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We've written many times about modern mobile phones acting as a network of sensors to detect what's going on around their users - but what if those same phones were set to watch existing networks of more traditional real-world sensors? That's what's happening in Japan, where the next version of Apple's iOS includes a unique option in the settings to turn on push notifications for earthquakes. This is probably just the beginning of a paradigm that could spread to other places and other functions where real-time push is a valuable utility - many use cases we can't yet imagine until multiple intersecting systems of technology evolve further.

Japan struggles with earthquakes as much as any country on earth and has an extensive network of sophisticated seismological sensors distributed around the country to try to detect big ones on the way. With the push of a slider (screenshot below), iOS5 users in Japan will be able to receive push notifications from those government sensors automatically (though probably via the mobile carriers). This could be what the future looks like, at least in part.

Cross-platform mobile push notification and in-app purchase service Urban Airship announced two new features this morning that mobile savvy marketers are sure to find compelling. In a world fast becoming more mobile, more real time and more data-centric, these technologies are very well timed. Hopefully they'll be self-correcting enough that app users won't be driven crazy.

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.

Are you ready to get buzzed by Tweets? Twitter confirmed last week that it is experimenting with and will soon roll out push notifications through its official iPhone app.

What does that mean? It depends on how exactly the company lets users manage and receive their notifications, but it's not too early to start thinking about how push could change the Twitter experience. We asked a number of experts in the field of User Experience design what they thought about Twitter push notifications and several of them predicted it will be a game-changer for mainstream users.

You've got a new email! Holy smokes am I going to get pinged a lot if I turn on the newly announced Gmail and Google Calendar push notifications on the Google Mobile iPhone app. Google just announced the new feature and it's a logical one, but it also seems like a throw-back to a simpler time when push notification for any and every email made sense.

There's no ability to set rules, to limit notifications to just emails from contacts, or anything. Just push notifications. For calendar that might make sense, but I'm already getting SMS messages ten minutes before my calendar events. A push notification is a beautiful thing, but I don't think it makes a lot of sense anymore in this context.

If you're not one of the fortunate few to have gotten your hands on a Google Wave invite, then you probably don't have too much use for Waveboard, an iPhone-ready interface for Google's new real-time collaboration system. However, if you've recently become a member of the Google Wave cult, you may have already forked over the 99 cents for this mobile app so that you could create, browse and respond to "waves" while on the go.

While some early testers of the Waveboard app complained that it didn't do anything more than what the iPhone optimized website already offered, the next release of Waveboard may have those naysayers changing their mind. Waveboard 2.0 has a few new features, but the one that will grab everyone's attention is its ability to offer "push" notifications on the iPhone.

Mint, the popular personal finance site that was just acquired by Intuit, just released a major update to its iPhone application (iTunes link). While Mint's iPhone app was always quite good, this new version brings a number of new features to the app that make it more useful and, most importantly, more secure. The new features include the ability to edit transactions on the phone, mobile access to Mint's newly enhanced budgeting features, and the app can now also receive push alerts which can be customized on the service's website.

Notifications combines push notifications for Twitter, email, and any RSS feed into one iPhone app. While we have tested quite a few push notification apps in the past, including some great apps like Boxcar and GPush, none of these offer the flexibility of Notifications. While it still has a few flaws and takes a while to set up, Notifications offers a number of features other apps don't offer, including the ability to get notified of new tweets with specific keywords. The app costs $2 and is available in the App Store now.

After a bit of a delay, the GPush app (iTunes link) has finally arrived in the App Store. GPush will send you a push notification whenever a new email arrives in your inbox. The app, which costs $0.99, does one thing and one thing only: it checks your Gmail account for new messages and sends out push notifications whenever it detects new messages. Just enter your credentials and forget that you ever installed the app.

According to Dominik Balogh, the developer of a push-enabled "to do" list application for iPhone called NotifyMe, the Push Notification technology provided by Apple does not appear to be working on any "unlocked" iPhones. Unlocked phones are those that have been modified to work on unsupported carriers. For example, in the U.S., this would mean phones that were hacked to work on T-Mobile's network instead of on AT&T. This is different than "jailbroken" phones, which are phones modified to allow the installation of unapproved third-party applications.

At first, you might dismiss this problem since it only affects a small subset of users, but Balogh brings up an important question: "what should the developers do?" People who have purchased his application are now angry that it doesn't work, yet there's nothing he can do to help them.

A few days ago, we reviewed iTwitter, one of the earliest iPhone 3.0 Twitter apps to support push notifications, but one major let-down of iTwitter is that push notifications only work when both parties use the iTwitter client. Today, however, Boxcar arrived in the App Store (iTunes link), and this client actually polls your Twitter feed every 5 minutes and sends out push notifications whenever a new direct message or @reply arrives. Messages sent between Boxcar users will be pushed out immediately.