Chris Padilla, Director of Industry Marketing at AT&T Interactive, gives a short recap of this week’s AT&T DevSummit.
I just got back from Las Vegas and can honestly say the 2010 AT&T Developer Summit was a blast! The AT&T Developer Summit is an annual one day event hosted by the AT&T Developer Program. This year the DevSummit was on January 6 and held at the Palms Casino and Resort, one day before the International CES show. It was a full day event giving attendees access to information about recent AT&T technology announcements and tools for developing applications on the AT&T Network and mobile devices.
Highlights from this year’s DevSummit include:
Among others, keynotes and remarks by; Ralph De La Vega, president and CEO of AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets, and Dr. Paul Jacobs, chairman and CEO of Qualcomm.
AT&T Interactive’s VP of Mobile Engineering Srinivas Mandyam giving a presentation on “Creating Apps with Plusmo”, and explaining how the Plusmo acquisition will benefit the AT&T Developer Program.
AT&T Interactive’s SVP and GM of Mobile Krishna Vedati sitting on an Executive Panel, answering questions from the audience.
Late night “Code Camp” at Ghostbar, where developers coded and ran demos with the glow of the Las Vegas Strip in the background.
Calling All Mobile App Developers The Widget Beta Program was also announced this year at the DevSummit. The AT&T Developer Program is looking for 50 developers who want to create innovative widgets using technology from Plusmo, a recent AT&T acquisition. If your idea is selected for the program, you’ll receive development support, access to new technology and more. Go to developer.att.com/widgetbeta for more information and to sign-up.
More detailed information on the event will follow, so stay tuned.
AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) today announced the acquisition of privately-held Plusmo, Inc., a leading provider of cross-platform mobile application solutions, bringing to AT&T an open standards technology that will simplify mobile application development, accelerate innovation and deliver a better application experience for consumers. Read More
We’ve released version 2.2 of our YPmobile iPhone application available now in the App Store (download here). With this version, we integrated access to our thousands of video profiles – which if you think about it – is a great fit for iPhone users (Nielsen recently reported that iPhone users are six times more likely to watch video from their device vs. other wireless users). We’ve also extended Pay Per Call® ads to our updated version of the iPhone app. Another great feature that adds value for advertisers while maintaining a positive user experience.
As consumers we’re relying more heavily on mobile devices for finding a great local business than ever before. Research suggests that finding local information ranks 3rd, as the most popular data consumption category after personal email and ringtones.
With YPmobile we’re making it easier to discover trusted local businesses and events:
Search or browse for local businesses
View businesses in map view
See aggregated business reviews
Search or browse for local events
See advertiser videos – get the experience of the place (we got thousands… more coming..)
Browse by Categories or Popular Businesses
Save Favorites
Make Plans & Share with friends
The ATTi team involved in making it happen has been working hard on this and many more Mobile Local Apps – Let us know what you think – and download it today!
Our first-generation mobile search algorithms often use simple “expanding radius searches” around specific points. Here’s what happens: If you were to conduct a search for pizza in Chicago, IL, we would search within a 5-mile-wide circle around a central point in Chicago for businesses related to pizza. If no results are found we would expand the radius by an additional 5 miles, until we find results or reach the maximum search radius of 20 miles. The same goes for ZIP codes, neighborhoods and street addresses.
The problem is that for some cities (not so much for ZIP codes and neighborhoods), this simple approach can sometimes omit businesses that actually fall within the city, but don’t fall within the circle we’ve drawn on the map. This is especially perplexing for users who search for a business that they know is in a certain city, only to discover that they can’t find it using one of our mobile apps.
A simple improvement to this algorithm is to combine the basic idea of a radius search with a search for businesses with addresses that match the city name. We call this search algorithm “Box+ search”. We expect this new dual approach to provide more accurate search results than the “expanding radius search”. To validate this we have set up a page where you can see the results of the two approaches side by side. You can see the difference in search results by looking at the following links, or try ‘Box+ Search” search with your own terms and location:
Note: For uninteresting technical reasons, the search actually finds matching businesses using a box, rather than a circle, along with the name of the city, neighborhood or zip code.
The blue pins are businesses that were only returned in the “expanding radius search”. The red pins are businesses returned with “Box+ search”. The green pins represent listings that were returned by both search algorithms.
The red box shows the default area that was searched for Box+, while the blue circle shows the expanded radius search area.
* This result is interesting because it shows how a Box+ Search returns accurate results i.e. business that are “Day Spas” in “Malibu, CA”, where as the radius search returns businesses in similar categories but closer to the center of the specified search area.
