With Laplock, You Get A Text Message When Somebody Unplugs Your Laptop

Fresh off the hackathon dungeon, Laplock is a nifty little app developed at our TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon in London. Martin Saint-Macary and Ivan Maeder worked tirelessly for the past 24 hours to build an easy-to-use software lock for your Mac. Here’s how it works.

At heart, Laplock is a menubar app for your Mac. You install it, enter your phone number and/or Yo account, and that’s it. After that, whenever you close your laptop lid and leave it somewhere, if someone unplugs the power cord, an alarm will blast through your speakers and you will get a notification on your phone.

Notifications can be a simple text message or a Yo. If reception is bad, the app will call you instead. Behind the scene, the two hackers used the Nexmo API to manage the notifications.

While Saint-Macary was already part of the runner-up team at the Disrupt Hackathon in Berlin, it was Maeder’s first hackathon. They two met at the venue yesterday, and started working on this project right away.

“I think it’s great because you spend 2 days doing something full time,” Maeder said. “You wouldn’t do that normally.”

I asked whether he managed to get some sleep. He just put two chairs together and slept as much as he could for a couple of hours. “This hackathon really feels like 10 days,” he said.

Yet, when I see the end result, it was worth it — I’m definitely going to install the app after the event. You can download it on Laplock‘s website right now, and the app was just submitted to the App Store as well.

Good job guys, and enjoy your nap.

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the docum...

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Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a...

Kiran Upadhyay

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