AT&T, Facebook to host mobile app hackathon in two months

Facebook has announced it will be part of the AT&T Mobile Hackathon in Palo Alto on May 4, 2012. The event will be for developers interested in learning about the use Facebook Platform and Open Graph to build social mobile apps, 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 on Friday and runs through to Saturday evening. You'll have a full 24 hours of hacking to build an app worthy of the $20,000 prize. Registration is free: AT&T Mobile App Hackathon - Palo Alto.

Facebook has already held its own mobile hackathons and has scheduled more. Three Mobile Hack events have already taken place in the U.S. (Palo Alto, New York, and Boston). This month, Menlo Park plans to do the same in Europe (London on March 5, Stockholm on March 8, and Tel Aviv on March 13) and Asia (Singapore on March 19, Hong Kong on March 22, Seoul on March 27, and Tokyo on March 29).

Unlike Facebook's own mobile hack events, which teach developers about the Facebook Platform for Mobile, this one will have one big advantage. If you missed the news from last week, Facebook is looking to improve how mobile payments work. The company is working with operators around the world to minimize the number of steps needed to complete a transaction in mobile web apps (see the Bango partnership from last month). This will be automatically enabled where carriers support it when you integrate the Pay Dialog into your app. One of Facebook's partners is of course AT&T.

See also:

• Facebook: 60 million users access apps via mobile
• Facebook Platform on Mobile comes to Android
• Facebook Platform goes mobile, starting with Apple iOS
• Facebook launches HTML5 Resource Center
• Facebook: "We're going to become a mobile company"
• Steve Jobs: "I admire Mark Zuckerberg."