

Urban Airship raises $15.1 million - turoczy
http://urbanairship.com/blog/2011/11/07/up-up-and-away-urban-airship-raises-15-1m-from-salesforce-com-verizon/

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nupark2
Urban Airship has raised $21.6M in less than 2 years, and I can't help but
wonder when (and if) they're actually going to start making money.

Providing a RESTful front-end on Apple's push notification API is a pretty
small thing. Apple solved the subscription problem, which was supposed to be
one of UA's legs to stand on.

This statement makes me think they're grasping at straws as the platform
vendors iterate them into obsolescence:

 _As we look to 2012 and beyond we’ll be looking at new ways to bake our
platform into connected devices. Mobile phones are our bread and butter but we
see opportunities with tablets, ultra-notebooks, desktops, TVs, set-top boxes
and more._

I've always thought UA's business model could only ever support a "lifestyle"
company (not intended the derogatory sense, by any means). They're not really
proving me wrong here, and it seems like they're inflating themselves with VC,
burning cash at a phenomenal rate, and grasping at straws to try and find
something they can do to make money other than wrap Apple and Android push
notifications in a REST API.

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Apocryphon
I'm disappointed that the product isn't related to actual zeppelins.

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layzphil
Me too. When oil prices go crazy in the next 10 years or so I'm convinced
there's a good market for these somewhere.

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pyre
I'm now picturing mass transit via zeppelin with men in business suits
repelling down ropes (rope in one hand and briefcase in the other) when the
zeppelin goes over their work.

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Tichy
The umpteenth time they are on HN in the last few days, and I still havo no
idea what they do. Weird company name.

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nivertech
How big is a market for Push Notification SaaS (in $$$)?

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davidu
So Salesforce (CRM) made a "strategic investment" in this round. My bet is
that this is just the first part of an acquisition which was unable to be
completed at this time.

If I were a betting man, I'd say CRM will acquire UA (read: finish their
acquisition) in the next 12 months. Think of this investment as a discount on
the final sale price that gives the founders the visible exit they seek (which
probably couldn't happen today) and puts SimpleGeo into the acquisition bag
all at once.

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wensing
Wonder what Salesforce wants with UA.

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mluggy
The business of push notification saas does sound small but should be more and
more easy to roll new services once you have their SDK.

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mgkimsal
Maybe I'm just old and remember the humanity of it, but isn't having your logo
be reminiscent of a major human tragedy not the best move in the world? Or
don't logos matter that much? Or maybe the target market doesn't even remember
it? Might we see twin towers logos in 50 years, trying to evoke a 90s NY
nostalgia feel in the youngsters?

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zizee
All I see is a picture of a zepplin. Where is the logo of an exploding
airship?

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mgkimsal
I guess I'm just part of a group that thinks of one of 2 things when I see a
zeppelin - the hindenburg or goodyear tires - nothing else.

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sjs
If you remember 1937 you are getting up there for sure. Were you having too
much fun in the 70s to remember Led Zeppelin?

On a serious note you could make the same argument about any vehicle. Cars,
trucks, airplanes, buildings, bodies of water, you name it and someone,
somewhere will be able to associate something bad with that thing. If you try
to anticipate every possible negative association you will never decide on a
logo or name, and will waste a lot of time and energy in the process. I think
startups have better things to do.

(John Siracusa talked about this on Hypercritical[1] just the other day.)

[1] <http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/41>

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wensing
Or you could just test 100 people and discover that X think of Goodyear or the
Hindenberg and you're being a bit absurdist. :)

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foobarbazetc
You guys need to fix your font so that increasing font size in Chrome doesn't
shrink it to unreadable levels.

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allanscu
Congrats to the UA team. UA took a simple idea of push notifications and made
it extremely easy for developers to use. Kudos!

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klbarry
There is so much potential for geo-fencing. I'm currently trying to figure out
how to use it for a one-time scavenger hunt, with no luck in figuring out the
tech. A service for this would be worth money, certainly.

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buss
My startup is in the early stages of building a platform for geosocial apps.
We want to tie together the identity providers (FB, 4S, GoWalla, anything
else) with the geodata providers (SCVNGR, SimpleGEO, FB, 4S, Gowalla, etc)
into a unified API.

The vision is being able to say "Give me all of the bits of geodata my friends
have left on any service" with a single call.

We are going to provide hooks for data and identity providers to tie into our
platform.

Would you be interested in something like this, and what would you want out of
it?

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klbarry
I would want the ability to easily create opt in geofencing for geographic
texting at any location - central park, a bar, etc. A bit different from your
vision.

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buss
That's a neat idea. Kind of like geographically localized chat rooms?

We've been considering that as a demo app for the platform. The initial idea
was just to mark a point and a radius for a chat room, then when users enter
the area they'd get a notice pushed to the phone like "geochat app has a chat
room here. want to join? [yes/no]". The app developer would use our api to tie
a (lat,long,radius) to an action (geochat-app/load-chat/{chat-id}, for
example). Combined with our own app that monitors user location, we can run
the appropriate action for the (lat,long,radius,app,user) set and launch the
developer's app.

A specific bounding box instead of a radius is a good idea, and we'll add that
to our to-do list.

Would something like this be useful to you?

