Have You Taken A Look At AT&T APis Lately?

Have you taken a moment and looked at the APIs AT&T is offering through their developer program lately? I think it is an interesting spread of API resources for a leading telco to offer, and is very telling about their strategy.

This is one thing I like about my API monitoring platform, is that I'm forced to dive deeper into companies that are ubiquitous in the space, and make sure I'm kep in tune with where they are actually going.

I thought AT&T's API catalog was interesting in its current state:

 

Advertising - Create a new revenue stream through the use of customized advertising. The Advertising API allows you to incorporate a simple, easy-to-use solution that supports revednue share-based monetization of your apps through the placement of paid advertising.
Call Management - Pick a virtual telephone number and add real time, cross-carrier voice, and SMS communications to your app.
Device Capabilities - Returns important information about a device—allowing you to customize your apps accordingly.
In-app Messaging - Drive further engagement with your customers by allowing them to share information with friends and family directly from within your app.
Location - Quickly and accurately pinpoint the location of an AT&T mobile device.
mHealth Platform - AT&T mHealth Solutions for healthcare combines mobility technologies, devices, connectivity, and apps to help minimize medical costs and deliver better patient outcomes.
MMS - Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) greatly enhances the power of your communications by moving beyond the text only capabilities of text based messaging.
Notary Management - Add the capability to digitally sign content or data payloads to your app.
Payment - Give your customers the convenience and security of having their in-app purchases charged directly to their AT&T bill.
SMS - Short Message Service (SMS) enables your application or service to reliably send and receive secure, targeted text messages and alerts to your AT&T mobility subscribers.
Speech Speech - Allow your customers to interact with your app using their voice. You send us audio. We send you text. It's that easy. 

Now with the option to customize our speech recognizer for your app. 

Plus, Text to Speech.
AT&T U-verse - Enable your app with the U-verse TV experience and allow U-verse TV customers to "connect" their world to yours via this cutting edge IPTV service.
WAP Push - Provide support to legacy device customers that have limited message content and formatting capabilities.

Some of the APIs they offer are pretty straightforward like MMS, SMS, Location and Speech.  But the TV, Healthcare, Notary and even advertising seem like they are from a different planet. Which is a signal in itself I think.

AT&T pops up on my radar a lot because of their presence at hackathons, and coverage in the blogosphere.  I'd like to make more time to dissect AT&T's approach to APIs from an outside perspective. I think there is a lot to learn from their strategy, both good and bad.  

Stay tuned...