(Photo: City 24x7)

A few months ago, City 24x7 teamed up with the city of New York to create touchscreen neighborhood directories in phone booths across the city. Today, in partnership with Cisco, the company announced that it's rolling out the high tech public communications systems to 250 more phone booths across the New York area.

Each phone booth is outfitted with a 32-inch touchscreen device that offers directory information, city news and alerts, transportation schedules, restaurants and maps. City 24x7 has partnered with a host of companies to bring up-to-the minute info to each booth.

"You can get your real time train alerts, best New York restaurants through Zagat, green market information through Grow NYC, theater tickets through Theater Mania," said Tom Touchet, City 24x7's CEO. City 24x7 has also partnered with CityMaps for hyperlocal maps for each booth, and will provide services for those who are disabled and have difficulty using a standard pay phone.

The new touchscreen platforms will serve as an alternative vehicle to deliver city announcements and information. It will host some ads, primarily for local mom and pop shops, which will help pay for the device's upkeep.

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, when cell phone networks were experiencing major outages and power was out across swaths of the city making it difficult to charge cell phones, suddenly high tech city dwellers had a use for payphones. Many were seen lining up to make phone calls from a technology that until then had seemed obsolete.

With backup battery power, the touchscreens could effectively keep running in the event of a power outage, providing important city alerts to residents in the event of a similar crisis. "They come equipped with backup battery power, which will keep them running for hours but not weeks," Mr. Touchet said. "That said, we are working on a green roof to augment and extend the battery life."

City 24x7 is already looking for more places to deploy the touchscreens. "There are a lot of other places that we’re talking about deploying," Mr. Touchet explained. "Any place that a city wants to impact urban flow in a positive way: bus stations, subway stations, campuses. It’s designed to align with the city and to get their info out in a way that helps people."

So close to this, you guys. (Photo: Pinterest, duh)

Actually, being in the billion dollar startup club kind of sucks. [New York Times]

Any person with children who purchases a computer in the U.K. will be forced to apply anti-porn safety controls to it, because there's absolutely no way kids who want to look at porn will be able to get around that. [Daily Mail]

Cisco balls so hard they just dished out $1.2 billion in cash for Meraki, a wifi startup. [TechCrunch]

How did nerds impact the election? Turns out 30,000 Redditors registered to vote after President Obama linked to a voter registration page in his AMA. [The Atlantic]

According to U.S. search results, Americans care more about Twinkies than the Israel/Gaza conflict. We are all the worst. [Virtus Machina]

Mr. Quinn (Photo: RIP.edu)

When you hire a former CIA operations officer to be a VP at your tech company, you have to expect that he'll bring a little of his spy training with him. Such is the case with Cisco VP Mike Quinn, who is so furious at a memo leaker inside the company that he has threatened to make tracking down that sonofabitch his new hobby.

When Mr. Quinn found out that a member of the Cisco "family" had leaked a memo regarding responses to a bit of negative press, he went all Tony Soprano on employees' asses:

I want you to remember that Cisco puts the groceries on your table every two weeks, not Brad Reese or other Slander Sheet Journalists. That you disrespected everyone else at Cisco. Now I know you do not have it in you to stand up and admit what you did, so I will now make you my "hobby." Ask around you will find out that I like to work on my hobbies.

Having an ex-CIA agent strike up a personal vendetta against you must be terrifying, though perhaps Mr. Quinn should have kept his plans a little closer to the vest. "If this guy had really been a good CIA ops officer, he would have said nothing until he knew who the leaker was," argued one Slashdot commenter.

Of course, as Network World points out, perhaps Mr. Quinn knew all along that this second email would be leaked and we're all playing into his master plan. Tony Soprano would be so proud.

A creepy slide from the SalesCrunch offer.

SalesCrunch, the "next-generation online meeting platform," announced today that it's willing to take one of Cisco's more extraneous ventures off the company's hands for the generous price of $1 (plus 15 percent equity). WebEx, for which Cisco paid a whopping $3.2 billion in 2007, is online meeting software, which is completely different from Cisco's main business, router manufacturing.

Fearing that Cisco would shutter WebEx just like they did Flip, SalesCrunch execs decided WebEx could be easily integrated into their platform, and potentially save the company from a lot of layoffs. "We figured we could probably come in, save a lot of jobs, transfer a huge base of customers to a better platform, get it off their books and out of their line of sight," SalesCrunch founder and CEO Sean Black told Betabeat.

The offer came in the form of a press release attached to a particularly bizarre slide deck, featuring snarky quotes about Cisco's failed business superimposed over weirdly disjointed screen grabs, cartoons and street art. One slide, which we unfortunately observed while eating breakfast this morning, features a dead bloody crow with a quote from Business Insider on top of it. It was, in brief, relatively nightmare inducing. Mr. Black told us that the photo is supposed to be "shocking," to keep on theme with some of the shocking business news Cisco has announced in recent years.

So even though WebEx appears to be a floundering business venture for Cisco, why $1? "Why not?" replied Mr. Black. "The $1 is the old school token exchange of value, but then there's the actual [15 percent] equity offer, which is the real meat on the bone."

Do you really think Cisco will accept the offer? we asked.

"I think the good news is that the board has to talk about any offer and our expectation is that they'll have to entertain the conversation," said Mr. Black. "I think this is a pretty good way to cleanly get WebEx off their books or start a conversation where there can be a real meeting of the minds on what a real offer would look like, if this isn't it."

Mr. Black clarified that "this is a very legit offer," and said Cisco shareholders had already reached out to him this morning saying that a SalesCrunch acquisition "makes total sense." When asked to clarify who from the public company's entire shareholder base exactly reached out, Mr. Black wouldn't name names, and simply said he's received comments that SalesCrunch is "significantly more advanced, [and the] user base is asking for something else not in the [WebEx] business." We're skeptical, but considering the bad blood between Cisco and its shareholders, this potential acquisition isn't the least likely thing we've ever heard.

“You’d be forgiven for flipping out when you realize how great the Flip MinoHD and SlideHD really are. But try to contain yourself. Instead, just try keeping one of these sleek camcorders—complete with on-the-go viewing screens and 720p resolution—in your pocket at all times, so you’re always ready to record the moment in stunning HD video," reads the breathless sales pitch.

The fresh perfume of corporate death is the height of luxury these days. No need to highlight these are now collectors items, folks aren't worried about replacement parts.

The units sold out in two hours.

Bonus points, The New York Times advises readers their Flip cams will not self-destruct, even though the company shut down.