Industrial Tech: Twilio, SendGrid, Google Cloud Messaging, Apple Push Notification Service
Twilio is a cloud communications (IaaS) company based in San Francisco, California. Twilio allows software developers to programmatically make and receive phone calls and send and receive text messages using its web service APIs. Twilio's services are accessed over HTTP and are billed based on usage.
SendGrid is a Boulder, Colorado-based transactional email delivery and management service. The company was founded by Isaac Saldana, Jose Lopez, and Tim Jenkins in 2009, and incubated through the TechStars accelerator program. As of 2013, SendGrid has raised over $27 million and has offices in Boulder, Denver, Anaheim, and London, and operations in New York City and San Francisco.
SendGrid provides a cloud-based email delivery service that assists businesses with transactional email management while abiding by anti-spam regulations. The service manages various types of email including shipping notifications, friend requests, sign-up confirmations, and email newsletters. It also handles internet service provider (ISP) monitoring, domain keys, sender policy framework (SPF), and feedback loops. Additionally, the company provides link tracking, open rate reporting, and CAN-SPAM compliance. It also allows companies to track email opens, unsubscribes, bounces, and spam reports without the utilization of code. Beginning in 2012, the company integrated SMS, voice, and push notification abilities to its service through a partnership with Twilio.
wtf is “cloud-based email”? how's it diff from just email?
and wtf is “transactional email management”?
Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) is a service that helps developers send data from servers to their Android applications on Android devices, or from servers to their Chrome apps and extensions. The Android service was first unveiled on June 27, 2012, at Google I/O 2012 held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The Chrome service was announced before Google I/O 2013 as a blog post titled “Building efficient apps and extensions with push messaging.”
Apple Push Notification Service
The Apple Push Notification Service is a service created by Apple Inc. that was launched together with iOS 3.0 on June 17, 2009. It uses push technology through a constantly open IP connection to forward notifications from the servers of third party applications to the Apple devices; such notifications may include badges, sounds or custom text alerts. In iOS 5, Notification Center enhanced the user experience of push and local notifications. APNs was also added as an API to Mac OS X v10.7 “Lion” for developers to take advantage of, and was greatly improved in OS X 10.8 “Mountain Lion” with the introduction of Notification Center.