ReadWriteWeb

Three weeks ago M.T. Richardson's job disappeared, his employer ran so far out of money that it said no one was getting paid and offered computers from the office as compensation instead. Yesterday, M.T. had one of the best days of his life. He's the junior-most developer in a still unlaunched company riding high behind the scenes of the iPhone 3.0 launch.

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.

Portland, Oregon based startup Urban Airship demonstrated a beta service at today's Apple developers conference that will handle the heavy lifting for small iPhone app shops seeking to utilize the new push notification functionality and the ability to sell goods in-app instead of sending customers to Apple's store.

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.