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Ralph De La Vega

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AT&T hints at family/data sharing plans on the horizon

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AT&T’s variant of the family data plan is on the horizon.

The company’s CEO of Mobile Business Ralph de la Vega told CNET on the sidelines of the CTIA Wireless trade show that the upcoming shared plan would allow consumers to buy one package of data to split among multiple devices, which is a forward-thinking step that could encourage tablet sales.

“I’m very comfortable with the plan that will be offered to our customers,” revealed de la Vega.

Just a few months ago, the executive seemed to doubt family plans due to IT, billing, and device subsidization issues. He even remarked his goal to “get it right”— instead of unveiling the strategy prematurely.


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AT&T unveils own APIs for carrier agnostic HTML5 web apps aimed at smartphones and tablets

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Image via The Verge

Carrier AT&T is holding its sixth annual Developer Summit at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas today, and President and CEO Ralph De La Vega addressed some 2,500 attendees from 33 different countries. “What’s good for developers is good for customers,” said La Vega while explaining why AT&T runs this developer summit.

Shortly, Chief Marketing Officer David Christopher took the stage to announce AT&T’s new API platform for HTML5 web applications meant to run across multiple devices and mobile operating systems, reminding that the web really is the ultimate app store. Interesting enough, Visual Voicemail for the iPhone (which turned 5-years-old today) was AT&T’s very first network API, so you could say Apple also helped revolutionize how carriers interoperate.

An impressive 85 percent of all smartphones will have HTML5 browsers by 2016, Christopher explained. The new API Catalog sports 130 individual APIs divided into 14 different categories — it is essentially a revamped U-Verse API catalog. The APIs enable a range of features, such as completely automated sign ups to use APIs in minutes, wrappers for Ruby, PHP and Java and tons of sample code in Github.

A storefront for web apps called the “App Center” will be available later this year (developers can sign up for a beta here). In short, this new platform is conceived from the ground up with HTML5 developers in mind and targets most cellular networks, not just AT&T’s…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP2iU04tb6w]

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