The Basement Like a blog, only interesting.

Everyone Loves a Good Smackdown

This past weekend I participated in the most amazing event ever – Startup Weekend Tulsa.  I plan to write more about the experience soon, but here's the gist – about 45 strangers got together, formed 5 teams and created 5 startup companies over the course of about 54 hours. It's the kind of thing that is really hard to explain without experiencing it, so for now I hope you can just take my word for it – it was a mind blowing experience. I was absolutely amazed at the quality and volume of ideas, product and collaboration from Oklahoma's aspiring entrepreneurs!

So here's the deal – as part of Global Entrepreneur Week, nine other cities (Atlanta, Bay Area, Boise, Cleveland, Dallas, Lexington, London, Los Angeles and New York) either have had this past weekend or will have next weekend their own Startup Weekend event.

A company called Twilio has decided that it'd be fun to see which of these 10 cities has the maddest entrepreneurial kung fu. So they're sponsoring a contest to see who can produce the coolest startup that integrated with their telephony services.

My team created a project called Menu-O-Matic. Menu-O-Matic is a tool to enable small to medium sized restaurants to improve their online presence by putting their menus online in both a web optimized and mobile device optimized format.  Through the magic of Twilio, Menu-O-Matic can also read you the menu over the phone – you know, so you don't have a wreck trying to read the menu on your iPhone while driving.

You can see a typical Menu-O-Matic menu here:

Silly Deli Menu (Sample Menu-O-Matic menu)

And you can have the menu read to you with Twilio by dialing:

1-877-490-4909 and dial restaurant code 36#

Pretty cool, huh?

So why am I telling you this?  Bottom line – I think it would be so cool to have Tulsa, Oklahoma crush the likes of the Bay Area, LA, Dallas and New York and I need your help to do it.

Specifically there're three things you can do to make the big city folks look silly:

1.) Tweet about @menuomatic's awesome use of @twilio technology.
2.) Post comments about how cool you think Menu-O-Matic is on Twilio's contest page
3.) If you have a blog or are a media type, write about us.

Thanks everybody!