The business value of a hackathon

Have you ever attended a hackathon? Hackathons are long on collaboration, soft drinks, and laptops, and they’re short on sunshine, glamour, and sleep. Occasionally you’ll see Special Guest Stars, like electronic kitty ears or, in this case, access to American Airlines’ check-in gate of the future. Developers are already in the mood to innovate, and these special treats really ignite them.

But in a well-run hackathon there’s even greater value for the three main stakeholders:

Developers

About 100 developers attended Travel Hack, and if you were one of them, you got:

• New APIs and use cases. Hackathons show developers real-world business problems and tools they wouldn’t normally get to see, like the sneak-preview application programming interfaces (API) that American Airlines and AT&T made available just for Travel Hack.
• Live, in-person access to experts. You’re never more than 15 steps from one of the people who helped write the dev tools and APIs, and they’re willing to help you.
• Networking, community spirit and contacts. Hackathons bring lone-wolf developers together to find and work with one another.
• Prizes and exposure. You and your team may win cash and high-profile recognition from sponsors, venture capitalists and the press.

API providers

In addition to AT&T and American Airlines APIs,several other travel-related companies made their code and tools available during Travel Hack. All of these API providers got:

• A ready, willing, able audience. Providers can crash-test their code with a demanding hackathon crowd before rolling them out to the wider market.
• Technical insights. Hackathons are your first chance to see, outside of your own labs, how developers use your tools in the real world.
• Exposure for experts. While your engineers are answering questions about APIs, they’re also boosting their profile and building valuable relationships outside your company.

The direct dialog with the developers benefits API providers in that real-time feedback is received on usability and is an efficient way to identify bugs in the code that can be fixed for future releases.

Enterprises

Travel Hack sponsors AT&T and American Airlines got:

• New product ideas. Hackathons are fertile ground for ideas at the higher level of new products and markets.
• Integrations. Enterprise developers spend plenty of time making new things work with existing things. At a hackathon, they can see how developers combine their products with other products.
• Ways to solve business problems. Hackathons attract developers who think about business problems from completely different perspectives.

Have a look at John Donovan’s post or SXSW recap for more details about AirPing, Mokiico, Round Trip and the other brilliant apps that developers created in a weekend.

Have you ever attended a hackathon? What did you learn from it? What does your business do to ignite innovation?

Imagine mobile apps that use flight schedules, loyalty programs, upcoming trips, weather info, passenger location, membership status, social feed, flight updates, car rental and hotel information to handle all the moving targets travelers are constantly trying to hit. What new possibilities for applications might emerge to simplify travel for passengers, and to create new revenue opportunities for travel and hospitality businesses?

Enterprise developers will have a chance to consider the possibilities during the AT&T and American Airlines Travel Hackathon (“Travel Hack”), where they will have access to the AT&T Location Information Services (LIS) Hybrid beta API and the American Airlines TravelAPI for the first time. Travel Hack is a 32-hour hackathon set to lift off during South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive, Austin’s annual creativity-fest for technology and things digital, on March 9-10, 2013.

Innovative uses for hyper-local data

To make your apps more effective at the hyper-local level where travelers spend most of their time — inside the airports, hotels, and convention centers – the LIS hybrid beta API combines WiFi with cellular GPS technologies to allow navigation both inside and outdoors to provide the best available device location. This cross-carrier API can be used across the popular mobile platforms.

API Functionality includes:

• Location: Request- and lookup-APIs supporting mobile devices, landline phones, geocoding/reverse geocoding and extended address
• Geo-fencing – APIs allow users to create and manage an unlimited number of geo-fences, defined as circles, complex polygons, point-radius and address-radius
• Proximity – APIs enable proximity as a unique capability to triggering in three dimensions rather than typical latitude-/longitude-based offerings — for example, proximity triggering with Wi-Fi access points.
• Messaging – Fully integrated messaging APIs can be used for SMS and in-app IP messaging
• Privacy – APIs for privacy and opt-in/opt-out management

Improving the travel experience

American Airlines is opening up APIs during TravelHack that give developers access to its coveted AAdvantage® data and flight information. Hoping to revolutionize the way travel data is used, American Airlines is the first major airline to make its proprietary data available to developers, giving them an opportunity to build new types of apps designed to improve the customer experience.

Take off at Travel Hack

Sound like fun? Register here to be among the first to program with these unreleased APIs for a chance at cash and other prizes. There’s no predicting what developers will come up with. Keep an eye on this blog for more updates, and visit our Enterprise Toolbox for more of the tools, APIs and sample code enterprise developers use to mobilize their organizations.

If yours is a travel and hospitality industry business, what kinds of apps would you like to see? As a traveler, do you have a wish list for apps and solutions that could make your life easier? Let us know in comments

Scorcioni poured his twin careers in neuroscience and software engineering into the AT&T and Axeda M2M Challenges at the recent Summit Hackathon. The resulting Good Times app performs inbound filtering to let callers know, based on the mobile user’s current mental state, whether or not it’s a good time to talk.

There’s really an App for That?

Scorcioni was among the first 100 developers to arrive at the two-day Hackathon on Saturday morning, January 5, which entitled him to a free pair of Necomimi Brainwave Cat Ears from NeuroSky that wiggle when you’re interested in something and fold down when you’re relaxed.

To most, it looked like the kind of quirky gadget you’d expect to see at a hackathon, but Scorcioni looked at it through his background in neuroscience and saw it for what it is: a mobile electroencephalogram (EEG).

The Necomimi electrode on the forehead picks up electrical signals from your brain and transmits them by wire. A microcontroller discards electrical noise and uses NeuroSky’s algorithms to interpret the brainwave data, then translates your mental state – relaxed, focused, both, neither – and sends it to servomotors that rotate the ears like a cat’s ears. Scorcioni started getting the idea to do something fun with the signal from the electrode.

“I thought about how addicted I’m becoming to my smartphone,” he explained, “and how much easier it would be to focus on a project – reading an article, painting a picture, writing software – if my phone were smart enough to know when I’m ‘in the zone’ and hold my calls automatically. Like a personal assistant who knows when it’s a ‘Good Time’ to reach me.”

Seeding an idea in fertile ground at the hackathon

At the hackathon, Scorcioni began fitting his concept to all the free resources at his disposal to bring his vision to life:

• Necomimi Brainwave Cat Ears: He tapped into the cable going from the microcontroller to one of the ears, and sent the person’s mental state to the Arduino board. When the Necomimi ears droop, the person wearing them is relaxed, signaling that it’s a good time take a phone call; all other times are not.
• Arduino Leonardo board with 3G shield: He saw an opportunity to tinker with 3G without worrying about SIMs and data plans.
• AT&T M2M Application Platform powered by Axeda:  He moved his data onto the Arduino board and uploaded it onto an M2M platform to work on.
• AT&T Call Management API:  He determined that telling this API it was not a good time to talk would make it hold the call and play a message to the caller.
• Experts, experts, experts: He mined the gold at the hackathon – human expertise. “With almost any technology, platform or API you wanted to use, the person who developed it was in the room for consultation,” Scorcioni explained.

Good Times is born – Are you ready to talk?

By Sunday, Scorcioni had mapped out Good Times, as shown in the accompanying diagram.

The resulting app automatically screens each call based on your mental state. If you’re not relaxed, your phone will not even ring because the AT&T Call Management API intercepts the call before it reaches your cell phone. The API works on the call in the cloud, before the call goes to the 3G link to your cell phone.

Making Good Times great

As a contestant in the M2M Challenge of the Hackathon, Scorcioni won third place – and went on to take home the grand prize of $30,000 at the Developer Summit. But Scorcioni sees additional potential in the AT&T Call Management API.

“How many things can we do when we have the ability to intercept a call?” he asks. “Good Times is a tiny step toward pausing the distractions from email, text and phone calls that keep us from focusing.”

It’s a cool M2M hack, too.

What can you do with tools like these? What would you like to try? Have a look at all the tools on the Links & Resources tab in the Enterprise Toolbox. or join us at our next Hackathon happening March 9-10 at SXSW. We’ll be co-hosting a travel/location-based challenge with American Airlines.

That’s how we came up with the idea of our Showcase Business Scenario and Solution to illustrate the real-world problems that enterprise developers face, plus the platforms, APIs and resources they can use to deal with those challenges. Here is what’s in the Showcase, which we unveiled in the Enterprise Track at the 2013 AT&T Developer Summit in Las Vegas:

• Video: a six-minute, black-and-white-retro video designed around a series of obstacles enterprises confront in trying to detect and troubleshoot a problem remotely and automatically
• Software solution: a reference application mashup in a GitHub repository for calling the APIs and platforms we demonstrate in the video, ready for enterprise developers to adapt to their own needs
• Website: our Enterprise Toolbox with walkthroughs, documentation and links to presentations by the experts who created these platforms and APIs

It’s a lot to get across, but I think the Showcase does a good job of it.

A series of enterprise problems

In fact, we structured the entire enterprise track at the Developer Summit around this showcase because it highlights the APIs and platforms that enterprise developers have asked us for.

In our first session of the track, “A One-Stop Shop for Mobilizing the Enterprise,” Chris Hill of Advanced Solutions described the market for development tools, and then played the Showcase Business Scenario video. Next, Larry Wall of Mobility Solutions Services went through the diagrams, screenshots and code snippets behind the software solution we depicted in the video.

Here are a few of the enterprise scenarios and problems we built into the video. (The numbered steps are tied to the architecture diagram):

• A managed asset fails

It could be a computer, a mobile device, a hospital’s x-ray machine, a vehicle navigation system or a substation on the electric grid. The AT&T M2M Application Platform Powered by Axeda monitors connected assets constantly (1), notifies the enterprise of the failure, and can even attempt to correct the problem remotely.

• Generate a work order

The M2M Platform invokes (2) a custom object written in Groovy script to relay an alarm (3) to AT&T Platform as a Service (PaaS). A custom application determines which technicians are best suited – availability, equipment, experience – to repair the asset, then it generates a work order (4,5,6).

• Locate a technician who can repair it

PaaS calls the AT&T Location Information Services (LIS) API to poll the mobile phones of qualified technicians and find the one closest to the failed asset (7). LIS can use cell ID for coarse accuracy or Assisted GPS for high accuracy.

• Send the work order

PaaS uses the AT&T Global Smart Messaging Suite (GSMS) to deliver the work order and notification to the technician’s phone on virtually any carrier (8).

• Technician switches phone from personal to work mode

The technician sees the notification and uses AT&T Toggle to enter a secure work environment on his personal smartphone. He accepts the work order and receives a complete diagnosis of the problem, a list of necessary parts, and a map with turn-by-turn directions to the site of the failed machine.

• Support the technician remotely

Upon arrival, the technician realizes that he needs another pair of eyes on the problem. He phones the main office, transfers the video call from his phone to his tablet using the Call Control API, then initiates a Web Real-Time Communications call to show his colleague what he sees on the failed asset.

• Color it fixed

Once he has repaired the asset, the technician closes the work order in PaaS (8). The AT&T M2M Application Platform Powered by Axeda, still monitoring the asset (1), resets the alarm and returns it to normal state.

Have a look at the video to see how we pulled all of these into our Showcase Business Scenario.

We spent the rest of the Enterprise track in deep-dive sessions around the technologies and products in the Showcase. The experts walked through many of the AT&T Advanced Mobility Solutions including M2M, GSMS, LIS, WebRTC, cloud, Toggle, and Mobile Application Development. Have a look through the presentations (on the Enterprise Sessions tab) for ideas, code snippets and new ways to develop apps around your mobile devices, services and platforms.

Your turn

How many of the enterprise problems from the Showcase are you trying to solve in your own company? Want to try your hand at solving them?

We pulled the functionality from the Showcase Business Scenario video into a reference application mashup and put it on GitHub. Qualified enterprise developers can try GSMS and LIS APIs at no cost in our Product Trial Environment sandbox so you can put them together and see how they can work in your mobility applications. You’ll find the products from the Showcase under Links & Resources in the Enterprise Toolbox.

We’re trying to make it as easy as possible for you to develop enterprise applications, and we think this Showcase is a good first step. Does it help you? What else do you need? Let me know in the comments below.

M2M Challenge at the AT&T Summit Hackathon

A two-day Hackathon was held for all developers, featuring a special M2M Challenge with Arduino boards, sensors, and the AT&T M2M Application Platform powered by Axeda. About 500 developers in 32 teams checked out the M2M kits and set about building their projects. By the end of the M2M Challenge, nine teams had completed their applications using the M2M Kits and AT&T platform, and delivered presentations to compete for prizes.

You can always tell what goes into a hackathon, but you can never guess what’s going to come out. Our judges awarded $10,000 cash prizes to the top three entries:

• First prize: M2M Rocket by John Carroll. Allows an iPhone app to remotely aim and launch a rocket.
• Second prize: Canary by Adam Sager. A connected and social home safety system.
• Third prize: Good Times by Ruggero Scorcioni. Detects from the brain state whether the user is currently busy, then accepts incoming phone calls or rolls them to voice mail accordingly. See the interview with Johnny Diggz.

All three were remarkable use cases of M2M, and the judges weren’t the only ones impressed: Good Times went on to win the $30,000 grand prize at the 2013 AT&T Live Fast Pitch competition held during the DevSummit keynote on Monday morning. (Thirty grand for a weekend’s work? Not bad.)

The Hackathon and M2M Challenge were pretty big news, getting ink in eWeek, Computerworld, TechWeek Europe, Neurogadget and other trade publications.

Showcase Video

Have a peek at the short video we created that combines a dozen AT&T Advanced Mobility Solutions. The video is based on a reference application we’ve made available on GitHub that uses four of the products in the Showcase video: AT&T Location Information Services, AT&T Global Smart Messaging Services, AT&T Platform as a Service, and AT&T M2M Application Platform Powered by Axeda.

Enterprise Sessions

When was the last time you attended a technology conference in a movie theatre? We filled our all-day Enterprise Track in theater 1 of the Palms Casino Resort with deep-dive sessions into the APIs and code from the Showcase Business Scenario: “One-Stop Shop for Mobilizing the Enterprise,” “M2M and mHealth,” “The Power of Mobile Identity with Messaging, Location, and Web-browser Real Time Communications,” “Solving the Enterprise Mobility Puzzle” and “Cloud Services to Fit Your Business: Compute, Storage, and Platform as Services.” If you missed the sessions or want to see them again, have a look through the presentations we’ve posted at EnterpriseToolbox.com.

On stage were the experts from AT&T who design, manage and work on our mobility products, describing the AT&T APIs, platforms and technologies featured in the Showcase Business Scenario. For our Connected Devices Panel moderated by Eric Krauss, our partners Axeda and Jasper joined us for audience Q&A.

Products and Resources

Our Advanced Mobility Solutions were highlighted in the Summit, and the exhibit hall was staffed with experts to describe and demonstrate them. We’ve also created links to the enterprise products featured at the Summit so you can find out more about them.

You’ll see lots more enterprise content from us in the coming months, so stay tuned. We want you to be the go-to person in your company on enterprise mobility, so what do you need from us to do your job better? Let me know in the comments below.

Businesses are building out their back ends so that all the gears of mobility mesh smoothly through better user experiences and better use of the mountains of data that come from mobility.

In fact, it’s getting hard not to be involved in M2M, and your next chance to learn more about it will be at the 2013 AT&T Developer Summit, January 5-7, 2013, at the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas.

I’m working on the Enterprise track for the conference, and there’s plenty of M2M in the schedule.

M2M Challenge at the AT&T Summit Hackathon

The weekend of January 5-6 is devoted to the Summit Hackathon, including a challenge for M2M application development. For two whole days, enterprise developers will have the run of Arduino boards, sensors, 3G network and the AT&T M2M Application Platform powered by Axeda.  You can win $10,000 in prize money for the best M2M application. Registration for the Hackathon is free, so whether you’re a veteran or newbie, this is the best deal on an M2M playground you’ll see for a long time.

Conference Sessions

On Monday, January 7, you’ll find several sessions with an M2M flavor:

• In “AT&T – A One-Stop-Shop for Mobilizing the Enterprise,” Chris Hill, senior vice president of Advanced Solutions, describes where you and your company can go with enterprise mobile technologies. Then Larry Wall, executive director of AT&T Mobility Solution Services, walks you through a video detailing a real-world mashup of four enterprise mobility services including M2M.
• M2M and mHealth Session examines the AT&T M2M Application Platform powered by Axeda and the AT&T mHealth Platform. Eric Krauss, director of M2M Product Management for AT&T Advanced Mobility Solutions, will explain how to apply the M2M Platform to a wide variety of industries. AT&T’s mHealth Platform will be covered by Ryan McQuaid, head of strategy and business development. Ryan will give an overview of challenges in this space, the importance of the user experience, as well as an application demonstration.

At our Connected Devices Panel we’re pooling the talents and insights of four M2M experts:

• Kevin Holbrook from Axeda, Macario Namie from Jasper Wireless, along with Eric Krauss and Larry Wall from AT&T will discuss the kinds of problems M2M can solve and the things you need to make it work.

Sponsor and AT&T Expo

Also on Monday in the expo area, you’ll be able to see demos of our partners’ products, including AT&T’s M2M technologies for the enterprise. From 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. we’ll have experts on hand to discuss details about the business scenario video and mashup that is showcased in the first session of the Enterprise Track. The will also review other M2M sessions going on throughout the day. Get your questions answered and build connections to the people who work around M2M all the time.

And right after the summit, stick around for CES, where you’ll have even more opportunities to learn about connected cars, mobile health, and other smart devices.

Kick off your 2013 by getting your fill of M2M, and take all this expertise back to the office with you. It’s your chance to get immersed in the software and hardware that are going to make waves for a long time to come.

How is M2M affecting your job? Let us know in the comments below.

1. Three days devoted to developers. Saturday and Sunday, January 5 and 6, are Hackathon days, including an M2M Challenge that will get your enterprise-development imagination going. On Monday, January 7, we’ll have seven different conference tracks running all day long, including one exclusively for enterprise development. We’re expecting over 2,000 developers at this, our seventh annual Developer Summit, and we want you and your team to be among them.

2. Experts, experts, experts. This is an all-hands show, so the managers, directors, vice presidents, executives, and technical leads from the enterprise side of AT&T Advanced Mobility Solutions will be there to present what they know and find out what you want next. I don’t think there’s a more concentrated, efficient way to get solid technical answers and business-improving solutions that you can take back to the office with you.

3. Enterprise track. After the keynote, you’ll be able to attend enterprise-focused sessions all day. We’ll start the track with a video and code crawl through a real-world enterprise mashup of several AT&T services, APIs and platforms. Once your wheels are turning, you can attend sessions on enterprise trends, M2M, cross-carrier messaging, mHealth, cloud-based services and more.

4. Secret weapons. What’s keeping you up at night? Developing enterprise apps? Putting your business in the cloud? Communicating securely with your workforce? Tracking and managing your assets and employees? Mobilizing your workforce? We’ve already done a lot of the heavy lifting for you, so come and learn about AT&T Advanced Mobility Solutions. Then come see our demos in the exhibit area and talk to the experts about how you can take advantage of these technologies.

5. M2M Challenge at the AT&T Summit Hackathon – We’re hosting a challenge in the AT&T Summit Hackathon for M2M application development, complete with Arduino boards, sensors, 3G network, and AT&T M2M Application platform powered by Axeda.  You can win $10,000 in prize money for the best M2M application. It is free to register for the Hackathon, so whether you’re a veteran or newbie, this is the best deal on an M2M playground you’ll see for a long time.

 6. All of this for $150. That’s right – just $150 for all the connecting, networking, hacking, learning, asking, and what-if-ing you can fit in.

7. And a little bit of fun, too. What kind of developer conference would this be without some kicks? After the sessions on Monday, January 7, join our platinum sponsors at two of the newest clubs in the Palms for food and refreshment, then head to the Rain nightclub for a show by The Killers.

Bring your toughest questions, your biggest ideas, your thorniest technical problems, and your wildest use cases. I will be introducing all of the sessions on the Enterprise track, so come find me and say hello. My job is to find out what you need to build solid enterprise solutions.

Quick details:

What: 2013 AT&T Developer Summit

Where: Palms Casino Resort, Las Vegas

When: Saturday through Monday, January 5-7, 2013. Hackathon Saturday and Sunday, Conference on Monday (keynotes, sessions, exhibit area, entertainment, networking).

How much: $150

Why: To get the inside track on enterprise app development

Stay tuned for more posts about specific sessions in the enterprise track. Meanwhile, what do you want out of the 2013 AT&T Developer Summit? Send me your questions and ideas in the comments below.

If you’re an enterprise developer, you want Maureen Backe in your corner. She has done partner and business development with enterprises all across the mobile landscape, and built developer alliances in mobile, e-commerce and location services.

On her path to AT&T, Maureen has worked at TomTom/TeleAtlas, SS8 Networks, Leap Wireless, and Novatel Wireless. As a digital marketing consultant she counted Google, Nextel International, Toyota, Kaiser Permanente, Candle Software and Lucent among her clients.

Steeped in the technology- and business-culture of both coasts, Maureen has taught and developed Internet technology classes at University of California, Los Angeles. In addition to holding a Masters of Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California, an MBA from Drexel University in Philadelphia, and a Bachelor of Engineering from Villanova University in Pennsylvania.

Maureen loves to travel and has visited 6 of the 7 continents. Other hobbies include swimming, kayaking, tennis, and gardening.  She is active and volunteers her time in professional organizations as co-chair for Location-Based Services Special Interest Group at CommNexus and as Entrepreneur in Residence at University of California San Diego Connect advising technology startups on marketing strategies.