• by Steve Smith  @popeyesm, November 1, 2011

App notifications, messaging and purchasing platform Urban Airship has purchased another set of engagement tools for app developers, the location-based services platform SimpleGeo.

Urban Airship drives the alerts and other in-app features for many major media brands, such as Weather Channel, Warner Bros., Groupon and Yahoo. SimpleGeo allows app developers to include location-aware features. The two companies will bring onto a single platform notifications, in-app purchasing, subscriptions, and contextually aware capabilities. 

Company CEO Scott Kveton says in a blog post that the combination of both 2-year-old startups will offer the development community a more comprehensive set of integrated monetization services.

“We’ve learned that our customers (brands, retailers, etailers, media, social networking sites, games and others ) want more than just generic tools. Instead of building blocks, they want a complete solution that can be used by the entire company to help engage, monetize, locate and understand the mobile user base,” he says.

The combination of Urban Airship messaging and SimpleGeo LBS features could help a retailer push location-relevant coupons as customers pass nearby a storefront. Messaging can be location-aware so recipients in different areas get contextually-relevant information.

Urban Airship claims 20,000 customers deploying its platform with metrics on millions of users and their mobile habits.

Kveton says that the two companies had already been working together in a partnership announced last summer and came to realize their respective services would fit well as a single platform offering. The Portland-based Urban Airship will retain and expand SimpleGeo’s San Francisco office.

SimpleGeo CEO and fellow executives Matt Galligan and Joe Stump will serve as strategic advisors.