As I was browsing through a bunch of links this morning, I happened upon a post about “10 disruptive individuals who are reshaping the mobile industry.”
Being a sucker for lists, I clicked through. What surprised and pleased me was to see Scott Kveton, CEO of Urban Airship, listed among names like Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Square and Jaakko Iisalo of Angry Birds fame.
Urban Airship isn’t a household name, but it’s used by a ballooning number of companies to make their mobile apps more useful and more relevant. Its tools combine smart push notifications with geo-location and context information to send just the right kind of messages at the right time, and also enable in-app purchases. Since its launch in 2009, Urban Airship has attracted more than 25,000 customers (companies building apps), sent out more than 10 billion messages, and connected to more than 100 million mobile devices.
Cofounder Scott Kveton is an outside-the-box kind of guy: His previous startup was a bacon-shipping service for consumers. Before that, he ran online identity company JanRain and helped found the OpenID foundation, which supplies the kind of plumbing that makes it possible for you to log in to one site using the credentials of another site.
I can completely validate that Kveton is disruptive. And UA isn’t doing too badly either. Congrats on getting the well deserved recognition.
To see who else made the list, read the post on Venture Beat.
