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>> Push notification. You know? We're late on this one. We announced this last year, and we expected to have this up in production by the end of the year, and we didn't. And there's a few reasons for this. Most importantly, within two months of launching the Apps Store, we had over a thousand applications on the App Store. And we have over a hundred million applications that had been downloaded. And a huge number of developers came to us saying how excited they were about push notifications, and how they were going to use it in volumes that we hadn't considered. And so we had to completely rearchitect the server infrastructure for push notifications. And that's what we've spent this last six months doing. Completely rearchitecting it to make it really, really scaleable. And now's when we had a hundred million downloads, now we've had over eight hundred million downloads. So this is what we've been targeting. So now we're good to go. Here's how it works. Let's say you have an instant messaging application, and while it's running, it's connected to your server. So if you want to send a notification up there, just talk right to your application. But when you quit the application, you no longer have this connection open. That's where the Apple Push Notification Service comes into play. It has a persistent connection open to the phone. And so this third-party server just passes its notifications through the Apple Push Notification Server. There are three types of notifications you can push. One is a badge so you can badge how many items are waiting for the user. You can also badge audio alerts. [bleep] And this can be whatever sound you want for your applications. Customizable for your application. You can also send text alerts. Text alerts appear the same way that SMS's appear, and you can even add a button where if you use your taps to net button, they'll launch right into your application. Now, of course, the reason we're doing these, and the nice part about it, is it scales. It scales to all of these third-party services that want to take advantage of it, and we're really excited about that. So, push notifications is a unified, generic push notification service for all developers. It preserves your battery life, it maintains the performance of your phone, and we've optimized it for mobile networks. Now, as Josh said earlier, we're in over eighty countries around the world this week, and that's with over 25 carriers, and every carrier has slightly different configurations of their networks. So we're doing all the hard work for you of making sure that we keep that persistent connection open to the phone so you don't have to. And it is now really scaleable, and we're ready to go.
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