This year’s Open Developer Conference, the 10th annual such event, was buzzing with activities and news. If you weren’t there, you missed a great three days of non-stop activity, from coding and breakout sessions to 4G and M2M demos, discussions and collaborations, and even some words of encouragement from Dan Hesse, Sprint CEO.

Hesse set the stage from the October 26-28 ODC by emphasizing Sprint’s commitment to developers and giving them the first look at several key news announcements, regarding some industry-leading innovations, new partners, and other advancements that demonstrate how Sprint is delivering on its promises to promote development.

Mobile apps are a huge growth area, with app downloads growing from the seven billion logged in 2009 to an anticipated 50 billion in 2012 – sevenfold growth in just three years. Everyone, from developers to customers to Sprint itself, stands to benefit from this tidal wave of consumer enthusiasm, and that realization infused this year’s ODC with a sense of urgency and anticipation.

So much happened at the ODC that we’re going to break it up into separate posts for your reading convenience. We’ll start, though, with the unveiling of the Sprint Services Framework, an enhancement to the Sprint Application Developer website (check it out at http://developer.sprint.com/sprintapis).

What the Framework does is provide a single Web 2.0 interface that developers use to access APIs directly from Sprint. These offer seamless capabilities across virtually all Sprint devices, from mobile handsets to embedded devices to operating systems and development environments.

We’ll tell you more in the next post.