Urban Airship is absolutely flying: hires former Skype CSO Christopher Dean

I’ve been following Urban Airship for quite a long time. They first originated, if you recall, to help service app developers who wanted to be able to send push notifications via iOS easily. That was back in 2009.

More than 9 billion push notifications later and the company is now absolutely flying with 25,000+ customers with tech giants such as Intel, Salesforce, Verizon, Foundry Group and True Ventures participating in their Series C round. Not for nothing is Urban Airship routinely regarded as one of the most valuable tools in a developer’s arsenal.

Urban Airship’s products now underpin the operations of companies such as Dictionary.com, Groupon, Warner Bros, The Weather Channel and Yahoo. The chances are that if you get a third-party push notification on your iPhone today, it was probably sent through Urban Airship’s infrastructure.

The snowball continues with the arrival of Christopher Dean, formerly the Chief Strategy Officer at Skype. He joins recent CMO hire Brent Hieggelke (the chap behind Second Porch/HomeAway).

I have to say I’m particularly impressed with how they’ve integrated Rich Push into the service. If you chose to include the SDK within your app, your customers will appear to receive gorgeous rich push notifications instead of the rather limited ‘one liner’ style approach standard on iOS. Of course — and rather interestingly — Urban Airship’s notifications infrastructure isn’t just restricted to iOS. Oh no. It works on iOS, Android and BlackBerry — and even the Kindle Fire.

If you’ve been thinking about playing with notifications, do take a look at what Urban Airship are offering: You can get a million push messages per month with their basic account — and that’s absolutely free.

I’m looking forward to seeing what else they’ve got coming in 2012.