1. I think he meant https://tower.im. There's also https://www.teambition.com/ for project management. They're respectively clones of Trello and Basecamp (haven't used either of them).

2. Honestly, rather than looking for alternatives, I'd invest in a good VPN. We've tried a lot of different setups and services (individual VPN, smart routing in and out of our office...), but Astrill (https://www.astrill.com/) has been consistently good (save for a couple times when the internet was simply slow in all of China regardless). We pay for individual "VIP" accounts for our employees and use everything we need (Gmail, Google Docs, Twitter, ...).

3. We are however considering running an npm proxy at the office to speed things up a little.