Kiran Upadhyay

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

Is that a message from some rando, a spammer, or the nice guy you met yesterday? Facebook Messenger wants to give you some clues before you consider responding. The app will now surface publicly shared biographical info like current city and job title at the top of message threads from people you haven’t chatted with before. The update starts rolling out today on iOS Android in U.S., U.K., France, and India. For example, if you received a message from someone you’re not friends with, Messenger could show that they’re a “Food Blogger” from “Seattle.” That info could jog your memory, reminding you they’re the woman you met in the fish market on your recent trip to the Northwest. Knowing they’re someone you’ve actually met could make you a lot more likely to reply, and get the conversation going naturally rather than stumbling with “oh…hey…how did we meet again?” Messenger can also pull up this kind of info for existing Facebook friends you’ve never messaged with before. Maybe your

Microsoft today announced that it is partnering with a consortium of telecom companies to build a new transpacific undersea cable that will connect a number of points in China, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan with the U.S. West Coast (or beautiful Hillsboro, OR — the home of the Hillsboro Hops — to be precise). Microsoft says the New Cross Pacific (NCP) Cable Network will provide faster connections for its customers and help it compete on cloud cost. In addition, Microsoft also today announced deals with Hibernia to offer faster connectivity between Canada, Ireland and the U.K., and AcquaComms to use its upcoming AEConnect cable between Shirley, NY and the West Coast of Ireland (with backhaul connections to the U.K.). The Hibernia Express cable, the first new transatlantic cable in twelve years, will launch in September. It’s partly optimized for very low-latency operations (the promise is under 60 milliseconds between New York and London) and will be able to handle up to 10 Tbps

Plenty of people have compared the Apple Watch to the classic Casio calculator watch; these guys went ahead and made the inevitable app. Meet GeekWatch — the app that turns your Apple Watch into an old-school calculator watch. I mean, sure — you could buy a calculator watch on Amazon for like 15 bucks. But where’s the meta/hipster/ironic/kinda-obnoxious humor in that? They swap out the “Casio” brand for “Geekio” for obvious (read: legal) reasons, but the inspiration is clear. One catch: since Apple hasn’t enabled custom watch faces yet, it’s not able to take over the entire screen, and you’ll still have some borders/margins/text around the edges. Alas, it costs a $1. On the upside, there are myriad goodies to unlock if you poke it in the right way. Remember trying to spell words upside down to pass the time in class as a kid? That’s a good place to start. Alternatively, check out the tizi Calc app; the Casio-style homage isn’t as direct (and also costs a buck as an in-app p

The Light Phone is the opposite of every other phone in existence. It is thin, light, lasts 20 days on a charge, and literally does nothing but make and answer calls. It’s as if the makers of the Sports Illustrated Football Phone had studied the timeless teachings of William Walker Atkinson and created a telephone that was the platonic ideal of the ultimate telecommunication device. The best thing? It costs $100. What does it do? Nothing. You put in a SIM card, press a few buttons, and make a call. There’s no browser. No games. No NFC. It has quick dial, which is nice, and it doubles as a flashlight. Did I mention it lasts for 20 days on a charge? The creators, Joe Hollier and Kaiwei Tang, created the phone at Google’s 30 Weeks incubator in NYC. They both came from a design background by Kaiwei has a background in building phones. “We started building this because it became very clear that true happiness means being present. This has been written about by so many of the smartest

There’s Maker Media, MakerCon, MakerShed, Make: magazine and 131 Maker Faire events that take place throughout the world. Now the founders of all these Makers want a way to connect what they refer to as the “maker movement” online. So Maker Media created a social network called MakerSpace, a Facebook-like social network that connects participants of Maker Faire in one online community. “Communities are built around strong cores and the core for us is the Maker Faire but you see so much during the faire that you can’t remember,” Maker Media CEO Gregg Brockway told TechCrunch over the phone. “We want to move that excitement and innovation online so you can connect with the makers on there.” The new site will allow participants of the event to display their work online by making a profile page to host their projects. Interested parties are able to follow one another in the same way as a Tumblr profile and makers can also post the progress of their work that will appear in a Facebo

So this just happened. AOL, owner of TechCrunch, is getting acquired: U.S. carrier Verizon said in a statement that it is buying the company for $4.4 billion, or $50 per share. We’ve just been sent an internal memo about the deal that we are embedding below. AOL will become a subsidiary of Verizon as part of the deal, overseeing a bigger push into content and mobile video by Verizon. “Verizon’s acquisition further drives its LTE wireless video and OTT (over-the-top video) strategy,” the carrier said in a statement. In addition to original content across different platforms like video and written word, and desktop and mobile, there are other assets that could be interesting fits for Verizon. For starters, AOL has been building up a programmatic advertising business to build up how AOL monetizes alongside newer formats like video and mobile. Currently that business — which is the fastest growing operation at AOL in terms of revenues — is split between ads on AOL-owned sites and