Urban Airship's Scott Kveton on why encouraging user interaction with apps is more important than driving downloads

If you're not moving forward, you're standing still – an old adage in-app infrastructure specialist Urban Airship could well have coined, based on the firm's movements in recent months.

Following a year that saw its revenue grow by a mighty 600 percent year-on-year, Urban Airship invested a fair slice of its funds in its $3.5 million buyout of location-based service provider and long term strategic partner SimpleGeo.

But is location the be all and end all of Urban Airship's mobile infrastructure? And how has the launch of iOS5 – with its focus on notifications – impacted the platform's own notable hand in this arena?

We caught up with founder and CEO Scott Kveton for his take on the future of the platform.

We've had a great relationship with SimpleGeo since both companies were founded. Last summer, we announced a partnership to jointly bring location-aware mobile messaging services to app developers.

Since then, we've been working closely and it became obvious that there's an amazing opportunity to create a combined infrastructure that's provided as a service. It'll bring location together with push notifications, context, in-app purchasing and subscriptions.

The result will give enterprises and developers the ability take their apps to a whole new level that is much smarter and more meaningful for consumers.

We'll begin sharing our new roadmap with customers later this quarter and then will make a broader announcement in early 2012.

By bringing together push, purchasing, subscriptions and location on a single platform for deploying, managing and measuring how consumers interact with their apps, we'll unlock a new wave of apps that are highly context aware give consumers a much more personal and meaningful experience.

The expanding market for push notifications is timely and reflects its increasing relevance to mobile marketing.

The industry has learned that obsession with driving downloads is ineffective as a long-term strategy. Despite the money invested in developing mobile applications, only about 5 percent of mobile apps are used 30 days after they're downloaded by customers.

Push notifications serve these marketing objectives because they can reach mobile customers, stimulate interactions with them, even if they are not using the app or their device at the time. Customers are responding.

For example, according to a recent study by comScore, 14 percent of consumers representing Groupon and LivingSocial users said they engage with the app after receiving an offer sent via push notification to their phones. This is not surprising and the engagement rates are certain to grow as push matures and the market and marketers become more familiar with it.

Push works because it takes advantage of mobile as an intent-driven platform. It focuses on the customer's reasons and motivations for using a device, such as shopping, following sports scores, or playing a game, and it creates conversations with the users around those activities. But it's also about real-time social sharing of content, like music, pictures, and video.

In addition, when you consider that most devices now are location aware, messages in real time become even more compelling.

Finally, apps can be designed to include rich media such as video, audio, maps or actionable content like coupons or voter polls to a message, which enriches the entire experience and strengthens the overall appeal.

We are already seeing significant gains from Notification Center and Newsstand.

Next, I think the real value of push notifications will become glaringly apparent as marketers realise its ability to get customers actively engaged with mobile content and applications.

Newsstand is finally giving publishers a subscriptions solution for not only mobile, but digital in general. We are seeing publishers elated with the number of new subscribers we are helping them get through Newsstand.

What does the future hold for Urban Airship?

I think we're going to be seeing even more consolidation in this space and we're poised to drive that. We've got a fantastic team and a repeatable business model with amazing customers that want more of it all.

While we'll continue to broaden the platform with more features across devices we'll also be looking to strike deals that bake us into devices opening up new opportunities to engage and monetise on a variety of connected devices.