Once again, Las Vegas offered a wealth of interesting experiences and information to those that  attended the 8th annual AT&T Developer Summit at the Palms Casino Resort on January 5-7. Here’s a quick recap of what went on, with links so you can follow up:

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.