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mtrichardsonon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2014)

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.

mtrichardsonon Poll: What was your financial situation when you started your startup?

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.

mtrichardsonon In Love with LÖVE

Not in Lion - by default holding down a key will bring up the accent menu. You can turn it off by following this http://osxdaily.com/2011/08/04/enable-key-repeat-mac-os-x-li... (though I've found it more useful to keep it on).

mtrichardsonon Why it's OK to leave a tech job at 5 p.m.

You can be doing what you love and still have a crappy job with low pay and no hours.

mtrichardsonon The One Product That Makes Apple a Trillion-Dollar Company Overnight

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.

mtrichardsonon Kicksend (YC S11) iPhone app - send up to 30 full-quality images at once over 3G

I'm honestly curious, why is that a problem?

mtrichardsonon Sen. Ron Wyden: "You can't come up with sensible Internet policy on the fly"

Check out the OPEN act. Ars links to their writeup in the article: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/12/censorship-f...

It moves the focus on handling these things away from the DoJ and to the ITC.

mtrichardsonon My Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Mac OS X (2011 Edition)

I'm using it right now, as is a friend I recommended it to a few minutes ago, thanks to this post.

mtrichardsonon Oregon's Self-Employment Assistance Program: States Supporting Entrepreneurship

I'm one of the founders mentioned, and others are here as well - please don't hesitate to ask any questions about the program.

mtrichardsonon Portland wants to transform its software culture into an industry

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.

mtrichardsonon Portland wants to transform its software culture into an industry

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.

mtrichardsonon Ask HN: Who Is Hiring? (October 2010 Edition)

Urban Airship in Portland, Oregon. http://urbanairship.com/jobs

mtrichardsonon C500k in Action at Urban Airship

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 :)

mtrichardsonon Urban Airship Brings Easy Push Notifications To Android

Thanks! That means a lot to us :D

mtrichardsonon Urban Airship Brings Easy Push Notifications To Android

Sure thing.

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.

mtrichardsonon Urban Airship Brings Easy Push Notifications To Android

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.

mtrichardsonon Urban Airship Brings Easy Push Notifications To Android

Hi,

Thanks for the questions!

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.

You can see the integration story around the push library here: http://urbanairship.com/docs/android_client.html

And the library is up on GitHub: http://github.com/urbanairship/android-push-library

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.

And, yes, everything is encrypted.

Thanks for the great questions :D

mtrichardsonon Urban Airship Brings Easy Push Notifications To Android

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. :)

mtrichardsonon Urban Airship Brings Easy Push Notifications To Android

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.

mtrichardsonon Urban Airship sends half a billion push notifications

(cofounder here)

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.

mtrichardsonon Posterous takes on Tumblr

My main problem with Posterous imports is that they don't preserve the URLs of my previous posts. I have custom domains set up, so redirects are broken. I was hoping that with the latest Tumblr import they had fixed it, but no go.

mtrichardsonon Apple forces users to pay full price to redownload already bought ebooks

I can read my Kindle books on my iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, Mac, and Windows computer (and soon Android). It's still Amazon's software (which, for the desktop computers, sucks), and it's still DRM'd, but you don't have to have a Kindle to enjoy the Kindle library.

mtrichardsonon Zendesk raises their prices 60%-300%, users predictably revolt

We user Tender and absolutely love it. They've occasionally have issues with delayed jobs, but they were minor quirks. We use it all the time and cannot recommend it enough.

mtrichardsonon People of class drink alcohol

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/05/people-of-cla...

Summary of that comment: Attitudes towards scripture is the primary predictor, though WORDSUM and education still have significant effects.

mtrichardsonon Ask HN: Who's Hiring?

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.

jobs@urbanairship.com

mtrichardsonon Portland introduces CivicApps: contest promoting usage of their open datasets

Direct link to the contest (I thought SF had a better explanation of what it's about): http://civicapps.org/

mtrichardsonon Urban Airship's AirMail takes push notifications to the next level

No - a Notifo or Prowl or other similar services could use us to deliver their notifications. They are enabling push on web apps and other items and creating a consumer app that serves as a central point for the notifications, whereas we provide a service for any app developer to integrate. Different targets and concepts :)

mtrichardsonon Urban Airship's AirMail takes push notifications to the next level

Thanks!

Metalab ( http://metalabdesign.com/ ) did our initial site and identity, then we got our friends Refresh Media ( http://refreshmedia.com/ ) to revamp it to its current state. Cannot recommend both of them enough.

mtrichardsonon Urban Airship's AirMail takes push notifications to the next level

Awesome, thanks for using UA!

At the bottom of http://urbanairship.com/products/airmail/ , there's a signup form - we'll be emailing that list first with early access. Or, you can email me ( michael@urbanairship.com ) and I can get you on the list.

Apple's push service has a few quirks - in addition to connectivity issues (which can definitely be numerous - thanks AT&T!), there's also a problem when passing along a development device token to a production server. They'll silently drop the connection and we won't know until the TCP window size fills up that this happened - in other words, messages can be lost. There's a feature we've implemented called push debug mode that will watch for this, but it will slow down broadcasts or large sends. We recommend having this on during testing and are working on a more automated solution. So, you could try that.

But, in general, yes, issues like this were some of the initial inspiration behind AirMail - we tried as much as possible to talk to our customers and get feedback and the product naturally grew out of hearing what they wanted.

mtrichardsonon Urban Airship's AirMail takes push notifications to the next level

Thanks for the submission!

I'm one of the cofounders of Urban Airship - I'd be more than happy to answer any questions if you have any.