Summer is always an exciting time at the AT&T Foundry. It’s a time of year that we welcome a new group of interns to our innovation centers, and challenge them to be disruptive in their thinking and contributions. It’s definitely not your run-of-the-mill experience – fetching coffee and filing papers. It’s an opportunity to collaborate and coalesce with some of the most innovative minds at AT&T, all in effort to bring new ideas to life.
Charmander is a project that embodies the spirit of the Foundry’s mission to bring new ideas to life. Started last summer by Theodora Chu as an intern project at the AT&T Foundry in Palo Alto, CA, Charmander provides an easy-to-use open source environment to gain more insight into network and cloud infrastructure. Over time, we can improve the overall efficiency and utilization of our resources – but more importantly better meet our ever-growing data traffic demand.
Project Car Seat is another such example of an idea brought to life by a Foundry intern. Last summer, at the Plano, TX Foundry, Nancy Dominguez took the initiative to pitch Car Seat to the team, after becoming inspired to build something that could potentially save the lives of children locked in hot cars. In fact, we recently shared the latest iteration of Car Seat at last month’s Innovation Showcase in New York City. Our showcases are meant to give AT&T innovators the chance to share how we’re working to help customers mobilize their world in the future with projects that teams are working on today. It was an awesome turnout and resulted in some great coverage, including an article by TechnoBuffalo.
These are classic examples of how ideas – even from unconventional sources – can rapidly evolve at the AT&T Foundry. I’m very proud of the precedent these projects have set, and the great strides teams continue to make at all five AT&T Foundries. May this summer’s AT&T Foundry interns continue setting the bar on innovation, and pushing the envelope to change the world, one idea at a time.
