Next week at the CTIA’s conference in San Francisco, John Donovan, AT&T’s Chief Technology plans to announce that it will open new facilities in Palo Alto, CA; Plano, TX; and Tel Aviv, Israel which will serve as a venue for mobile application developers to pitch their latest wares. In press reports like this, Donovan called the program “speed dating with apps developers,” which gives it all the aura of a Demo or Disrupt conference. It also has some of the aspects of the wireless applications developer contests that AT&T has sponsored for a couple years through its devCentral Program.

The way that AT&T is working with the venture community (and vice versa) is what is bound to attract attention. According to the report in Bloomberg/BusienssWeek both Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers will be in attendance, prepared to invest in promising application developers. AT&T does not plan to take an equity position in any contestant, but plans to benefit from their delivery of apps that further popularize devices that run Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android. Donovan cited the figures that Gartner issued last December, forecasting $6.7 billion to be spent on wireless applications in 2010. Greg Sterling discussed the validity of this assessment here.

The reality TV show, “Who Wants to be a Wireless App Developer?” cannot be far behind.

Categories: Articles

Tags: AT&T, Recombinant Communications, Wireless Applications