Facebook announced it will be part of the AT&T Mobile Hackathon in Palo Alto on May 4, 2012.
The event is meant for developers who are interested in learning about the use of Facebook Platform and Open Graph to build social apps for mobile, as well as learn about AT&T’s HTML5 SDKs, and how to use carrier billing to monetize them.
The event kicks off at 6:00 PM Friday through 6:00 PM Saturday. The event carries a prize of $20,000 for the best overall app and a special prize by Facebook for the best social app.
More details about the event can be found here.
Facebook has successfully held its own mobile hack events in the USA (Palo Alto, New York, and Boston), and has scheduled more. Three in Europe and another four in Asia, to be held in March.
Facebook has already partnered with several mobile operators to improve mobile payments, and in an effort to standardize HTML5 has formed a new community group at the W3C called Core Mobile Web Platform. Facebook is pushing to create a one-step payment system for carrier billing.
AT&T announced on Mnday that the HTC Status, a Blackberry-like smartphone with a dedicated Facebook share button, will arrive on July 17 with an attractive price tag of $49.99.
Targeted at the younger crowd, the HTC Status is expected to be a hit with teens who spends a lot of time on Facebook. The handset will be available in a variety of color options that include black, silver, pink, and blue. Best Buy will exclusively feature a mauve edition also.
The phone is powered by Android 2.3.3 (Gingerbread) and with its enhanced version of HTC Sense Interface it has deeper Facebook integration allowing you to easily post on walls, share images and videos, check into Facebook Places, share your latest find on the web – all with the press of a button.
Furthermore, HTC Status also features a chat widget that allows you to see all your online friends and start instant chats with as many friends as possible without any interruption even when you take a call, play a game, or browse the web. Moreover, whenever a Facebook friend calls, their latest status will be displayed along with their profile picture right on the call screen.
HTC Status is available for preorder for $50 with a two-year contract.
For more information or the detail specifications, visit AT&T’s website or the Facebook way.
AT&T announced that it had already fixed the problem that caused a mom and her two daughters to get into other people’s Facebook accounts using their mobile phones, earlier this month. The problem was, AT&T had a glitch in their infrastructure that connected the phones to the internet. This made it lose track of who owns which profile.
The mobile phone service provider said they added new security measures that will keep this incident from happening again. They also worked with Facebook to disable subscriber identification information that was used to automatically log-in. Now, to get into Facebook accounts, the site will only accept current cookies they placed or full login information.
Because this has already happened, there is a possibility that it can happen again. Fortunately, Chris Wysopal, co-founder of the security company, Veracode Inc., said, this problem will not happen to websites that use encryption because user’s browsers will have trouble decoding the encryption on the site that the user was not trying to get onto. Banking and e-commerce sites use encryption. Sadly, other sites do not. Web-based email and Facebook only use encryption when the user logs on but once within the site, the encryption is no longer used.
Bad things can happen on the internet whether it is because of the user’s carelessness or not. We cannot just depend on the security of sites. It is also important that we do our part and not upload sensitive information online if it can be helped.
