The Pulsate SDK takes care of synchronizing the badge number on app's icon in iPhone home screen. The number represents the total unread items in user's feed: unread campaigns and unread messages.
You might want to present that number somewhere in your UI to inform the user of new updates that are waiting for him in the feed.
You can access the badge number by using the applicationIconBadgeNumber property:
[UIApplication sharedApplication].applicationIconBadgeNumber
UIApplication.sharedApplication().applicationIconBadgeNumber
Once you have this number, you can add it to your app as a UI element.