, the best tech blogger in the world, describes the company’s new offerings:
The company’s new Push Composer is a simple web-based publishing platform for publishing messages that will be delivered to app users’ iOS, Android or BlackBerry screens. Messages can be scheduled ahead of time and delivered to groups of users segmented by a variety of tags. The second new feature, UA Reports, displays daily metrics about notification open rates by time of day. With nearly 10 million notifications sent each day, Urban Airship says it intends to offer mobile marketing benchmarks, best practices for maximizing engagement through push and more data-centric insights in the near future.
Kirkpatrick, who lives in Portland, also provides some perspective on the company’s rapid ascendance. “From its humble beginnings, the startup has now grown to 25 employees, has taken over a spacious office in Portland, Oregon and is quickly hiring many of the most cutting edge engineers, designers and sales people in that tech-rich town.”
One of the reasons for the company’s success–Urban Airship’s focus on three not so little letters: ROI.
Kveton says, “Our research shows that, increasingly, the business drivers for mobile apps are the business objectives of marketers. Marketers need to impact their business bottom lines with mobile apps and to do so they need data and metrics to help them measure app ROI.”
Same as it ever was.
By the way, Scott Kveton, is the man who used to spell bacon, Bacn.