PORTLAND, OR -- (Marketwire) -- 01/04/13 -- Urban Airship, the global leader in mobile push messaging to build relationships with connected consumers, today predicted that mobile marketing will enter its third wave of investment in 2013 as more businesses and consumers discover the value and convenience of Apple® Passbook® passes. Key reasons include the ease and speed with which businesses can now deliver offers, tickets and boarding passes to a convenient, centralized wallet on consumers' mobile devices. This offers real value and convenience for the consumer and streamlines ways for businesses to effectively close the loop from digital acquisition and engagement to conversion.

Urban Airship will host a webinar with the Mobile Marketing Association on January 24, focusing on the promise of Passbook and how passes can be rapidly adopted to bolster existing mobile strategies or reach consumers' devices for the first time. Building off the first and second waves of mobile marketing investment -- mobile advertising and mobile apps -- Passbook has experienced rampant adoption since launch with thousands of businesses using PassTools™ web composer to create coupons, tickets, loyalty cards and more in minutes and without writing a single line of code or requiring any developer-level knowledge.

"As one of the world's largest promotional, retail and shopper marketing agencies, The Integer Group sits at the intersection of branding and selling where mobile plays an increasingly vital role," said Cort Langworthy, creative lead -- mobile, The Integer Group. "We believe Passbook offers us a massive opportunity. It takes a major step forward in solving shopper marketing and promotions on mobile devices. We love the simplicity and power of the PassTools platform, and we are actively using it with our clients. Consider us and our clients very excited indeed."

Today, Urban Airship is offering select companies early access to sophisticated, enterprise-scale PassTools functionality through its Passbook Early Access Program. Companies can request access to the PassTools API to create template-driven, dynamic passes that can contain personalized and updateable information for each customer, automatically pulling in data from other systems and applications. Early access participants will have a chance to interact directly with Urban Airship's development team to launch their first-to-market Passbook campaigns, while contributing to Urban Airship's future product development efforts.

"Orange Silicon Valley, a fully owned innovation and research subsidiary of telecom giant Orange, constantly explores new solutions and their potential to create compelling customer experiences, and we found that PassTools' Pass Builder and API offer a simple, intuitive and complete Passbook solution," said Chai Geller, senior product manager at Orange Silicon Valley. "PassTools enabled us to focus on Passbook's capabilities rather than the technical complexity with the end result being an incredibly quick prototype that is both appealing and functional."

"Urban Airship has a history of being first to market to take new, cutting-edge functionality from Apple and make it easy to use and scalable," said Joe Beninato, general manager of Digital Wallet at Urban Airship. "Today, we are accelerating this third wave of mobile marketing investment by bringing the ease of use and scalability of PassTools to enterprise early adopters who wish to provide the convenience of personalized, updated passes to their customers."

About Urban Airship
Urban Airship enables brands to build relationships with their always-connected customers through services that streamline delivering highly targeted, cross-platform mobile push messages and Apple Passbook passes. Billions of push messages and tens of thousands of passes are delivered each month, sparking exceptional consumer experiences, driving app engagement and increasing customer loyalty and lifetime value for leading brands such as CBS Interactive, ESPN, Groupon, shopkick, Walgreens, Warner Bros. and Waze. The company's solutions handle the end-to-end process of high-performance push messaging, location-targeted messaging and Passbook pass management. For more information, visit www.urbanairship.com and follow us on Twitter @urbanairship.

Add to Digg Bookmark with del.icio.us Add to Newsvine