Urban Airship Blog

We're hiring at Urban Airship ( http://urbanairship.com/ ). We're located in Portland, Oregon. We do push notifications and content delivery for mobile devices - currently iPhone and BlackBerry, but (very) soon Android and others. We have lots of really awesome customers and power some really big mobile apps. Server stuff is in Python, but there's also work in Objective-C and Scala. We're funded by True Ventures and Founders Co-op and we currently have 7 people - 6 engineers and our CEO, Scott Kveton. It's a place where everybody works on every layer of the stack and we're having a fantastic time working on new products and scaling out. You should join us. [email protected]

Stackmob[1] and Urban Airship[2], depending on what you'd use it for [1] https://www.stackmob.com/ [2] http://urbanairship.com/

http://urbanairship.com has turned into an 8-bit working game.

How is this different from Urban Airship? http://urbanairship.com/

I've always been a fan of Urban Airship http://urbanairship.com

Urban Airship has a similar service (even priced similarly): http://urbanairship.com/ Their focus is specifically mobile apps, & they have nice sample code for iPhone/Android/Blackberry. Gets spendy faster than Amazon, but I've used it for personal stuff and it's really easy. Ex.: I do a lot of database work recently, so when I kick off a 90min query, at the end I ping them with some JSON and my phone meows. (Meow! Stop drinking! Your query is done!)

Not that similar, I think appnotify falls under the class of APSN infrastructure service provider which brings to mind, UrbanAirship - http://urbanairship.com/ iLime - https://www.ilime.com/

As an alternative, Portland-based Urban Airship now sells and hosts an In-App Purchase infrastructure, in addition to Push Notification services. http://urbanairship.com http://siliconflorist.com/2009/06/17/tap-tap-revenge-urban-airship-cel…

San Francisco, CA or Portland, OR - FULLTIME or INTERN - Engineers and business people Urban Airship is hiring all kinds of engineers and business people in San Francisco and Portland. We have a travel program between the cities, so you'd get to know 2 badass cities. Urban Airship helps mobile developers send push notifications at high volumes across iOS, Android, Blackberry, WP7, Kindle, etc. - 10 billion push notifications sent. We're sending about 2.5 billion per month now. We sent 150M push notifications in a 24 hour period just this week. - Our systems are engineered to send about 50,000 push notifications per second. We want to "light up a stadium in a second". - We have huge customers like The New York Times, ESPN, USA Today, Groupon, LivingSocial, BET, etc. - We're about 65 people and just raised $15M from Intel, Verizon, and SalesForce. - Working on advanced segmentation of users to send smarter push notifications. - Great, hardworking leadership, one of the most important things in a startup. - Ping pong showdowns. Lagunitas keg and bourbon in the office. Fun, connected, smart, and badass co-workers that are 100% startup. The formal job listings are here: http://urbanairship.com/company/jobs/ but we're hiring smart engineers with a broad range of skills. Hit me up at ben (at) <companyname> (dot) com if you're interested!

Blogpost (now pulled from Urban Airship blog): Today I’m excited to the acquisition of SimpleGeo. You can read Jay Adelson’s post here. [Dead link] Both Urban Airship and SimpleGeo started two and a half years ago and I’ll never forget when Crash Corp Inc. (the original SimpleGeo) launched as we both went live with our new sites on the same day with the same font; Museo. We’ve known each other over that entire time and shared lots of discussions and even did a partnership deal in the last couple of months. As we continued to talk and engage we realized that putting our two companies together would make for a really interesting offering for our combined customers. We’ve learned that our customers (brands, retailers, etailers, media, social networking sites, games and others) want more than just generic tools. Instead of building blocks they want a complete solution that can be used by the entire company to help engage, monetize, locate and understand their mobile user base. Urban Airship will fold in the SimpleGeo product suite to offer a complete set of solutions for our ever growing customer base. Urban Airship is now the leading platform for mobile cloud services in the market. This is a fantastic win for both Urban Airship and SimpleGeo customers and investors. Obviously there are many things that we need to work out while we make this transition and we’ll be working closely with existing customers from both companies to make sure they are up to speed on our future…

urban airship, portland, python web engineer, js web engineer, data engineer: https://www.urbanairship.com/careers

People have been using Netty (Java) to handle over 500K connections with NIO on one server. http://urbanairship.com/blog/2010/08/24/c500k-in-action-at-urban-airsh… That's 3 years ago. I'm sure more can be handled now, with more memory and more cores. Bundled Netty with a distributed system like Hazelcast, you can easily scale out to more machines.

Here's a case study showing over 500k connections to a Java instance in 2.5GB of memory using NIO. JRuby's implementation of Ruby's IO is implemented directly atop NIO. So yeah...that 15GB assertion is nonsense. http://urbanairship.com/blog/2010/08/24/c500k-in-action-at-urban-airsh…

TL;DR They managed to scale their server up to 1 million open connections with a single Java process. Pretty impressive stuff. More here: http://urbanairship.com/blog/2012/05/17/scaling-urban-airships-messagi…

I think we have good handle on how to get the messages down to the devices. Check out http://urbanairship.com/blog/2010/08/24/c500k-in-action-at-urban-airsh… on how we handle connectivity and delivery to android devices.

Urban Airship! SF & Portland - Funded by Intel, Salesforce, Verizon Do you want to work on a product that reaches hundreds of millions of users a year? http://urbanairship.com/company/jobs/

Parse competes with Urban Airship in being a push notification service provider, so this isn't just a lifeline, it's competitive: https://www.parse.com/pricing http://urbanairship.com/pricing/

Technical details would be interesting. Until then, here's Urban Airship's post from last year on 500k connections on Linux: http://urbanairship.com/blog/2010/09/29/linux-kernel-tuning-for-c500k/

This is bollocks. The argument is that you can only have ~60k connections due to the limit of ephemeral ports. This applies on a per-client basis, so you can have nearly limitless connections. I wrote about this here under "The 64k connection myth": http://urbanairship.com/blog/2010/09/29/linux-kernel-tuning-for-c500k/

Horizontal scaling is key. If we had more faith in auto-sharding in MongoDB 1.6, that may have worked (however horizontal scaling wasn't our only issue with MongoDB). With PostgreSQL we manually partition the data (luckily we have a really nice key to partition on). PostgreSQL 9's streaming replication has been adequate so far. We've only been using it in production for a few months and recently moved off of AWS* which drastically reduced our error rates overall. * http://urbanairship.com/blog/2011/06/01/hybrid-cloud-were-up/

Urbanairship in Portland, OR is hiring for an Ops position: http://urbanairship.com/jobs/operations-engineer/

A timeline of Google's messaging rivalry with Facebook. Original inspiration from source [23], enhanced and corrected from [33]: - 2006-02-07: Google Talk integration inside Gmail goes live [35] - 2006-09-26: Facebook opens up to everyone (not just colleges) [36] - 2007-02-14: (corrected date) Gmail opens up to everyone (not just invite-only) [37] - 2008-04-06: Facebook chat goes live [34] - 2008-07-11: iOS App Store launches [38] - 2008-08-26: Facebook hits 100 million active users [24] - 2008-09-23: Android 1.0 launches [39] - 2008-11-11: Google Talk introduces voice and video calling [40] - 2009-03-11: Google buys GrandCentral, launches Google Voice [1] - 2009-04-08: Facebook hits 200 million active users [25] - 2009-06: iOS gets push notifications [42] - 2009-06-25: Google Voice invitations being serviced [2] - 2009-09-15: Facebook hits 300 million active users [26] - 2010-02-04: Facebook hits 400 million active users [27] - 2010-05-20: Android gets push notifications [41] - 2010-06-21: FaceTime released with iOS 4 [43] - 2010-06-22: Google Voice opens up invite-free to everyone in the US [3] - 2010-07-21: Facebook hits 500 million active users [28] - 2011-01-05: Facebook hits 600 million active users [29] - 2011-05-30: Facebook probably hits around 700 million active users [30] - 2011-06-28: Google+ launches, with text chat "+Messenger" and video chat "+Hangouts" [4] - 2011-07-06: Facebook introduces video calling powered by Skype…

Urban Airship is hiring full time senior software engineers in San Francisco and Portland. We're looking for people to join our back end team (which is primarily Java, hbase, cassandra, high volume RPC services), and our web team (JavaScript, python/django, d3, etc...) Our San Francisco location is a small, engineering and operations-focused office in SOMA. We have the feel of a much smaller company, but we operate at a scale of billions of events per day. If working on APIs that get called 40,000 times per second, all day, every day sounds interesting, you might like us. Doing interesting things with a firehose of kafka events is also something we also do a lot of. We support open source software and believe in good tooling (we just released a new project yesterday -- https://github.com/urbanairship/tessera; full disclosure - that was my project for our internal Hack Week recently, and we're now monitoring our metrics in production with it), and minimizing the obstacles to getting stuff done. We also believe in work/life balance, as well has having room for people to work on their side projects; most of our monitoring stack started as side projects! In our backend stack, experience with Java, netty, protobufs, kafka, hbase, high volume TCP/IP messaging in general, designing and building REST APIs, postgres, postgis, cassandra, geolocation technology, automated testing and deployment are all valuable. You can check out the official listings at…