Urban Airship, in Portland, San Francisco, and remote. We're building the platforms required for communicating with and understanding a mobile audience, and we work with some of the biggest and best companies in the world.
We're looking for technical product managers, designers, platform engineers, senior web engineers, sales engineers, program managers, data engineers... Feel free to send me an email (in profile) to talk about any of these.
Same restrictions on normal unemployment apply in Oregon. The SEAP is unemployment, and requires that you be on regular unemployment first. The differences are that you're specifically allowed to work full time on your company. The company has to be vetted to make sure it's not completely ridiculous, but all profits you make are yours. It's a fantastic lifeline and without it Urban Airship would definitely not exist. It's also a federal program (as well as federally funded), though the states run it - in other words, California could implement it. They just haven't.
I think the difference here is that I'm already on my phone or iPad looking at the item in the first place. It's a pleasant experience for me to look up things that I might like, or to grab something I know we need. Oh, we're out of light bulbs? Pull out the phone, Prime them, done, don't need to think about it. It's not that it's easier on the phone/tablet over the laptop, it's that more and more those devices are becoming the first thing I go to.
Portland venture capital is picking up (and we've been lucky to be a part of that). An important note is that most of the money isn't coming from Portland and it's not coming in small amounts. Serious investments are coming in from out of state VC firms.
Dedicated entrepreneurs exist and are making a go at it here - and doing quite well.
I'm wary of most of these organizations, but I do have high hopes for the software startup scene here.
There are local tech events happening pretty much every night of the week. http://calagator.org/ has a good listing. It's to the point where you can't pick a night to do a user group/meetup without it conflicting.
You might want to start there when trying to find talent... though for what it's worth we haven't had a hard time finding talent lately. Lot of competing people away, but that's hardly new or different.
Not in our tests, and nobody in our beta test period had any comments. The logic around controlling the connection is pretty intelligent in what it does.
A connection that's open isn't problematic at all, assuming it's being used - lots of setups/teardowns can be an issue (which is why polling apps will consistently take up a large portion of your battery life). The main issue is if the app is using a radio when it shouldn't be. Luckily, we can control this pretty well with our handling code and have been able to balance out needs pretty well between delivering a message as quickly as possible and not destroying battery life.
If you're an Android dev, we'd love your feedback on it in general :)
For in-app content delivered through our infrastructure, whether it's free or paid through Apple's in-app purchase, we charge $0.05/download.
An API call is made to our system when a person wants to download content. If it's a paid item, a receipt is included in that call and we then validate the receipt with Apple. After that, the application can download the content.
Our core product is a suite of features to make it easier for mobile publishers to add advanced mobile features. If it becomes clear at some point that we need to only use C2DM (Google's version), then we will - it'll still be the same API and the same product from the perspective of our customers.
Right now, it might seem like it's "Oh yay easy push notifications!" but that's not really the main story. The main story is that we're going cross platform with all of our products and we're helping people really take advantage of these great new technologies to help their mobile applications and strategy.
The AirMail Control Panel manages a persistent TCP socket connection to our infrastructure using custom keepalives. Our pings aren't adapted to networks yet, as we just don't have good enough data around that - we've got great monitoring set up around this, so I'm not too concerned about that.
We haven't noticed any drop in battery usage during our (very long) testing phase. That was one of our primary concerns :)
Each instance of the layer of our infrastructure that manages the connections can handle several hundred thousand connections.
Our app handles notifications by default, but if you don't want it to handle the alerting and want to do it yourself (this was a requirement by some of our larger customers) you can by specifying only an "extra" value. We'll pass that data along and your app can parse it.
We've been doing this for over a year. We're extremely familiar with all of the quirks of the process around push notifications and, during that time, have listened to what our customers are asking for. We've implemented most of these features and are in the process of implementing more. Using Urban Airship, you get things like autobadge (increment/decrement), quiet time (no alerts in the middle of the night for customers who don't want them), a super easy broadcast feature, arbitrary grouping by tags, scheduled notifications, the ability to hook up an RSS feed to automatically push notifications, and a web UI to send notifications... features like that, in addition to that, we have great support, so if something isn't work right you have a team you can go to get help.
A lot of our customers don't even have any server at all, they just use us.
On top of all that, we also have a great in-app purchase solution and rich messaging through AirMail.
It goes a lot beyond just a simple API to send push notifications. :)
There a couple Urban Airship cofounders that read HN, myself included - please don't hesitate to ask us any questions. This has been a really, really fun project with some very interesting technology coming out of it.
Since the post is just about Apple push notifications, I'm going to assume that's what you're asking about.
Apple maintains a persistent connection to every device with push notifications enabled. An application can show a user a dialog asking whether or not that user wishes to receive push notifications - if the user says yes, the application is given a unique identifier called a device token. That device token can then be used to deliver messages from the developer's server via a persistent socket connection to Apple using their binary protocol. According to Apple, this connection should be held open as long as possible - you can't just open it when you need to send messages. They also don't provide any grouping or broadcast functionality.
Where we come in (again, on the Apple push side) is allowing that application to register the device token with us along with any additional information they might want - tags, aliases, time zones, quiet time information. The application developer can then send messages through a simple RESTful API instead of maintaining the persistent connection to Apple. They also get the benefit of grouping, RSS to Push, scheduled notifications, broadcast messages and all of the other things we offer.
Our customers love it because not only do we take care of all of the difficult problems, as well as handling scaling to millions of devices, we provide a lot of features on top of the basic service. It's a lot of work that they don't have to implement and, any time that they have questions, they have a team of experts they can contact.
On top of that, we have AirMail, which allows application developers to use push notifications to drive users into a richer experience.
We're looking for technical product managers, designers, platform engineers, senior web engineers, sales engineers, program managers, data engineers... Feel free to send me an email (in profile) to talk about any of these.