This article was published on June 20, 2013

Urban Airship’s Wallet Studio helps firms create and manage Apple Passbook and Google Wallet cards


Urban Airship’s Wallet Studio helps firms create and manage Apple Passbook and Google Wallet cards

Urban Airship, a specialist in delivering push notifications, location-based mobile marketing and building cards for Apple’s Passbook app, launched a cross-platform digital wallet solution today called Wallet Studio.

The tool set enables businesses to easily create, launch and manage campaigns that integrate with Passbook and Google Wallet. Staff can design their own passes using Urban Airship’s Pass Builder, a tool picked up by the company as part of its Tello acquisition, and easily map it across to the card format used by Google Wallet.

Customers can then send wallet items and other updates to their customers through a number of different mobile channels, including in-app, email, SMS, Twitter and Facebook.

The new service also gives customers detailed analytics reports in order to measure the performance of their cards and passes, as well as their related marketing campaigns and offers.

Wallet Studio is clearly targeting businesses and marketers who want to deliver and tweak digital wallet campaigns without referring to an extensive in-house design team. It includes common templates for coupons, loyalty cards, gift cards, event tickets, boarding passes and membership cards, which should help to simplify the design process and accelerate pushing updates to their existing userbase.

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Urban Airship also has an API which enables customers to update digital wallet items in real-time with required user information such as membership numbers, bar codes, promotional codes and trackable links, among others.

The company is also bundling in its expertise with push notifications so that businesses can notify users about changes to their digital wallet with messages and updates on the home screen. This could include expiration alerts and new offers, as well as personalized user information such as point totals or flight gate changes.

Scott Kveton, co-founder and CEO of Urban Airship said: “Consumers are just now discovering the value and convenience of digital wallets, and businesses can gain greater efficiencies and more effectively close the loop on ROI over decades-old paper and plastic-based processes and newer but siloed social channels.”

Urban Airship partnered with GamesAnalytics, a messaging and analytics platform that allows video game developers to give the player feedback based on their individual performance, in July last year.

The company then acquired Tello in December, a software as a service (SaaS) and mobile application company that specialized in creating passes for Apple Passbook. After moving into some new London offices in December later that month, it’s clear that the push notification specialists have eyed up Apple Passbook and Google Wallet as the next big growth market.

Image Credit: Nicky Loh/Getty Images

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