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.

An Unusual Company

We first wrote about Urban Airship eighteen months ago, when the then tiny startup unveiled its plans to act as a technology middle-man for app developers interested in outsourcing the infrastructure required to take advantage of the new push notifications and in-app purchasing on the iPhone. The company was founded by a scrappy group of engineers with a bizzarre story: their previous employer collapsed overnight, offering company computers in lieu of final checks, they built and sold an online bacon delivery website and a number of them were fortunate enough to receive unemployment payments for bootstrapping entrepreneurs under an innovative program from the state of Oregon.

Then they built Urban Airship. Led by serial innovator Scott Kveton, the company started landing customers fast and furious.

Fast forward to today and the now venture-backed startup says it has more than 7500 customers, using the company's services in almost 16,000 different apps, and adds an average of 43 new customers each day. In addition to push and in-app sales, the company was powering some of the first experiments with iOS content subscription. Urban Airship's list of customers is long and interesting, from Target to the Guardian, Warner Brothers, the Vancouver Canucks and Groupon. That's right - this little startup powers the push notifications for the fastest growing tech company in history. Say what you will about Groupon (I'm no fan) but that's impressive.

As we discussed in depth when it was revealed that push notifications were coming to the Twitter iPhone app, push enables new forms of interaction with mobile apps. Beyond increasing user engagement, push offers users opportunities to interact with apps in ways that are real-time, synchronous and rich with flow. The interruptive nature of push allows for finer-tuned prioritization of certain messages from certain sources. Push is a big deal, and Urban Airship makes it easy and systematic for app developers to implement it.

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. The building now houses a number of mobile startups, including former Twitter engineer Alex Payne's forthcoming BankSimple. A publicly available mobile device testing lab is in the works as well, gathering devices from manufacturers around the world for anyone to come and test their apps on.

Moving Beyond Speaking to Geeks

Urban Airship says that companies come to it to save time and money on deploying push notifications, but there's far more than can be done once the customers are in the door. The startup is building new features quickly - some go over well (like RSS to push) and others have been slower to gain adoption, like the feature the company calls "rich media push."

The two features the company is releasing today speak to a new audience, though. While the legacy product is ultimately an API play, the new features adress the needs of marketing organizations. Both features are being tested with existing customers but will be made generally available once that testing is complete.

The new Push Composer is like a little blogging platform, or a Twitter client, but for writing Push Notifications. An attractive UI allows anyone to compose short messages, schedule them for delivery and segment the audience based on tags that users may have opted-into or that a mobile app provider applied to people themselves. For example: one group of recipients might like the Portland Trailblazers, another group may be people who have opened a push notification within the previous 24 hours. Tagged groups can be whatever you like. Click send and boom, the message will be sent and received in seconds.

At launch the Composer does not allow users to determine what screen in an app gets opened when a notification is viewed, but the company says that may be offered in the future. Right now when recipients view a notification, the app simply opens up its front page.

Even more interesting are the new UA Reports. At first the reports are simple. They just track app opens, time in app, and push volume over time.

In time, Urban Airship hopes to see what kinds of data their customers want and to offer a wide variety of information based on that data it collects, cross referenced with other data sources. The company says it believes that app developers will eventually make decisions based on the data the reports deliver: what kinds of notifications get the most response? What kinds of features are users best alerted to by push? Which features or content types should be more prominent in the experience of the app?

The company says, for example, that one of its magazine customers found that push notifications and icon badges for its mobile apps were being opened more often at 9 PM than at any other time of the day. In response, the magazine now regularly pushes new content and notifications around 8:30 to prime the pump for evening readers.

Push notifications are great for keeping users engaged with apps, but some mobile devices handle them better than others. On iOS they are frankly terrible - though rumors are flying that drastic improvements may be forthcoming.

Will putting push composition in the hands of marketers lead to notification overload, a declining user experience and consumer backlash? That seems like one of the risks, but one that Urban Airship hopes to tackle with data-based education about best practices. The company says it has one full time engineer dedicated to metrics right now, but does not offer any formal training or guidelines in pushing just right instead of too much.

"2011 is the year that mobile apps need to prove their value," says Urban Airship's Jason Glaspey in the company's announcement today. "With thousands of apps fighting for consumer attention and an average app lifespan of one month or less, developers and marketers need powerful tools."

With a full-speed-ahead attitude and plenty of momentum, Urban Airship will now try to provide just that kind of tools. Hopefully the data analysis the company shares with its customers will help keep trigger-happy push composers in check and not lead to an overwhelming flood of notifications. Time will tell. It looks like this new mode of communication is about to become easier and smarter than ever before.

For all their dreams of success in a medium that privileges big pictures, multi-media and a touch interface, publishers of periodical content have been frustrated by the lack of subscription sales options on Apple's iPad. Urban Airship is a small startup that has begun to power iOS subscription to content for publishers including NewsWeek, the Atlantic and a major sports league. The company, which was founded with the help of a unique government unemployment program and online bacon sales (seriously), announced tonight that it has raised a second round of venture capital, $5.4 million from the Foundry Group, True Ventures and the Founders Co-op.

In the Spring of 2009, we wrote about Urban Airship's just-launched push-notifications and in-app sales as a service - a service the company built by the seat of its pants when push notifications came to the iPhone much faster than anyone expected. The founders had been building their technology with funding from one special Oregon unemployment fund for people whose employers shut down without paying them (they were told to take their computers home in lieu of a last paycheck), another fund for unemployed people working full-time building their own companies and from revenue from Bacn, an online bacon shopping site and URL shortener. (They've since sold Bacn to a competing online bacon retailer.)

The team quickly put together an impressive roster of clients for their push notification as a service technology, most famously for Tapulous, the makers of popular iPhone rhythm games Tap Tap Revenge. Users of the game can challenge each other and the challenges are sent as push notifications, powered by Urban Airship.

Then, this Fall, Verizon announced that it had selected Urban Airship to offer power push notifications for all the apps in its very ambitious new app strategy.

Many of Urban Airship's early customers were brought in by its high-energy CEO, Scott Kveton. Kveton has helped usher into the contemporary computing era technologies including OpenID, the Firefox web browser and the Linux kernel.

Subscriptions

Now Urban Airship is doing subscriptions. And why not? Apple made a magical device that almost feels like a magazine of infinite variety you might find in a Harry Potter book, but there's no ability to subscribe to serialized content on it.

"It is no easy feat to add in-app subscriptions that work within the Apple guidelines and practices," writes Jessica Davis, Communications Director, on the company's blog. "One of our engineering team members described the task as 'Herculean,' which is apt, given the amount of code required to make it work."

The Future is Cross-Platform

Urban Airship is best known for its work on the iPhone, but its push notifications can be sent to Android and Blackberry phones as well.

Glaspey says the team is hard at work building out subscription options for Android and Blackberry, as well as keeping its eye on Windows Phone 7.

Just like the startup's push notifications service made it easy for any app publisher to add the compelling user experience of push, at least in theory increasing user engagement with apps, the new subscription feature is aimed at unlocking the potential that the iPad has offered to publishers of magazines and other serialized content.

"It's still up the the media to deliver content that matters in this new paradigm and in a format that's worth paying for--all at a convenience and price point that subscribers respond to," says Glaspey. "The battle isn't over, but it may have gotten easier."

And why stop at magazines?

"One of the big hurdles is that using an app for customer payments is pretty new - a lot of people who could use this haven't yet imagined expanding their revenue this way," Glaspey says.

"One of the things I'm working on a lot this Fall is visiting advertising agencies and doing speaking gigs at conferences talking about the opportunities of mobile: to try and expand the imagination of people beyond magazines and streaming content (the obvious use cases) while also reminding people that their marketing messages are already irrelevant. They need to provide value and not just make a mobile 'micro-site.'"

A platform that makes it easy for mobile developers to add engagement-driving push notifications, in-app sales to make their development financially viable and now a subscription infrastructure to kill the unwieldy problem of downloading a new app for every issue of a periodical; that's what Urban Airship has built so far. With a fresh infusion of cash, it will be interesting to see what they do with it, and what they come up with next.

The company announced the availability of 20 different network-level Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) concerning device user location, messaging APIs that will enable new types of user experiences and the availability of push notifications through a startup that provides rich-media mobile push as a service. Innovation-minded mobile developers we talked to agreed - these are intriguing offerings.

Carrier Level Location Data

"Carriers already know where every phone is (to 1-2 mile accuracy in the worst case) but there has previously been no way of getting that information unless you go talk to the carriers and try to strike a deal - which of course the little guys have no way of doing," says Aaron Parecki, co-founder of a startup called Geoloqi, which is targeting a bleeding edge practice called Geofencing. "I haven't heard of anyone making that available via an API yet."

The other advantage to getting access to this device from a carrier, instead of from an app on a device? "That's the holy grail of cell phone location," Parecki says, "because it doesn't require the user to start an app to track themselves. It's 'always on' after they start using it the first time."

Duvander's caveat ("with proper privacy controls") is an important one, however. While developers, marketers and others may be thrilled at the prospect of easy, programmatic access to passive, persistent user location data, users may be more cautious in their enthusiasm. Consumer response will likely depend on how effectively best-practices emerge and how compelling the apps that get built on these APIs prove to be. The vast majority of mobile location services people use today are opt-in, explicit about sharing location selectively in a one-off fashion.

The blog Duvander edits, ProgrammableWeb, happens to be owned by Alcatel-Lucent, a major telephony middleware provider now focusing substantial energy on what it calls Application Enablement, or carrier-level APIs similar to what Verizon appears to be offering. We've asked if Alcatel was involved with the Verizon announcement today and have not yet received a response. (Note that Alcatel is also a long-term sponsor of ReadWriteWeb, and I wrote the Forward to the company's recent book about Application Enablement. Again, I have no idea if Alcatel is involved with or competing with this Verizon news.)

Photo by Laura Diaz

Messaging and Push Notifications

In addition to the location APIs, Verizon also announced the availability of messaging and push notification features as a service in the Verizon Developer Community. Portland, Oregon startup Urban Airship was selected to power push notifications, and is offering push with a multi-media payload. (Our previous coverage of Urban Airship.)

A Verizon App Platform

Verizon is not known as a great platform to develop apps on. This developer conference received almost zero press coverage - the exact opposite of what we see from the best-known mobile app platform on the market, Apple.

Every other carrier wants a piece of that action, though. Rich push and messaging APIs are probably a must-have, and may be one area in which other carriers could beat AT&T/Apple's clumsy implementation of Push.

Carrier-level location APIs though are just-plain hot, though - from a developers perspective.

Can Verizon combine market leadership, superior wireless coverage, a more compelling price-point (for inferior phones) and an ambitious developer strategy to win some hearts and minds? Who knows - but hopefully we'll see developers pushing the envelope to build some inspiring new technology with these new technical capabilities.

Developers who put the AirMail library into their apps will also receive full analytics showing how many recipients opened the messages, how long they spent viewing the content and more. AirMail is available only as a developer preview today but a preview video can be viewed below.

If you've got multi-media in an iPhone app, this is a way for it to reach out and grab (with push) your users and keep them engaged.

If you've seen push notifications from Gowalla (a great use case, by the way), Tap Tap Revenge, Yowza or Urban Rivals, then you've seen Urban Airship's service on the front end. On the back end, the company is developing push and in-app purchase infrastructure for numerous apps and devices, including the forthcoming iPad.

We want to make it extremely simple for mobile publishers to communicate in a real-time fashion with their users. The mobile phone is the perfect channel for that and we want to provide the ability to reach any user, any time, immediately, without the high cost or difficult implementation of SMS.

Bringing that paradigm to BlackBerry and Android will open up big new markets for the company and easy new functionality for developers. The company is offering BlackBerry push right now by integrating with BlackBerry's own API. Android push will be handled end to end by Airship and isn't ready yet. "We'll handle the details of managing the persistent socket connections from the device and sending the notifications as needed along that connection," the company says. That's easier said than done. Richardson: "We're taking it slow to make sure that we do it right."

The downside to using a service like this of course is that it's a form of reliance on a small outside service provider. Quite a few companies have been willing to forgo building this kind of tech in-house to date, though. Urban Airship reports that it delivered 100 million push notifications in its first 6 months and 60 million more in just 4 weeks after that.

Into mobile? Check out the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010.

Kveton is a dynamic, intelligent, skilled and flawed human being who is creating a very interesting life story for himself. Last night he announced his next big move. As you can expect, it could make a substantial impact on the future of the web.

Scott Kveton's Heavy-Lifting Early Days

When Kveton was 31 years old he founded the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University in Corvallis. After working at various big tech companies for a few years, he had joined the University and cut its hardware budget by 75% the previous year - just by buying open source Linux servers. The school decided to put the budget surplus back into the paradigm that made the difference. Then Google, IBM and other big companies started giving the new Lab money to host open source projects they were working on. Soon Kveton had a staff of 25 students and contacts all over the Open Source world. That was 6 years ago and those contacts have been invaluable throughout the rest of his career.

Shortly after the Open Source Lab's birth, the Linux kernel was in need of a new home. The parties responsible had built the server from the bare metal up, thus they were assured that no security compromise could be introduced from the outside at that core level and infect countless computers around the world. Arrangements were made to host the kernel at the Open Source Lab, the machine was flown from San Francisco in a Cessna and Kveton rolled out a red carpet. That essential piece of hardware remains at the Lab today.

Within that same first year of the Lab's lifetime, Firefox was born and officially launched to the public. Kveton suspected that the public reception would be enthusiastic enough to melt the network of mirror download providers for the browser around the world. So he helped write a piece of software that would manage that network automatically when under a heavy load. Kveton says Mozilla didn't want to use his program, but by 9:30 AM PST the mirror network was toast. With a workable network management system quickly put into place, Firefox went on to see 1 million downloads on its official launch date.

Going Startup

After continued success hosting other open source projects (like Drupal) at the Lab, Kveton decided he wanted to try something entrepreneurial.

He became the CEO of online identity provider JanRain and co-founded the OpenID Foundation. The Foundation brought together many of the biggest companies in the world and many innovative engineers, to talk about how companies would be better served by allowing users to travel freely from site to site with interoperable identities than by locking users in to a single, non-portable identity. Kveton was the Chair of the foundation for 2 years, then co-Chair for one year. He explained his interest and belief in the idea like this three years ago:

OpenID really is a grassroots, bottom-up approach. For something like this to be compelling there can be no hook back to the "mother ship". It's truly got to be open and decentralized and that's one of the main reasons people are finding it compelling. Has federated identity failed? In the past, yes. I believe in 5 years, there will be a federated identity that people use all over the Internet; you'll have one login and it won't be controlled by anyone but you. OpenID is hopefully going to be the driver of that; the HTTP of identity. Nobody but you should own your identity.

Kveton gave OpenID all he had for several years. He says that in time his family suffered and that he needed to leave his post as CEO of JanRain. He says he's still active with the company. He says this is an issue he struggles with: balancing work and family. "I'm a workaholic. That's how it is, that's one of my big priorities," he told me with a little sadness. "It's tough to balance out with family life and two kids. You do what you can and that's the best you can."

Kveton's next stop was a brief one with a company called Strands. That company was aimed at providing recommendation services for music venues, banks and other organizations. Its top executives were from Spain, the company raised more than $50 million and one of its two main offices was inside an old mausoleum in Corvallis, Oregon. Here at ReadWriteWeb, we were very excited about Strands. Kveton only stayed at the company for 8 months.

His next stop was at identity provider Vidoop. That company imploded, telling some of its employees they wouldn't be paid back wages but could take computers home from the office as compensation. According to OpenID community leader and now Google employee Chris Messina, though, the company fired Kveton months earlier, for going to South by Southwest on its dime but actually speaking at the event about...selling bacon on the internet.

That was Kveton's next project, a website called Bacn. "I'd ran my own blog about bacon," he told me,"and people would send me links on Twitter about bacon. I thought, 'I wonder if there's a business here.' I talked to people who sell bacon on the internet and found out that they knew bacon but not the technology."

Kveton talked to local web designer and information architect Jason Glaspey, just back from a months-long trip to Argentina, and to a young coding wizard named Michael Richardson, who was unemployed since Vidoop's collapse. "The day after Christmas I said let's launch a company at the Masterbacon conference on January 17th," Kveton recalls. "No one said we couldn't do it, so that's how we did it. Loads of logistics, fulfillment, postage, etc. all got done in 21 days. We had to think fast. That was one of the funnest things I've ever done. We put a modest investment of $10k into it, bought the bacn domain, Jason's wife did branding. We made shirts and paid some models with PBR and pizza. After it launched, the business grew fast. Once we did 680 pounds of bacon in one single day. It came in, we boxed it up and shipped it out in one day."

At roughly the same time, Kveton took on a short-term role as the Interim President of the Software Association of Oregon. That was never intended to be a long-term gig and another opportunity quickly presented itself.

Urban Airship

Colleague Steven Osborn was consulting for Subattomic Studios, the gaming company behind Field Runners. That company wanted push notifications and in-app purchases to be added to its iPhone app and Osborn saw just how non-trivial it was to set up that infrastructure. He reached out to Kveton and Richardson about it. Kveton: "Steven said, 'I don't know if there's a business here.' I looked at it at said there's a huge business! Michael asked if we could name it something with the word Airship in it. So we put it into the web 2.0 name generator and got Urban Airship!"

And that's how Osborn, Richardson and Kveton started a company. That was in May. Come June, Kveton bought a car-load of Danishes and drove to the Apple World Wide Developer's Conference where push notification was formally announced. He worked the line at the door, handing out pastries and telling developers about the company he was launching.

One person he talked to was his old friend from Mozilla, Bart Decrem. Decrem is a Belgian who left Mozilla to lead the social web browser company Flock, then left there and became CEO of Tapulous, the wildly successful maker of iPhone games like Tap Tap Revenge.

Decrem told Kveton that his company was big enough they preferred to build their own push notification infrastructure. Then Apple told Decrem that Tapulous had 8 days to implement push in order to launch as part of a big announcement. Decrem quickly got on the phone with Urban Airship. Kveton and team put the pedal to the metal and built push notifications for Tapulous ahead of a very tight deadline. (See our full coverage of that story: How Urban Airship Saved Tapulous's Bacon on iPhone 3.0 Day)

From there the company grew fast. As it says on its website:

Within one month, Urban Airship launched, landed its first customer, and powered the first App Store app that used push notifications. In the subsequent --short -- months, the team has signed more than 1,500 customers, sent more than 110 million messages and connected to more than 10 million mobile devices.

Why are push notifications and in-app purchases so important? As we've written before:

Push notifications, like when Tapulous now tells users who don't have the app running that they've been challenged to a music-playing match by a friend, are something developers believe will increase ongoing engagement long after the initial download of an app. In-app sales will help monetize that engagement, something developers have found challenging after an initial flurry of sales, once they are lost in a sea of options in the app store and no longer making money sitting beside countless other apps on peoples' phones.

Next Steps for the Airship

And so we catch up to today. Last night Urban Airship announced that it has transitioned from bootstrapped project to funded corporate venture. The round of funding was provided by San Francisco's True Ventures and Seattle-based Founders Co-op.

What will the company do with the funding? So far its assets are a few laptops and some code. "More of the same on a larger scale," Kveton says. "We'll be adding engineering. We're very excited about iPad, we'll have full iPad support. All these other devices are going to enable push notification - the future of the mobile market makes the PC look tiny."

As Urban Airship ramped up, Kveton and crew sold the Bacn to BaconFreak.com. It was proving a distraction and the team was happy to sell it just a year after it was founded. Another conference presentation about the rapid launch of Bacn.com lead to a book deal with the title "Makin' Bacon: From Idea to Startup." That's due out in April.

Kveton has also helped launch a web technology incubator called P.I.E. with a select group of innovators and global advertising company Wieden+Kennedy. Kveton says WK likes to have Urban Airship in the building because the phone geeks help inform the advertisers about the cutting edge of what's possible. WK and its clients in turn help inform Urban Airship's perspective on a number of different markets relevant to the startup.

Even critics who call him things like a charismatic opportunist admit that Scott Kveton is a very likable guy - and he clearly knows how to leverage the relationships he's built throughout his travels.

A book and a related incubator shouldn't be too much for Kveton to balance with running a now-funded tech startup company. But all these circumstances beg the question: is Urban Airship where this high-energy innovator is going to land for a good long while?

"I am excited about taking a company through its life cycle," Kveton told me last week. "This is one that I know I'm going to be able to drive to fruition, I intend to be here for the long haul."

No matter how this latest venture goes, Scott Kveton has already changed the web and the world for the better, more than all but a handful of people online ever do.

Disclosure: The author was an early participant in the PIE incubator and has had a past consulting relationship with W+K.

Urban Airship's primary product prior to now has been push notification provisioning. The company says that both push and in-app sales are complicated enough to warrant outsourcing to specialists like them. We've written about the company's vision at launch and its dramatic success on iPhone OS 3.0 launch day.

As we wrote early this summer:

Push notifications, like when Tapulous now tells users who don't have the app running that they've been challenged to a music playing match by a friend, are something developers believe will increase ongoing engagement long after the initial download of an app. In-app sales will help monetize that engagement, something developers have found challenging after an initial flurry of sales, once they are lost in a sea of options in the app store and no longer making money sitting beside countless other apps on people's phones.

M.T. works for Urban Airship, a mobile company that most iPhone users will be touched by, but will never hear of. The company powers the new push notifications and in-app purchasing features for app-making client companies who can't or don't want to do all the heavy lifting themselves to implement these new capabilities of the mobile device. Three weeks ago Urban Airship was an idea and some code, a side project of one of the men who would become a co-founder. Yesterday Urban Airship helped Tapulous, its first customer and one of the biggest gaming companies on the iPhone, launch push notifications before almost anyone else.

Push and in-app sales were known to be in the works on the iPhone, they're the developer-fantasy equivalent of copy-and-paste or MMS for users. Push notifications, like when Tapulous now tells users who don't have the app running that they've been challenged to a music playing match by a friend, are something developers believe will increase ongoing engagement long after the initial download of an app. In-app sales will help monetize that engagement, something developers have found challenging after an initial flurry of sales, once they are lost in a sea of options in the app store and no longer making money sitting beside countless other apps on peoples' phones.

But developers did not expect to see the new version of the operating system with push and sales launching this week. That news came out at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) one week ago Monday.

Urban Airship was at the WWDC and they were ready. They worked 18 hour days getting the code ready to function, getting a booth ready and making the muffins they passed out to booth visitors. Half the team had been living off of two unique unemployment funds; the state of Oregon has a fund that pays unemployment to people whose employers close without paying them (the state then seeks to get the money back from the employer if they can) and Oregon is a voluntary participant in the Self Employment Assistance Program, which compensates the unemployed while they start their own businesses, so long as they are working at least 40 hours a week on it. All this work was going on while several members of the crew were shipping bacon to customers of Richardson and co-founder Scott Kveton's other recently launched company, an online bacon sales shop called Bacn. (No one said these were normal people.)

Meanwhile, in Palo Alto, upstart iPhone gaming company Tapulous was pondering what it meant to have a week and a half before 3.0 day. The company's primary game, called Tap Tap Revenge, is one of the hottest on the platform. It's a music and rhythm game, like Guitar Hero, but for your thumbs. The company knew it wanted to use the new push notifications to let users challenge each other to competitions, but could it be ready in a week and a half?

Then on Tuesday, Tapulous found out that the new version of its app needed to be submitted by Friday in order to be approved and available on 3.0 launch day. "I had about an hour on Tuesday afternoon to sort out whether this was something that could even be attempted," Jess Kahn, Engineering Director at Tapulous, wrote on the company's blog, "and subsequent to that, a deadline of end of day Wednesday to say definitively if we were going to be able to make the Friday midnight ship date."

"Not shipping wouldn't mean the end of the feature," Kahn wrote, "it'd simply leave Push Notifications in the sizable bucket of things we'd like to do for our next big release of Tap Tap Revenge. Shipping, however, would be of strategic interest and benefit to Tapulous, and so clearly, the pressure was on to get Push implemented, and in record time!"

That's when Tapulous got on the phone with Urban Airship. The two companies shared what they knew about the requirements and possibilities and at the end of the call, they decided to give it a shot together. The two teams had from Wednesday morning until Friday at midnight to integrate Urban Airship's infrastructure into the Tapulous software and make sure everything was solid enough to deliver what was expected to be a huge number of messages. "We knew this was the biggest opportunity we could get," MT Richardson says, "a defining moment for our company."

"By Thursday Tapulous was slamming the system with tests," Richardson recounts. "It was proving reliable but a bit slow, so we worked to optimize the technology while Tapulous worked on integrating it. They loved it. We implemented a few things that were on the roadmap but not done yet, we just bumped those things up by priority. We were able to do that because we were using things like Django and rapid development platforms."

The team of teams submitted the new version of Tapulous by the deadline on Friday night and by Saturday Urban Airship had in place a queue system on its servers that could handle large amounts of data. Urban Airship thought there were a few more days until everything went live, but then, Richardson says, "on Sunday we were working on the servers and all the sudden we saw a bunch of messages coming through. We thought it was Apple testing, but then we got a notification that next version of Tapulous was live and all the developers testing 3.0 were using the Tapulous challenges!"

Come Wednesday, Apple released 3.0 to the public and a huge crush of downloads challenged even Apple's servers. Urban Airship saw their push notification numbers skyrocket from Tapulous users but Richardson says it all went off without a hitch.

After the action, Tapulous wrote in an account of the harried dash: "It's as if we added that Push provider support to our back end, but without it taking three or more weeks, and without the risk that if we'd done something wrong, we'd be compromising the uptime of our existing systems and the products and features that depend upon them...Integration with Urban Airship was a breeze...The level of professionalism and support was the likes of which I have rarely seen."

Urban Airship isn't launched to the public yet, but will soon release a set of open source libraries for easy integration of their service with apps. It's all come together very quickly. Co-founder Steven Osborn had been working on the code for some time, but the implosion of identity provider Vidoop, where several of the Urban Airship team members worked, was the sign they needed to make the company come to life.

Through surprise unemployment, through muffins and bacon, through a big surprise that launch day was coming as fast as it was - the Urban Airship team made their infrastructure play happen, thus letting other developers integrate important new features faster than they could have themselves.

The coast isn't clear for Urban Airship yet. The company has to finish building out its developer interface, documentation and its business model ("It's probably going to be tiered pricing after an initial bulk of free messages for testing," Richardson told us). At least one other iPhone developer infrastructure company, PhoneGap, has struggled to get past Apple approval processes. And Urban Airship is aiming largely at small app developers who don't want to build out push and in-app sales themselves and who don't want to go with big app publishing companies - that might be a hard market to get a lot of money from.

Those concerns noted, Urban Airship has one big customer already. And they've got one heck of an adrenaline-fueled glow from their success this week.

The service uses RESTful APIs and Open Source code libraries to handle "the tedious, annoying, difficult and troublesome parts of the development process" and offer outsourced scalability solutions.

Leading iPhone dev blog Mobile Orchard has covered complications in both the push notification feature and the store kit well. Having these tasks outsourced to a service like Urban Airship could make independent developers' lives a lot easier.

We love a good infrastructure play, but they can get complicated when it comes to a tightly controlled platform like Apple's. Last month we wrote about a mysterious and troubling trend of iPhone developers reporting rejection of their apps based on their use of the PhoneGap dev environment, a service that greatly democratizes mobile development in general. It's hard to say why but Apple appears unhappy with developers utilizing that 3rd party platform in delivery if not creation of apps.

Will Apple play nice with startups helping startups to develop on the fabulous platform that is the iPhone? We sure hope so. There's a long and rich history of web services amplifying the innovative work of developers on the web - having these kinds of services available for the iPhone as well sounds like a great way to take mobile to the next level. We'll be keeping an eye on Urban Airship.