Given its name, it's particularly fitting mobile infrastructure specialist Urban Airship is on the up and up.

In the last two years, the company claims to have delivered 5 billion push notifications on behalf of 20,000 different apps across iOS, Android and BlackBerry.

That comes in at an average of 13,000 messages every minute, though the firm's more recent numbers are even more impressive.

Heading skywards

Year-on-year, Urban Airship's notifications business has grown 500 percent, having jumped from a total of 84 million messages at the same point in 2010.

Now, CEO Scott Kveton reports its notification operation is growing at more than twice the rate of Twitter: the social network took 3 years, 2 months and 1 day to hit 1 billion tweets, compared to the 1 year, 3 months and 15 days it took to hit 1 billion messages.

"I'm amazed at the growth we've seen in such a short time," added Kveton.

"Our team has delivered on the vision of a ubiquitous messaging layer for any connected device and we're just getting warmed up over here. The market is rapidly adopting push notifications as a critical communications channel. It’s clear that mobile is changing everything."

Expanding the Airship

Like the industry itself, Urban Airship is also changing. The company has appointed start-up veteran Dylan Anderson as CFO, VP of finance and corporate secretary.

Having clocked up 18 years of financial and operational leadership in early-stage companies, Anderson will be tasked with overseeing Urban Airship's growth as well as driving the firm's capital.

"Dylan is joining the team at the perfect time," added Kveton.

"As the deals we are doing start to become more and more complex, we need someone intimately familiar with sophisticated revenue models and experience structuring full-service, SLA-level contracts."

[source: Urban Airship]