Leap, the women’s networking group that was developed by Y Combinator, is spinning out of the company with a new name — Elpha.
Co-founded by Cadran Cowansage, Abadesi Osunsade and Kuan Luo, Elpha is designed as a professional network for women offering content and access to a directory to make it easier for women in the technology industry to connect. In a blog post, Cowansage also indicated that the company will provide access to information about companies that prioritize welcoming women.
The idea for Elpha came to Cowansage years ago, but was launched in 2017 with the support of Y Combinator. Initially Leap was a nights and weekends project (as Cowansage puts it), but it now boasts 7,500 active members. Including its co-founders Abadesi and Kuan. Abadesi started as the first community lead for the Leap group, where she joined from Product Hunt, and was also the founder of Hustle Crew — a group focused on inclusion in tech.
Kuan, a former New Yorker, is a startup veteran who led the design team at the New York database technology development company Cockroach Labs and the architect of a retreat for women leaders in tech called “For The Women”.
While the company is no longer directly affiliated with Y Combinator, it is going through the accelerator’s winter batch and YC has come on as an investor, according to Cowansage — taking the traditional 7% ownership stake for its $150,000 investment.
Source: TechCrunch
A password mishap involving the death of a crypto exchange founder has resulted in a Canadian exchange’s inability to repay its customers $190 million. As a result, QuadrigaCX has recently filed for “creditor protection.”
The post Crypto exchange founder dies with sole password, leaving $190 million locked up appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
A bit over a year after its release, Nest’s security alarm system is picking up a new trick: it can now double as a Google Assistant device.
Nest announced the new functionality this afternoon, saying that it’s being “pushed out to all Nest Secure systems both new and old” today.
This update effectively turns the Nest Secure’s keypad hub into a Google Home Mini, allowing you to do things like say “Hey Google, turn off the lights” or “Hey Google, arm the alarm” on the way out the door. It’s worth noting, though, that you can’t turn the alarm off with your voice — they don’t want people shouting through your door to disable your alarm, after all. To turn the alarm off, you’ll still need to use either the Nest app, one of Nest’s key fobs or punch your PIN into the hub.
Wondering how the heck the Nest Secure hears you? The current spec page for the Nest Secure’s control hub (or “Nest Guard” as the hub is known), for example, makes no mention of a microphone. I can’t find any mention of it in the manual, either. And yet…
Turns out the Nest Guard has had a microphone all along, though it “has not been used up to this point.” That’s… a little strange, to say the least. It’s nice to be able to flip on new features when the time comes, but the spec page probably should’ve mentioned the microphone from the beginning (even just to say “There’s a microphone in there, but it’s not used for anything right now.”) There’s no shortage of internet-connected devices with microphones built-in, but said mics are usually made a bit more obvious.
We reached out to Google for confirmation of the microphone hardware and more details on when the feature will go live. A Google spokesperson responded:
The Google Assistant on Nest Guard is an opt-in feature, and as the feature becomes available to our users, they’ll receive an email with instructions on how to enable the feature and turn on the microphone in the Nest app. Nest Guard does have one on-device microphone that is not enabled by default.
Source: TechCrunch
To handle its massive amount of data, Facebook built new hardware and software tools, and shared them through open source.
Source: Wired
Social networks now remove 72 percent of content reported as illegal hate speech. That percentage was 28 percent in 2016.
Source: CNET
Plus: Electrify America invests in some Tesla Powerwalls and Shell goes more electric.
Source: CNET
VW’s planned hybrid GTI was killed off by new boss Herbert Diess, Autocar reports.
Source: CNET
The InSight instrument will listen for marsquakes while snug as a bug in a rug.
Source: CNET
YouTube is expanding the test of its “Explore” feature, a new discovery tool it first introduced as an experiment within its iPhone app last year. Similar to Instagram’s Explore page, the new YouTube feature aims to introduce users to a diverse set of personalized recommendations so they can more easily find something new to watch. The test is now available across devices, and has been updated to also suggest smaller, up-and-coming YouTube creators, the company says.
The changes to Explore were announced in a recent Creator Insiders video, where the company shares ideas it’s thinking about or testing ahead of a public debut — like a change to the “dislike” button, for example.
Last year, the company published a video to Creator Insiders where it talked about a plan to develop a new place within the YouTube app that would help people broaden their horizons when looking for something different to watch.
Today, YouTube’s recommendation technology relies heavily on past viewing activity and other in-app behavior to make its content suggestions, the company explained. With the Explore tab, however, YouTube aims to widen recommendations to include various topics, videos and channels you may not have otherwise encountered.
For instance, the Explore section might recommend videos about high-end cameras after you watched videos about telescopes. Or it might recommend videos about kittens or puppies because you watched other animal videos.
When YouTube launched Explore last year, the test was only rolled out to 1 percent of YouTube’s iPhone app users.
On testers’ devices, Explore replaces the Trending tab in the app’s navigation at the bottom of the screen. The section of Trending videos then became just another sub-category within Explore, alongside other top-level sections like Gaming, Movies, Music, Originals and more.
While Explore was initially available only to iPhone users, the test has now gone live across devices, including iPhones, iPads, Android phones and tablets and on the desktop, YouTube confirmed to TechCrunch. But it’s still only available to a “small amount” of testers, the company says.
In addition, Explore has been updated to include a new section called “On the Rise,” which will feature up-and-coming YouTube creators.
Here, a shelf is shown showcasing creators with fewer than 10,000 subscribers. These suggestions are personalized to you, too, based on which channels you currently like and regularly watch.
Beneath the “Under 10K” section are other creators YouTube thinks you’ll like, based on your YouTube watch history as well as those whose channels are watched by other fans of your favorite creators.
These recommendations may include those channels with more than 10,000 subscribers, but there will be a cap on how many subscribers a creator can have to be categorized within this “On the Rise” section. (That cap is still TBD, though.)
We understand that while YouTube has expanded the experiment’s reach, it doesn’t yet have a definitive plan for rolling out to the public the Explore tab.
For now, Explore is still considered an experiment and the company is looking to gather more feedback before making a formal decision about the feature’s wider availability.
Source: TechCrunch
The chat platform has more than 10 million daily active users.
Source: CNET