With your busy schedule, do you really want to spend so much time listening to phone menus and trying to find the right options? Use Call the Company to directly call human representatives at major companies. Just type in the company and/or department you are searching for, and click to connect right in your browser so you don’t have to use expensive cell phone or long-distance minutes.

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?

There are plenty of ways to exchange contact information, but they generally require that people have the same app on the same type of smartphone, as well as requiring both parties to agree to share information. 203-403-NAME make this process extremely simple, by only requiring an online handle (username).

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.

I have created an implementation of the Office 2010 Ribbon toolbar that can be used in any website. It is written in HTML, CSS, and JS. Try a demo at http://okgodoit.com/ribbon/ or watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YOpn2W-fQ8. Download the source from http://okgodoit.com/ribbon/ribbon.zip.

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.