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Burner's disposable phone numbers save everything in the cloud

Thanks to The Wire (one of the greatest TV shows ever), we know all about burner phones. These cheap and quickly discarded phones are an easy way to communicate without sharing your permanent number with random folks (or the police). The Burner app for iOS and Android works under the same concept. It creates temporary numbers to hand out to people while keeping your main digits a secret. To add value to those short-term (and in some cases long term) numbers Burner is adding integration with Dropbox, Soundcloud, Evernote and Slack. Linked numbers can auto-save texted photos and voicemails to Dropbox. Slack can route messages from a channel to a number and accept replies. While Evernote can create an auto-response bot that replies to texts with pre-determined messages.

Burner is hoping the new Connections features gets its customers to use the service in new ways. For example with the Slack integration, customers can send a text to a company's Slack channel that's manned by employees for quicker service. The Evernote auto-respond bot is even more intriguing. Burner says that Airbnb hosts could use it as a way to share WiFi or other commonly requested information without the host having to check their phone every five minutes.

The company also announced a premium subscription service to keep alternate lines active as long as you're cool with paying $4.99 a month. If still you just want a temporary number that expires, you can still go in that direction. The updated Burner app is available now.