Urban Airship raises $15.1 million

[nupark2]

Urban Airship has raised $21.6M in less than 2 years, and I can't help but wonder when (and if) they're actually going to start making money.

Providing a RESTful front-end on Apple's push notification API is a pretty small thing. Apple solved the subscription problem, which was supposed to be one of UA's legs to stand on.

This statement makes me think they're grasping at straws as the platform vendors iterate them into obsolescence:

As we look to 2012 and beyond we’ll be looking at new ways to bake our platform into connected devices. Mobile phones are our bread and butter but we see opportunities with tablets, ultra-notebooks, desktops, TVs, set-top boxes and more.

I've always thought UA's business model could only ever support a "lifestyle" company (not intended the derogatory sense, by any means). They're not really proving me wrong here, and it seems like they're inflating themselves with VC, burning cash at a phenomenal rate, and grasping at straws to try and find something they can do to make money other than wrap Apple and Android push notifications in a REST API.

[Apocryphon]

I'm disappointed that the product isn't related to actual zeppelins.

[layzphil]

Me too. When oil prices go crazy in the next 10 years or so I'm convinced there's a good market for these somewhere.

[Tichy]

The umpteenth time they are on HN in the last few days, and I still havo no idea what they do. Weird company name.

[nivertech]

How big is a market for Push Notification SaaS (in $$$)?

[davidu]

So Salesforce (CRM) made a "strategic investment" in this round. My bet is that this is just the first part of an acquisition which was unable to be completed at this time.

If I were a betting man, I'd say CRM will acquire UA (read: finish their acquisition) in the next 12 months. Think of this investment as a discount on the final sale price that gives the founders the visible exit they seek (which probably couldn't happen today) and puts SimpleGeo into the acquisition bag all at once.

[wensing]

Wonder what Salesforce wants with UA.

[mluggy]

The business of push notification saas does sound small but should be more and more easy to roll new services once you have their SDK.

[mgkimsal]

Maybe I'm just old and remember the humanity of it, but isn't having your logo be reminiscent of a major human tragedy not the best move in the world? Or don't logos matter that much? Or maybe the target market doesn't even remember it? Might we see twin towers logos in 50 years, trying to evoke a 90s NY nostalgia feel in the youngsters?

[zizee]

All I see is a picture of a zepplin. Where is the logo of an exploding airship?

[foobarbazetc]

You guys need to fix your font so that increasing font size in Chrome doesn't shrink it to unreadable levels.

[allanscu]

Congrats to the UA team. UA took a simple idea of push notifications and made it extremely easy for developers to use. Kudos!

[klbarry]

There is so much potential for geo-fencing. I'm currently trying to figure out how to use it for a one-time scavenger hunt, with no luck in figuring out the tech. A service for this would be worth money, certainly.

[buss]

My startup is in the early stages of building a platform for geosocial apps. We want to tie together the identity providers (FB, 4S, GoWalla, anything else) with the geodata providers (SCVNGR, SimpleGEO, FB, 4S, Gowalla, etc) into a unified API.

The vision is being able to say "Give me all of the bits of geodata my friends have left on any service" with a single call.

We are going to provide hooks for data and identity providers to tie into our platform.

Would you be interested in something like this, and what would you want out of it?

[dsri]

You should check out SCVNGR: http://www.scvngr.com

[caseorganic]

Cool! We're looking to solve that problem too. We'll release a toolset for non-developers in December (along with a suite of tools for developers). There are so many people out there that want to do scavenger hunts, but it is very difficult to do it from scratch.