I spoke today with Scott Kveton, a former developer with deadpooled open-ID startup Vidoop, about the startup, Urban Airship, he and 3 other fellow ex-Vidoopers launched today to assist iPhone developers with push notifications and iPhone storekit provisioning (you can find a comprehensive story about the fall of Vidoop here). iPhone app developers can outsource these cloud-based services to Urban Airship, which will focus primarily on the iPhone for now but will aim to provide support for other mobile devices in the future.
Kveton says that he along with his former colleagues saw a gap in the industry where developers could get bogged down in the nitty gritty development issues concerning push notifications to the iPhone and updating content to apps. The service will handle the delivery of notifications to Apple, will provide aliases for your users so you can send specific messages to users, and will create a web interface to send targeted or broadcast messaging for updates or other information.
