One of the most important features of mobile platforms is notifications. Our phones, and sometimes even our watches, are forever buzzing and bleeping to tell us that someone, somewhere, has done something that we should know about, right now. Whether you use iOS, Android, or even Windows Mobile, there's a common theme to these notifications: they're deeply annoying. We get notifications when we can't do anything about them, we get too many notifications, and we get notifications that we just don't care about.
This problem is just getting worse, too. Instagram users are begging their followers to turn on notifications for their accounts so that they ensure their pictures are seen in spite of the use of an algorithmic timeline. Even when we think we have our notification settings at just the right balance, an unexpected event—a tweet going viral and getting retweeted all over the Internet, say—can throw things off.
A new startup, Projector, which today announced that it had received $4.5 million in seed financing, is hoping to give mobile app developers the tools to make their notifications actually good by making them a whole lot smarter. The Projector service sits between existing application servers and the notification servers, providing a place for rules and machine learning to be applied to the notifications. There's also a client-side library for displaying and reacting to the notifications.
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