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Mobile backend-as-a-service provider Kinvey and and mobile service provider Urban Airship today are announcing a partnership that will combine the power of Kinvey's cloud capabilities with Urban Airship's robust push notification system. This is a big partnership for Kinvey, a TechStars Boston startup looking to increase its profile in mobile development circles. Urban Airship benefits from the strategic partnership by taking advantage of Kinvey's cloud capabilities that will help provide scalable data services for thousands of developers across platforms.

The goal is to help developers make better decisions. The analytics tools and cloud capabilities of the combined Urban Airship/Kinvey capabilities will enable developers to know when and how to push out updates to their apps and increase engagement with push notifications. The partnership is also a sign that the backend-as-a-service sector is beginning to mature and morph, with consolidation perhaps coming down the road.

Mobile backend as a service startup Parse has raised its Series A funding with an announcement today of $5.5 million coming from Ignition Partners. Parse is growing quickly and likely benefitted from being close to the prominent VCs in San Francisco along with Valley developers that have tied their cloud services to Parse for data storage, social layers, push notifications and user management.

Parse has added features recently, most prominently aligning themselves with both Heroku and Appcelerator. These are canny moves for the startup because it allows Parse to approach the environments that developers are working in. What will be next for Parse?

Urban Airship made big news in the startup community yesterday with its acquisition of backend location services provider SimpleGeo. Last December we called SimpleGeo the most promising company of 2011 because of the way it provides location data for applications and the approach the company uses to tackle the problem. Urban Airship agrees that SimpleGeo has great potential, hence the acquisition.What does this mean for the backend-as-a-service mobile cloud realm?

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.

Can the iPad save the magazine star? It might, if Portland, Oregon startup Urban Airship has anything to say about it.

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.

It wasn't hyped like an Apple developers' conference, that's for sure - but Verizon's Developer Conference held today in Las Vegas included some very big announcements from the largest mobile carrier in the US.

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.

Portland, Oregon mobile service provider Urban Airship announced today that it now offers push notifications as a service - with a multi-media payload. The white label technology, called AirMail, sends users of iPhone, BlackBerry and soon Android phones a push notification that when clicked launches not just an app, but specific content like images, videos or text inside that app.

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.

Urban Airship, a Portland, Oregon based iPhone "push notifications as a service" company, announced this morning that it now offers push notifications for BlackBerry applications and will soon offer Android push as well. "We are going to see at least four, and potentially five, extremely relevant platforms for mobile applications in the near future," the company said, "and we intend to provide the push messaging and content delivery infrastructure for all of them."

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.

Geekdom may be a land of big personalities, but some peoples' stories are better known than others. One story you might not know yet is the tale of Scott Kveton's young, unusual, accelerated and admirable career. Not yet 40 years old, Scott Kveton built the organization that houses the Linux kernel and he saved the day when Firefox launched but all the download mirrors were overwhelmed. He was key to bringing the biggest web companies to the table to develop OpenID and other federated identity systems. Then he spent a year selling bacon on the internet, until flipping bacn.com to an acquirer and signing a deal to write a book about lightweight, agile startups.

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.

Urban Airship, the Portland, Oregon-based iPhone infrastructure service provider, just announced that it is offering in-app purchase provisioning for iPhone apps. The company says customers can implement the service in four minutes and will be charged 5 cents per transaction. The service also enables delivery of free content to app users for the same cost.

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.