Intro
1. Learn Vocabulary - Learn some new vocabulary before you start the lesson.
2. Read and Prepare - Read the introduction and prepare to hear the audio.
The world is going mobile. Our phones are capable of doing so many things, and there are more apps made every day. Even though your phone is always with you, it can be easy to miss important information.
Urban Airship helps your phone communicate with you better. They make push notifications which let your apps get your attention more easily. They’ve helped companies like ESPN, Intel and Oracle send more than 10 billion messages to more than 100 million mobile devices. The company was recently named “Best Emerging Mobile Marketing & Advertising Solution” by CTIA, an international organization for the wireless industry.
As CEO, Scott Kveton is captain of the Urban Airship. We met with him at his office to learn about mobile apps and the English vocabulary that surrounds them.
3. Watch - Watch the video without reading the dialog.
Dialog
1. Listen and Read - Listen to the audio and read the dialog at the same time.
2. Study - Read the dialog again to see how the vocab words are used.
Scott |
Jason: This is business English on English, baby! I am Jason here with Scott Kveton, CEO of Urban Airship. Can you tell us a bit about what your company does?
Scott: Sure thing. Urban Airship provides a platform for mobile app developers to help with things like push notifications, in-app purchase and subscriptions.
Jason: What is a mobile application?
Scott: A mobile application is something that a user can download and put on their phone. It can do any number of different things, whether it’s for your sports scores, reading news, listening to music…It takes advantage of things like maybe the accelerometer, the GPS, things that are native on the device itself.
Jason: What are push notifications?
Scott: A push notification for a smart phone is basically…It looks a lot like an SMS message. It looks like a text message. The big difference is that it’s actually sent over the data network. So it works on any connected device. It could be a tablet. It could be a smart phone. It could be a computer. Anything that’s connected to the Internet, we can send a push notification to. The notifications themselves are tiny, tiny messages and send just a little bit of information straight to the device. We’re now starting to weave in things like location and context because the device knows where you are. It knows who you are. It knows what you like. So if you can actually then push the right message to the right user at the right time, it can be really, really effective.
Jason: What is monetizing?
Scott: Monetizing, or figuring out how you make money on these devices, is pretty tricky. We’ve actually built some tools that help developers make money through in-app purchase. So you might be inside of an app and want to buy a weapon for a game, or you might want to buy some new content. You might want to buy some music. You can actually buy that inside of the application itself and then it charges straight to your credit card you already have set up on the phone and through the phone. The other thing you can do is subscriptions. And then of course this ties into push notifications because it will send you a push notification saying, “Hey, the latest issue of the magazine you already have subscribed to is now available for download.”
Jason: Well, thanks so much for talking with us. Really interesting stuff.
Scott: Cool!
Grammar Point
Go Super to learn "Modal Verbs" from this lesson
Quizzes
Lesson MP3
The iTEP® test
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Discussion
Mobile applications help us do all sorts of things. Scott Kveton’s company, Urban Airship, enables push notifications that send you small messages over the data network on your smart phone or tablet.
App developers sometimes have a hard time monetizing their products, or make money on their mobile apps. Urban Airship helps them with ways for customers to buy things using the app or subscribe to content.
Do you have a smart phone or a tablet? What are your favorite apps?
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