Urban Airship and Tapulous Partner on Tap Tap Revenge iPhone Push Notifications

Portland, OR (PRWEB) June 17, 2009

Portland-based software company Urban Airship announced today that they have signed a deal to provide leading iPhone application developer Tapulous with support for push notification services, a new offering for Apple iPhone OS 3.0 that will enable Tap Tap Revenge players to challenge one another from within the game interface.

Tapulous was among the first group of iPhone developers to test iPhone 3.0, which is being released to users today. Its new features promise increased user engagement for iPhone applications, but they also carry with them a new set of concerns for developers, primarily additional development time and scalability. Urban Airship has developed solutions to help mitigate those concerns for the iPhone development community, quickly and easily.

"Implementing a Push provider, per Apple's spec, seemed like it might be a little tricky, even with our existing server infrastructure. Plus, we needed to be sure that we'll scale," said Jessica Kahn, Director of Engineering at Tapulous. "Urban Airship was the right solution for us. On our own, it might have taken weeks to do a good job of implementing the provider portion of Push support. Instead, it took a few hours to integrate our product with theirs."

New Features Hold New Challenges for iPhone Developers

With the release of Apple iPhone OS 3.0, iPhone developers gain access to two new, powerful ways to interact with their customers:

•     Apple Push Notification Services (APNS), which allow iPhone applications to send messages, update the badge on home screen icons, and play custom sounds.
•     Apple In App Purchase, which enables "in app purchase," allowing users to purchase content from within an existing iPhone application and providing for the advent of content subscriptions.

The features provide the opportunity for developers to increase engagement with applications and create a recurring revenue stream. However, they also require additional server-side infrastructure to support them. Since Apple has no plans to provide hosting solutions to enable these features, developers are scrambling to figure out their own infrastructure.

Urban Airship takes that burden off of the developer by providing an affordable Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) infrastructure, designed specifically to support these new features. With Urban Airship's iPhone services, developers can take advantage of this new functionality without having to pursue expensive hosting or infrastructure purchases.

"Urban Airship helps developers use these new iPhone OS 3.0 features without having to deal with the complexities of managing server infrastructure," said Scott Kveton, CEO of Urban Airship. "We're really excited to be working with Tapulous and its great to see us realizing our goal of providing easy-to-integrate tools to developers so they can focus on building their apps and increasing revenue instead of the details of building cloud services."

About Urban Airship
Urban Airship is a software company based in Portland, OR that specializes in delivering scalable cloud infrastructure for mobile application developers. The company has 20+ years of experience developing large-scale infrastructure--capable of servicing millions of customers at a time--for companies like Amazon.com, Mozilla and Vidoop. For more information, please visit: http://urbanairship.com .

For more information contact:
Urban Airship Inc.
Scott Kveton
CEO
(503) 764-8770

###