AT&T Developer Summit and Hackathon

I was in Las Vegas for the AT&T Dev Summit and Hackathon this past weekend. It was actually the first time I’ve traveled away from home to a hackathon. That says quite a bit about the excitement of the hackathon.

In the Sin City that never sleeps, a 24 hour hackathon didn’t feel out of place, except that it wasn’t in Silicon Valley, our tech-savvy home that seems to always have a hackathon. With all the food, soda, and toys you could handle, it was almost a sleepless weekend of hacking.

Hackers were introduced to AT&T’s M2X cloud data storage service which was super easy to start working with given the SDKs available in a number of languages.

Sponsors that included FitBit, Pebble, Intel, Netgear, and Qualcomm provided real hardware that was easy to integrate into a project. With so many toys, ideas became real concepts, not just apps. AT&T had a swag room that had quite a few toys they gave out to developers to work with during the weekend.

There were some interesting projects that teams presented in the wearable and mobile tracks, two separate tracks with first place prizes of $25,000 each. There were a number of sponsor APIs worth $10,000 a piece. Not bad for gambling in Las Vegas.

One of the eye catching hacks in the wearable category was Glass Prompter, a teleprompter for Google Glass. This one was notable because of the simplicity yet convenience it offered. On the Glass display, the wearer is shown text they read aloud, similar to a teleprompter. As the explorer reads aloud, the audio is translated into text and is used to automatically scroll the text, changing the color of text that has been read.

There were several public safety hacks that included detecting when a person has fallen and another that alerts nearby officers the whereabouts of fellow officers.

Ending the wearable track, SafeNecklace kept track of a school group of children using necklaces with the Qualcomm Gimbal beacon. When a child wanders off, an audible alert is played.

There were 111 teams who signed up to pitch. The wearable track ended at five, three hours after the first team presented and the mobile track took another two and a half hours to demo.

During the demos, two artists drew on large boards behind the stage.

Self Control

My team presented Self Control, a cloud of connected devices that helps you to live a healthier lifestyle. Our app took the data from FitBit to understand if you’re sleep deprived and determine if your diet can be adjusted to help you sleep better.

With your refrigerator also being connected to the Self Control cloud, we suggest what you should eat and what you should pick up while at the closest grocery store.

I had a chance to play around with the Philips Hue, which lets you turn light bulbs on and to control the light through the internet. Each connected light bulb is controlled by the Hue. Using a very simple API, a developer can set the saturation, brightness, color, and other attributes for each connected light bulb. It might sound too trivial to be entertaining, but the more light bulbs you have to play with, the more interesting concepts you can come up with.

Self Control also uses your habits from wearable devices to know when to adjust the lighting so you can ease into getting ready for bed. As bedtime approaches, lights will dim and change into a soft color that relaxes your mind and body for a better night’s sleep.

We ran out of time, given only 90 seconds, but it was still fun being on stage in front of hundreds of people.

Summit

The Developer Summit on Monday started with a keynote. AT&T announced Sponsored Data, where the data you use isn’t counted against your data plan.

AT&T also introduced AT&T Drive for the vehicle.

The keynote also showed a video that featured three teams who have won past AT&T hackathons. Sleek-geek was one of the teams.

Later in the morning I was part of the panel during the Lessons from Hackathons: Rapid Prototyping for Mobile Apps session. The first part of the session showed responses from hackers that AT&T surveyed about their hackathon experience. Factors included what languages developers use, how they come with teams or recruit specific roles, and what tricks work best in a short amount of time.

Even being a serial hacker, I found new tips and found myself nodding in agreement with a lot of those tips shown.

At the Sponsor Expo, AT&T had a photobooth for people to take crazy photos and for a chance to win hardware and giftcards.

Macklemore and Ryan Lewis Concert

Finishing off the Developer Summit, AT&T hosted a concert with Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. The crowd of developers had a really good time and the music was an awesome way to end an entertaining weekend in Vegas.