Local leaders in mobility attended the Mobile Monday Seattle meet-up this week to discuss hot topics ranging from APIs, HTML 5, and roadmaps and mobile strategies for companies like: AT&T, Microsoft, Red Foundry, Apptentive and ProgrammableWeb.

HTML5 is positioned to be the #3 development platform in 2013, just behind iOS and Android.

The AT&T Developer Program and Adobe PhoneGap have collaborated to enable AT&T APIs to be accessible as a plugin through the PhoneGap platform to help you quickly bring robust PhoneGap mobile applications to market. The AT&T Plugin significantly reduces the complexity of building applications that use the AT&T API Platform.

Now that many of the major mobile tech bloggers have made their mobile predictions for 2013, we’ve decided to look some of the most popular trends that everyone seems to be talking about in terms of opportunity for developers.

Here they are in no particular order:

NFC and Mobile Payments

Probably the most popular prediction made by ReadWrite, Inmobi, Scandit, Techbeat, and Business Insider is that mobile payments will increase in 2013. Many are skeptical about the market exploding in 2013, but they believe progress will be made and standards based on NFC such as Isis will be adopted.

Forecasts from eMarketer show that mobile payments are set to explode in the US with a 234% increase in 2013. CNET took a much more cynical view stating that “mobile payments continue to be hampered by rival groups all with their own agendas, and some don't even feel it really addresses any real problems.” Mobile payments aren’t the only use of NFC though; as NFC becomes more popular developers have a huge opportunity to find creative uses for it.

On October 8^th, in collaboration with Adobe, Facebook, Google, HP, Microsoft, Mozilla, Nokia, Opera, and others, the W3C announced the alpha release of Web Platform Docs.

Want to make sure your HTML5 games and apps are going to work on smartphone browsers? Want to know the level of HTML5 support in Smartphone browsers?  Try Ringmark, a browser test suite that is available at http://rng.io.

As many of you already know, HTML5 is quickly becoming the go-to programming language for mobile apps. Earlier this month our friends over at Intel wrote about how HTML5 is changing the development game and how your app’s performance is strictly dependent on the browser that’s hosting it. The article explains that for developers, the problem isn’t necessarily learning HTML5, but understanding which browsers support which functions.

Have you thought about making a mobile web gaming app? If you have, check out some of these new technogies like pubnub.com and weboolu.com that can help you accelerate your development as well present new interactive possiblities for you game!

Yesterday we sent out the June edition of the AT&T Developer Program Newsletter. If you're not yet a member of the AT&T Developer Program, join now and be sure to select the AT&T Developer Program Monthly Newsletter option!

If you're signed up, but didn’t get this month's newsletter, check your email preferences. Make sure the AT&T Developer Program Monthly Newsletter option is checked, and that the email address listed on your community profile is up to date.

Although HTML5 applications seem like they are always a few years out, that is not unusual for a standard.

Register today to join the AT&T Developer Program and Microsoft for this free webcast to learn how you can do cross-platform HTML5 based development targeting Windows Phone. HTML5 and Javascript are more and more used by developers who need and want to target multiple mobile platforms with a common code base. Open source framework such as Apache Cordova (previously known as PhoneGap) and jQueryMobile are fully supported on Windows Phone and this session will show you how to use the Cordova tools along with the recently released Metro theme for jQueryMobile to integrate your application into the Windows phone experience.

All attendees can enter to win an AT&T Windows Phone Smartphone. Winner will be notified via email after the Webcast.

Registration Required

Please Note: Registrations must be submitted at least 1 HOUR prior to scheduled event start time in order to be considered for approval.

When: Thursday, May 24th, 10:00-11:00 AM Pacific Time

If you've ever worried about making sure your new app or website was fully compliant with the latest browsers out there, worry no more. There are new boilerplate base templates that can take the worry about being compliant with the latest browsers. HTML5 Boilerplate and Twitter Bootstrap are two such projects to get you off the ground faster!

Want to find out more about what happened at the Miami Mobile App Hackathon? 

Register today for this free webcast on Thursday, April 26th about how optimized mobile JavaScript libraries give your HTML5 hybrid apps native performance, across platforms and enter to win an AT&T Smartphone!

Join us for this free webcast to learn how to get results for your hybrid application fast using the jqMobi framework. We will discuss how you can benefit from a small, lightweight JavaScript framework, and explore the jqMobi selector tools, the jqMobi User Interface, and the plug-ins available to extend the jqMobi framework.

All actual attendees can enter to win an AT&T Smartphone. The winner will be notified via email after the Webcast.

When: Thursday, April 26, 10:00—11:00 AM Pacific Time

It’s finally here! The Mozilla Foundation released BrowserQuest on March 28^th, a 2D adventure game built entirely on HTML5, Javascript and other Open Source languages. Unlike other HTML5-based games, which focus on social turn-based gaming, BrowserQuest is a massive multiplayer online (MMO) adventure game that is reminiscence of Nintendo’s Zelda or Pokémon franchises. While this browser game is a huge step forward in HTML5 mobile gaming development, challenges persist.

BrowserQuest uses the Websockets API  to allow users to chat within the browser by offering a full duplex communication channel operating through a single socket over the Web. This allows users to take full advantage of the game while generating far less network traffic. Due to the use of Websockets, the game currently only runs on Firefox for Android and Mobile Safari on mobile devices, and Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera (provided you enable WebSockets) full browsers.