AT&T’s quest to attract developers (and make you hate it less) is off to a strong start in 2013.

Today at AT&T’s Developer Summit Keynote, held alongside CES in Las Vegas, the carrier announced three new platforms to show its commitment to new technologies: Digital Life, a nationwide home security and automation service; Mobile Payments; and Connected Car. To give an idea of what’s possible with smarter cars, AT&T showed a video that featured a car with a huge touchscreen and a life-like voice.

The three platforms aren’t anything new for the tech industry, but by announcing its support, AT&T is placing a very public bet on the future. And of course, it helps that all of these platforms will be intimately tied to its mobile network.

Before diving into the above platforms, AT&T chief technology officer David Christopher discussed a few of the telecom giant’s new API solutions. AT&T is working on a new advertising API that will give 80 percent of revenue to developers, as well as a Call Management API.

Digital Life will launch in eight markets in March. The home security aspect will be monitored 24/7 by call centers in Atlanta and Dallas.

“This market is completely unpenetrated,” said Glenn Lurie, the president of emerging enterprises for AT&T. He pointed out that less than 20 percent of U.S. homes had some sort of home security, even though AT&T’s own research found that many more consumers wanted it. Mostly, AT&T found that consumers wanted more features and value out of home security.

Digital Life is more than just home security for AT&T. It also provides the capability to control just about everything in your home. You can use it to set the temperature and energy consumption in your home while you’re out. It can send you a notification if you have a water leak, and it will even be able to completely shut off the water. AT&T has built apps for every mobile platform, as well as HTML 5.

“It gives you control of your home again anyplace, anytime you want it,” Lurie said.

Looks like last night’s Netflix outages didn’t happen just because too many of us were escaping our families in the warm, familiar glow of bad TV shows. It’s Amazon’s fault. Specifically, Amazon Web Services, and more specifically yet, EC2.

UPDATE, 12:15 p.m. Pacific: Services have been restored. You may go back to avoiding your family and watching bad TV shows.

EC2 stands for Elastic Compute Cloud; it’s Amazon’s service for pay-as-you-go, (ostensibly) scalable cloud computing. A huge swath of big, cool apps use EC2, so saying “EC2 is down!” is like saying, “Depending on geographies, half the Internet you actually care about is down!”

The last time we saw EC2 take a big ol’ swandive was back in October. Yes, just two months ago, Amazon managed to flatline a bunch of services, like Flipboard, Airbnb, and Reddit.

If you take a look at the AWS health dashboard, you’ll see this morning that some services (elastic load balancing, Elastic Beanstalk) are still experiencing issues in North America.

For its part, Heroku (which platform-as-a-service also supports a huge swath of the Internet you care about) is also having issues, including HTTP errors and ssl:endpoint unavailability. In other words, if you’re using Heroku for https://, your site might be down. Or it might not serve pages and pictures correctly. Or it might be fine. Just depends.

There’s a lesson in here. For normal people who don’t work at Netflix or AWS or Heroku or Pinterest and who also celebrate Christmas, the lesson is get off your iPhone and go hang out with your family. They won’t be around forever.

The lesson for devs not employed at Heroku or AWS: Don’t put all your eggs in the exact same basket as everyone else on the Internet.

The lesson for AWS and Heroku employees is, much like ER doctors or plumbers, don’t count on a holiday.

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