Guest Post: BlankSlate

[Note: This is a guest post, cross-posted from BlankSlate.]The Gluecon conference was held this week and included a Hackathon which BlankSlate sponsored. It went from Wed night at 7pm to Thurs at noon. Even though it wasn’t a lot of time, a long night with APIs that do a lot of the heavy lifting for developer’s proved enough for some great apps to be created.There were three sponsors in all – Twilio, PayPal, and BlankSlate – and the contest was set up like this: each sponsor judged the submissions independently and awarded their prize to the app they felt was the best use of their API.In the end, there were two winners: one for Twilio and one for BlankSlate and PayPal.The BlankSlate / PayPal winner was Text It Off and was made by Clay Loveless, the CTO of Mashery. Text It Off is a social app where you send a text of what you eat throughout the day. If the food is “good,” e.g. something you should be eating, you get paid by the people playing with you. If the food is “bad,” you pay your people. When you text your meals to Text It Off, it texts you back “good” or “bad” with the food’s nutritional info from the USDA — and then it makes the appropriate payments to or from your account. Maybe a future version of the app will be able to tell if you are lying and deduct from your account!Other entries that we liked included:Broadcaster by Dusty Candland from Red 27 Consulting. Broadcaster enables you to create an account, add as many phone numbers as you want to it, and then send a text which is then broadcast to all the numbers in your account. A great way to get the word out.Conference Phone Survey by Eugene Osovetsky, the CTO of Webservius. The app enables conference attendees to call a number, enter their rating of the conference on the keypad, and then leave a comment which is transcribed to text. Then, both the rating and comments are published to the web. A great substitute for filling out a survey form!