The Taking Notes Podcast

   

September 2011

Taking Notes Episode 140: 2011.09.23 - Interview with Urban Airship CEO Scott Kveton 9.23.2011
In Episode 140 we sat down with Urban Airship CEO Scott Kveton. For those of you not familiar with Urban Airship here is what they do:

"Urban Airship powers the world's most successful mobile apps. Providing breakthrough technology, Urban Airship makes mobile marketing far more engaging, effective, and efficient. Top brands depend on Urban Airship's innovative platform to reach and engage target audiences and increase app revenue streams through push notification, rich messaging, in-app purchase, subscriptions and user engagement tracking."

In the show we talk about:
  • Something near and dear to us all - "bacon" and specifically Scott's bacn.com project.
  • How Urban Airship got started.
  • What exactly Urban Airship sells.
  • Why building apps that customers want and need is important. Just don't build apps because they are technically cool.
  • The difference between mobile advertising services and Urban Airships "Platform-as-a-Service" or "PAS".
  • Why a developer would use Urban Airship's PAS rather than adding push notifications themselves.
  • How geolocation ties into push.
  • How Urban Airship makes money and how customers are making money using their products and services.
  • The number of push notifications served as of August 2011.
  • Scott's involvement with the Portland Incubator Experiment. Listen to Episode 138 of Taking Notes to learn more about the Portland Incubator Experiment with Rick Turcozy.
  • A blog post Scott wrote talking about boots trapping a startup company.
  • What's next for Urban Airship.
  • and much more...

This show runs about 28 minutes. On Episode 141 we will be interviewing IBM's Ed Brill about Notes/Domino 8.5.3 and more.




Taking Notes Episode 139: 2011.09.08 - Interview with Appcelerator CEO Jeff Haynie 9.8.2011
On this show we talk with the CEO of Appcelerator Jeff Haynie. You may have heard of Appcelerators' Titanium development platform.

"Titanium makes cross-platform native application development easy. A free and open source application development platform, Titanium lets you create native mobile, tablet and desktop application experiences using existing web skills like Javascript, HTML, CSS, Python, Ruby, and PHP."

We talk with Jeff about:
  • Who is Jeff Haynie and how did Appcelerator get started.
  • How the Titanium product has evolved over time.
  • That time in history when Steve Jobs said that developers could only use XCode to develop native apps for all "iThings".
  • How someone can get started with Titanium.
  • What products and services Appcelerator offers.
  • Where you can download Titanium.
  • What the differences are between the community and paid versions of Titanium.
  • The upcoming "Code Strong" Appcelerator Developer conference and "hackathon" being held in San Francisco September 18-20..
  • and much more...
The podcast runs 29:43.