PORTLAND, OR -- (Marketwire) -- 02/27/13 -- Today at Mobile World Congress, Urban Airship detailed growing momentum for its previously announced alliance agreement with Windows Azure. Urban Airship and Microsoft Corp. are working to help popular apps deploy on Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 devices with high-performance, precision-targeted push messaging services to increase app user engagement and retention. Urban Airship is updating its service for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 to support push messages to Live Tiles, in addition to Toast Templates, offering new ways for apps to connect with their most loyal users on device home screens.

"The first platform to get the new NBC News app is Windows 8 with Windows Phone 8 following in about a month. There are advantages to being first in a new ecosystem, and Live Tiles and Toast notifications offer unique features to drive user engagement," explained Yan Philippe, Group Manager, NBC News Digital. "Urban Airship is a great tool that we hope will help drive more frequent use and better user engagement of the NBC News app for Windows 8, offering consumers up-to-the-minute news alerts from NBCNews.com and on-air programs such as 'NBC Nightly News' and 'Meet the Press.'"

Another NBC News app -- Breaking News -- recently rolled out to Windows 8 users with Urban Airship powering push messaging across all of its supported platforms. "Push messaging has been a huge engagement driver for us since launching on Windows 8, along with our iOS and Android apps," said Cory Bergman, GM of Breaking News, a mobile-first startup within NBC News. "We're utilizing Urban Airship to extend the value of our app to smartphone, desktop and tablet home screens, building the broadest audience possible."

"Many of our partners, including Atimi, BrandingBrand and Xtreme Labs are working on Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 development projects for very large brands," said Christopher Dean, chief revenue officer, Urban Airship. "We're happy to be working with Microsoft to make the process easier and the end result richer and know our push messaging services will handle the most ambitious cross-platform strategies, while offering the scale and precision that best-in-class apps require."

Urban Airship's APIs, client libraries and documentation make it easy to add push messaging to apps developed for Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, Android, BlackBerry and iOS. Developers can get started immediately by adding Urban Airship's new single codebase client library to their apps for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8.

"Urban Airship helps its customers take advantage of engaging platform features like Live Tiles and Toast Notifications across our family of Windows 8 and Windows Phone devices. It provides a compelling value proposition to publishers trying to simplify management and implementation of push notifications across multiple platforms," said John Richards, senior director of Windows App Marketing for Microsoft Corp.

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.

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