With Valentine’s Day Single’s Awareness Day just around the corner, what better to hack on than an app to help people become a little less single? Check out my new creation Who Is Single? to get a quick overview of which of your Facebook friends are single. It automatically filters by the gender(s) you are interested in, and people who are interested in your gender. There’s a lot more potential, but at the moment it’s refreshingly simple. Check it out and let me know what you think!

Why was a native Atlantan like me in NYC this weekend for a hackathon? Because I love hackathons, I love travel, I had no plans this weekend, and I had some AirTran credits to fly for (nearly) free. So why not go explore a different city, meet awesome people, build something cool, and maybe win something?

So now as I’ve boarded my flight home, I’m thinking when can I do this again? I’ve exhausted all my AirTran credits, so there’s no more free flights in my near future. Maybe there’s some company that would be willing to sponsor me going to hackathons? In exchange for paying for my flights and maybe hotels, I could use their technology in various hackathons around the country, or even around the world. It would be great exposure for a company that has some awesome new technology, and I’d get to fulfill to my love of travel and my love of competition.

So who’s with me?

It’s obviously very early on and very cumbersome, but I have successfully got my new iPhone 4S to charge from my old Palm Pre’s Touchstone inductive charger. I may not be using WebOS anymore (sadly), but the spirit of my Pre lives on. My goal is to bundle this up in a nice package that can be easily added to an iPhone 4 or 4S, and look good doing it. I’ll post updates when I’m closer to that goal.

I created Call the Company using the nifty Twilio Client for this week’s Twlio competition. It makes it astonishingly simple to connect to a live human representative from most any company. No more spending ten minutes navigating phone menus just to be get caught in an endless loop of phone call chaos! Call recipes are created, rated, and sorted by the community, meaning that as companies’ phone systems change, the application will be able to keep up. I also threw in a bit of a social layer, so go ahead and “like” a phone call on Facebook or “tweet” it to Twitter, or just bookmark it the old-fashioned way for one-click calling.

Want to call Delta international reservations to check on that European vacation? How about talking with a Sprint account specialist to ask for a discount on your bill? So easy!

What’s next? While this competition focused mainly on the Twilio Client, I can see this being very useful as a phone call-based application as well. Do you have any thoughts or suggestions?

Meet a cool entrepreneur, investor, or tech person? Just ask for their twitter handle, text it to 203-403-NAME (203-403-6263), and instantly get a vcard for them that you can easily import into your phone or computer address book. It pulls a surprising amount of public and semi-public information from a variety of social and other sources. Some information that can be included: full name, company and title, email (occasionally), phone number (occasionally), home page url, home location (generally city-level), description, summary, Klout, photo, facebook profile link, and other social profile pages.

It’s easy! Just text an online handle/username from twitter or other service to 203-403-NAME (203-403-6263), and get back information instantly. You then just reply with your email address and it will send you a vcard file, ready to import into any phone or address book in just one click. The email method is required because of limitations in smartphone operating systems (the only way to import a vcard is via email). But don’t worry, the service remembers your email so future lookups are even faster.

This was created for a Twilio and InfoChimps competition. Find out more at http://www.twilio.com/contests/2011/07/new-developer-contest-twilio-infochimps.html.

Some highlights:

• Light (silver) and dark (black) themes
• 2010-style Backstage feature (optional)
• 2 button sizes
• Buttons can have a disabled state
• Tabs, sections, and buttons can all have custom HTML (such as bold or entities) in their titles
• Optional hot and disabled icon states
• Full HTML in ScreenTip (tooltip) supported

So far I’ve tested it in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and IE 8+. I’m still working on IE 7 compatibility, and I haven’t tested it on Opera. It uses the jQuery framework.

There’s still a lot of work left to be done, but I wanted to get this first version out there. Feel free to leave feedback and suggestions in the comments.

Please note that you legally should license the ribbon UX from Microsoft (for free) at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa973809.

Here’s the plan:

Sign up for two Citi credit cards at 75,000 miles each with American Airlines (or 3 if you have amazing credit and/or a business) at http://creditcards.citicards.com/usc/Travel/AA/Multi/Nov10/Triple/75k/ver2/default.htm?ProspectID=C39ED646496347C5A1E15A6F1A8A5A6B&promocode=travel2&sc=4XKBP9N0. More information and some other deals at http://slickdeals.net/forums/showthread.php?sduid=84371&t=2336451.

Spend $4000 on each card within 6 months. If you have trouble, consider buying coins from the US Mint. (http://tylertervooren.com/advancedriskology/the-day-i-bought-15000/)

Redeem 140,000 or 160,000 miles for an American Airlines OneWorld ticket as seen here http://www.aa.com/i18n/disclaimers/oneworld_awards.jsp.

It actually sounds rather simple, and won’t cost a dime. I’m very tempted, and you should be too! Who wants to join me?

This application uses Twilio for SMS handling and the DailyBurn service to look up over 400,000 popular meals. Give it a try!

Example usage:
Me “bacon cheeseburger”
(415) 729-3599 “Choose: 1: Bacon Cheeseburger @ A & W; 2: Bacon Cheeseburger @ Pierre; 3: Jr Bacon Cheeseburge @ Wendy’s; 4: Bacon Cheeseburger @ Ruby’s Diner”
Me “3″
(415) 729-3599 “In 136g: 310 calories, 26g carbs, 16g fat, 50mg cholesterol, 17g protein, 670mg sodium, 1g fiber”

A few highlights:

• Headliner is an RSS newsreader that helps you keep up to date with your favorite news and blogs
• It can import feeds from and sync with your Google Reader account
• Allows searching for and subscribing to feeds by keyword
• Has a special OOBE screen that guides the user to get started quickly in one of 3 modes
• Stores downloaded feeds and articles in IsoStore for offline viewing
• Showcases a slick Metro UI with the Panorama and Pivot controls
• Shows a “What’s New” panel with the latest news
• Allows you to view feeds by category, and articles by category or feed
• Displays unread count for each category and feed, as well as coloring article list items based on if they have been read yet
• Uses familiar styling for article lists (looks like email app) and category/feeds lists (looks like contacts app)
• Has two modes for viewing articles:

1. Summary mode: displays the article summary or content and a supporting image (if found).  This is the faster view.
2. Embedded browser mode: displays the source article within an embedded IE control.  This view, while slower, can be more complete.

• Allows you to send articles via Email or SMS
• Allows you to share articles via Twitter