17 October 2020

How to Request Additional Quota for your YouTube API Project


A UK based organization recently organized an online conference with 300+ participants and each of the attendees were asked to upload a video to a common YouTube channel post the event. The organizers created a YouTube uploader to make it easy for attendees to submit videos but soon ran into the quota issue with YouTube.

Let me explain.

The YouTube API website says that 1600 quota units are required to upload a single video to the YouTube website through the videos.insert method of the YouTube API. Thus, for instance, if you are expecting users to upload 100 videos to your YouTube channel in a single day, your Google Cloud project should have a quota of at least 1600 * 100 = 160,000 units.

The quota limits reset every 24 hours. New Google Cloud projects have lower quota and you’ll have to request YouTube to increase your quota if you are expecting higher number of videos.

Increase your YouTube API Quota

Here’s step by step guide that will help you get your YouTube video uploader, or any other Google Apps Project, approved for higher quota.

Configure Google Cloud Project

1. Go to console.cloud.google.com/projectcreate to create a new Google Cloud Project.

Create Google Cloud Project

2. From the menu, go to APIs and Services and chose OAuth Consent Screen. Set the type as External and click the Create button.

Oauth Consent Screen

3. Give your application a name, then click the Add Scope button and specify the list of OAuth Scopes that your Google Cloud project will require. For the uploader, we require the following Google APIs:

https://www.googleapis.com/auth/youtube.readonly
https://www.googleapis.com/auth/youtube.upload
https://www.googleapis.com/auth/script.external_request
https://www.googleapis.com/auth/script.send_mail
https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.email

OAuth Consent screen

4. Inside the API and Services section, choose Library, search for the YouTube Data API library and click Enable to enable the library for your project.

Enable YouTube API

5. Click the 3-dot menu in the upper right, choose Project Settings and make a note of the project number of your Google Cloud Project.

Google Cloud Project

Configure Google Apps Script

1. Open your Google Script, go to the Resources menu, choose Cloud Platform project and enter the project number that you have copied in the previous step.

Link Cloud Project with Apps Script

Click the “Set Project” button to link your Google Cloud Project to your Google Apps Script Project.

2. Go back to the Google Cloud project, click the API and Services section, choose Credentials and copy the OAuth client ID to the clipboard.

OAuth Client ID

Request YouTube to Increase Quota

Now that you have all the necessary data, it is time to submit your YouTube project to Google for increasing your API quota. Open this request form and fill the required details.

The API client is the same as the OAuth Client ID that you copied in the previous step. The project number is the same as your Google Cloud Project number. For the “Where can we find the API client” question, you need to provide the link of your YouTube uploader form.

Submit the form and you’ll receive a response from Google Compliance team saying they are conducting an audit.

Thanks for your response to the Quota Request. We will conduct our audit based
on the information you provided. We will notify you if additional information is
needed or when we’ve completed our review. Thank you for your cooperation.

They may have some follow-up questions and once they grant the quota (usual takes 3-4 days), you’ll receive a confirmation.

Your quota extension request has been approved based on the information you
provided and your representation that your use of YouTube API Service are in
full compliance with the YouTube API Services Terms of Service. The total quota
for project 123 is now 500,000 units / day. Please note that the quota extension
has been granted ONLY for the use-case mentioned in your quota extension request
application and we may change your quota based on your actual quota usage as
well as on your continued compliance with the YouTube API Services Terms of
Service at any time.

How to Password Protect Google Documents and PDF files in Google Drive


Introducing PDF toolbox, a new Google Drive addon that lets you password protect PDF files and Google Documents. The app can also help you unlock PDF files that are already protected with a password in your Google Drive.

Watch the video tutorial to get started.

Password Protect PDF Files

To get started, install the PDF toolbox add-on and grant the necessary authorization. The app requires access to the file that you would like to encrypt (or decrypt) and you also have an an option to send the encrypted file as an email attachment to another user.

Next, select any PDF file or Google document in your Google Drive and expand the “Encrypt PDF” section. Enter the output file name (it will also be saved in your Google Drive), provide a password and specify whether the encrypted file should allow printing and comments.

Click the Encrypt button to create a new PDF file that would require a password to open.

Password protect PDF files

The app can secure PDF files as well as Google documents, spreadsheet and presentations. In the case of native Google documents, the file is first converted to a PDF document and then encrypted with the specified password.

Please note that the Google Drive API imposes a limit of 10 MB on the size of PDF files exported from native Google documents. Thus, similar restrictions apply with the toolbox as well.

Unlock PDF files

If you a password-protect PDF file in your Google Drive, you can use the PDF toolbox to remove the password protection. The app will create a new copy of the PDF file in your Drive that will open without requiring a password.

The workflow is similar.

Select any locked PDF in Google Drive and open the PDF toolbox app in the sidebar. Expand the “Decrypt PDF” section and and type the password that was originally used to restrict access to the PDF file.

Click the Decrypt button and, if the password matches, all restrictions would be removed from the file. The unlocked, password-free PDF file would be uploaded to Google Drive as a separate file.

Remove PDF Password

How PDF toolbox works

All files in Google Drive have an export link to download the file in PDF format. The app uses the export URL to fetch the PDF version of a file in Google Cloud storage, encrypts (or decrypts) the file with the PDF library and uploads the processed file to Google Drive of the authorized user.

All downloaded files are instantly removed from the cloud storage after the PDF file has been exported. PDF toolbox is in beta stage and the pricing will be added later this month.

Also see: Remove PDF Passwords with Chrome


Chemist Eggs


Chemist Eggs

Daily Crunch: Twitter walks back New York Post decision


A New York Post story forces social platforms to make (and in Twitter’s case, reverse) some difficult choices, Sony announces a new 3D display and fitness startup Future raises $24 million. This is your Daily Crunch for October 16, 2020.

The big story: Twitter walks back New York Post decision

A recent New York Post story about a cache of emails and other data supposedly originating from a laptop belonging to Joe Biden’s son Hunter looked suspect from the start, and more holes have emerged over time. But it’s also put the big social media platform in an awkward position, as both Facebook and Twitter took steps to limit the ability of users to share the story.

Twitter, in particular, took a more aggressive stance, blocking links to and images of the Post story because it supposedly violated the platform’s “hacked materials policy.” This led to predictable complaints from Republican politicians, and even Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey said that blocking links in direct messages without an explanation was “unacceptable.”

As a result, the company said it’s changing the aforementioned hacked materials policy. It will no longer remove hacked content unless it’s been shared directly by hackers or those “acting in direct concert with them.” Otherwise, it will label tweets to provide context. As of today, it’s also allowing users to share links to the Post story.

The tech giants

Sony’s $5,000 3D display (probably) isn’t for you — The company is targeting creative professionals with its new Spatial Reality Display.

EU’s Google-Fitbit antitrust decision deadline pushed into 2021 — EU regulators now have until January 8, 2021 to take a decision.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Elon Musk’s Las Vegas Loop might only carry a fraction of the passengers it promised — Planning files reviewed by TechCrunch seem to show that The Boring Company’s Loop system will not be able to move anywhere near the number of people the company agreed to.

Future raises $24M Series B for its $150/mo workout coaching app amid at-home fitness boom — Future offers a pricey subscription that virtually teams users with a real-life fitness coach.

Lawmatics raises $2.5M to help lawyers market themselves — The San Diego startup is building marketing and CRM software for lawyers.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

How COVID-19 and the resulting recession are impacting female founders — The sharp decline in available capital is slowing the pace at which women are founding new companies in the COVID-19 era.

Startup founders set up hacker homes to recreate Silicon Valley synergy — Hacker homes feel like a nostalgic attempt to recreate some of the synergies COVID-19 wiped out.

Private equity firms can offer enterprise startups a viable exit option — The IPO-or-acquisition question isn’t always an either/or proposition.

(Reminder: Extra Crunch is our subscription membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

FAA streamlines commercial launch rules to keep the rockets flying — With rockets launching in greater numbers and variety, and from more providers, it makes sense to get a bit of the red tape out of the way.

We need universal digital ad transparency now — Fifteen researchers propose a new standard for advertising disclosures.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.


Read Full Article

Google Assistant, Maps, and Search can now help you figure out where to vote


Election Day approaches! Still not sure where the nearest polling place or ballot drop box is? Google wants to help.

This morning the company rolled out a handful of features across Google Assistant, Google Maps, and Google Search, all meant to kick in when a user seems to be looking for information on voting locations.

On Google Search, for example, a search for “ballot drop boxes near me” will now bring up a dedicated tool for finding just that — punch in the address where you’re registered to vote, and it’ll help you find a drop box or polling place accordingly. The same tool will also pop up when you search for things like “how to find polling place” or “where to vote”, so there’s some flexibility in it.

Or if you’ve got an Assistant-powered device nearby (like a Nest Mini, Nest Hub, or an Android phone), you can say “Hey Google, where do I vote?” and Assistant should be able to figure it out accordingly based on your current location (with Assistant assuming, as it’ll note in its response, that your current location is where you’re registered to vote.)

The Maps integration is a bit more limited, but it gets the job done. Searching for “where do I vote” in the Google Maps mobile app results in a prompt that will toss you into the above web-based Google Search flow. Once you’ve found your location, tapping the “Directions” button will swing you back into the Maps app.

Google says it’s pulling its polling location information from the Voting Information Project as part of a partnership with Democracy Works. The company says they’ll be adding more polling places leading up until Election Day, expecting to have over 200,000 in the system when all is said and done.

Don’t want to get your polling place details from Google, or just want to double check things? There’s always sites like Vote.org (which, if you’re curious, is what Siri recommends when prompted with the “Where do I vote?” question), which also provides info on checking your voter registration status, becoming a poll worker, etc.


Read Full Article

Trump’s latest immigration restrictions are bad news for American workers


I’m an immigrant, and since arriving from India two decades ago I’ve earned a Ph.D., launched two companies, created almost 100 jobs, sold a business to Google and generated a 10x-plus return for my investors.

I’m grateful to have had the chance to live the American dream, becoming a proud American citizen and creating prosperity for others along the way. But here’s the rub: I’m exactly the kind of person that President Trump’s added immigration restrictions that require U.S. companies to offer jobs to U.S. citizens first and narrowing the list of qualifications to make one eligible for the H-1B visa, is designed to keep out of the country.

In tightening the qualifications for H-1B admittances, along with the L visas used by multinationals and the J visas used by some students, the Trump administration is closing the door to economic growth. Study after study shows that the H-1B skilled-worker program creates jobs and drives up earnings for American college grads. In fact, economists say that if we increased H-1B admittances, instead of suspending them, we’d create 1.3 million new jobs and boost GDP by $158 billion by 2045.

Barring people like me will create short-term chaos for tech companies already struggling to hire the people they need. That will slow growth, stifle innovation and reduce job creation. But the lasting impact could be even worse. By making America less welcoming, President Trump’s order will take a toll on American businesses’ ability to attract and retain the world’s brightest young people.

Consider my story. I came to the United States after earning a degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), a technical university known as the MIT of India. The year I entered, several hundred thousand people applied for just 10,000 spots, making IIT significantly more selective than the real MIT. Four years later, I graduated and, along with many of the other top performers in my cohort, decided to continue my studies in America.

Back then, it was simply a given that bright young Indians would travel to America to continue their education and seek their fortune. Many of us saw the United States as the pinnacle of technological innovation, and also as a true meritocracy — somewhere that gave immigrants a fair shake, rewarded hard work and let talented young people build a future for themselves.

I was accepted by 10 different colleges, and chose to do a Ph.D. at the University of Illinois because of its top-ranked computer science program. As a grad student, I developed new ways of keeping computer chips from overheating that are now used in server farms all over the world. Later, I put in a stint at McKinsey before launching my own tech startup, an app-testing platform called Appurify, which Google bought and integrated into their Cloud offerings.

I spent a couple of years at Google, but missed building things from scratch, so in 2016 I launched atSpoke, an AI-powered ticketing platform that streamlines IT and HR support. We’ve raised $28 million, hired 60 employees and helped companies including Cloudera, DraftKings and Mapbox create more efficient workplaces and manage the transition to remote working.

Stories like mine aren’t unusual. Moving to a new country takes optimism, ambition and tolerance for risk — all factors that drive many immigrants to start businesses of their own. Immigrants found businesses at twice the rate of the native born, starting about 30% of all new businesses in 2016 and more than half of the country’s billion-dollar unicorn startups. Many now-iconic American brands, including Procter & Gamble, AT&T, Google, Apple, and even Bank of America, were founded by immigrants or their children.

We take it for granted that America is the destination of choice for talented young people, especially those with vital technical skills. But nothing lasts forever. Since I arrived two decades ago, India’s tech scene has blossomed, making it far easier for kids to find opportunities without leaving the country. China, Canada, Australia and Europe are also competing for global talent by making it easier for young immigrants to bring their talent and skills, often including an American education, to join their workforces or start new businesses.

To shutter employment-based visa programs, even temporarily, is to shut out the innovation and entrepreneurialism our economy desperately needs. Worse still, though, doing so makes it harder for the world’s best and brightest young people to believe in the American dream and drives many to seek opportunities elsewhere. The true legacy of Trump’s executive order is that it will be far harder for American businesses to compete for global talent in years to come — and that will ultimately hamper job creation, slow our economy and hurt American workers.


Read Full Article

Engageli comes out of stealth with $14.5M and a new approach to teaching by video remotely


Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet have become standard tools for teachers who have had to run lessons remotely since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. But they’re not apps necessarily designed for classrooms, and that fact has opened a gap in the market for those looking to build something more fit to the purpose.

Today, a startup called Engageli is coming out of stealth with a service that it believes fills that need. A video conferencing tool designed from the ground up more as a digital learning platform, with its own unique take on virtual classrooms, Engageli is aiming first at higher education, and it is launching with $14.5 million in seed funding from a Benchmark partner and others.

If that sounds like a large seed round for a startup that is still only in pilot mode (you can contact the company by email to apply to join the pilot), it might be due in part to who is behind Engageli.

The startup is co-founded by Dan Avida, Serge Plotkin, Daphne Koller and Jamie Nacht Farrell. Avida is a general partner at Opus Capital who in the past co-founded (and sold, to NetApp) an enterprise startup called Decru with Plotkin, who himself is a Stanford emeritus professor. Koller is one of the co-founders of Coursera and also an adjunct professor at Stanford. And Farrell is a former executive from another pair of major online learning companies, Trilogy and 2U.

Avida and Koller, as it happens, are also married, and it was observing their kids in the last school year — when they were both in high school (the oldest is now in her first year at UC Berkeley) — that spurred them to start Engageli.

“The idea for this started in March when our two daughters found themselves in ‘Zoom School.’ One of them watched a lot of Netflix, and the other, well, she really improved her high scores in a lot of games,” he said wryly.

The problem, as he and Koller saw it, was that the format didn’t do a good enough job of connecting with individual students, checking in with them to make sure they were paying attention, understanding, and actually interested in what was being taught.

“The reason teachers and schools are using conferencing systems is because that was what was out there,” he said. But, based on the team’s collective experiences across past e-learning efforts at places like Coursera — which built infrastructure to run university courses for mass audiences online — and Trilogy and 2U (which are now one company that covers both online learning for universities and boot camps), “we thought we could build a better system from the ground up.”

Even though the idea was inspired by what the pair saw playing out with their high school-attending children, Engageli made the decision to focus first on higher education because that was where it was getting the most interest from would-be customers to pilot the service. But also, Avida believes that because higher ed not already has a big market for remote learning, it represents a more significant opportunity.

“K-12 schools will eventually go back to normal,” he said, “but we’re of the opinion that higher education will be a blend with more and more online learning,” one of the reasons also for the founding of the likes of Coursera, Trilogy and 2U. “Younger kids need face-to-face contact, but in college, many students are now juggling work, family and studying, and online can be much more convenient.”

Also there is a very practical selling point to providing better tools to university classrooms: “People pay those tuitions to have access to professors and other students, and this is a way to provide that in a remote world,” he said.

[gallery ids="2060568,2060569,2060570"]

As it appears now, Engageli lets teachers build and run both synchronous (live) and asynchronous (recorded) lessons, giving students and teachers the option to catch up or replace a live lesson if necessary.

The startup’s idea is also to make it as easy to integrate into existing workflows as possible: no need to install special desktop or mobile apps, as the platform works in all major browsers, and Avida notes that it’s also designed to integrate with the software systems that many universities are already using to organise their educational content and track students’ progress. (Making the barrier to entry low is not a bad idea also considering that many institutions are already using other products, making them more entrenched and increasing the challenges of getting them to migrate to something else.)

But perhaps Engageli’s most unique feature is how it views the virtual classroom.

The platform lets teachers create “tables” where students sit together in smaller groups, where they can work together. With tables, the idea is that either an instructor — or in the case of large classes as you might get with university seminars, teaching assistants assigned to tables — can engage with students in a more personalised way.

When a class is delivered asynchronously (that is, recorded), it means that students sitting at a table can still partly be involved in a “live” experience where they can talk about the work with others in their groups. The tables are also opened up before a class starts, and students can go from one to the other to chat with others before the class begins.

On top of the tools that Engageli has built to record and consume lessons, it’s also building a set of analytics that lets professors (or their assistants) monitor how well audio and video and working both for themselves as we as for their audience, and also collect other kinds of “engagement” information, which could come in the form of getting people to ask or answer questions or take polls and other interactive media.

Together, these features create better feedback to make sure that everyone is getting as much out of the remote experience as possible.

Education has not always been one of the buzziest areas in the world of startups — it’s been something of a boring cousin to more headline-grabbing segments like social media, or those taking on giants like Amazon and Google.

But the pandemic has thrown a spotlight on the opportunities in the field, both to fill a sudden surge of demand for remote learning tools, and to create more innovative approaches to doing so, as Engageli is doing here.

Just yesterday, Kahoot — a platform for building and using gamified learning apps — raised $215 million from SoftBank; and other recent rounds have included Outschool (which raised $45 million and is now profitable), Homer (raised $50 million from an impressive group of strategic backers), Unacademy (raised $150 million) and the Indian juggernaut Byju’s (most recently picking up $500 million from Silver Lake).

On top of the recent spotlight on education, it’s also been interesting to see the proliferation of startups that are also coming out of the woodwork to provide new takes on videoconferencing.

Last week, a startup called Headroom — also started by already-successful entrepreneurs — launched with an AI-driven alternative to Zoom and the rest providing not just automatic transcriptions of conversations, but automatically generated highlights and insights into how engaging your webinars and other video content really was.

Apps like Headroom and Engageli are just the tip of the iceberg, with other innovative approaches also stepping out and raising significant funding. The big question will be whether they will get much attention and time from would-be customers who are already “happy enough” with what they already use.

But in a tech world that thrives on the concept of disruption and companies creating businesses out of simply being better approaches to entrenched markets, it’s a bet worth making.

“Dan, Serge and Daphne have repeatedly built fast-growing, extremely successful companies. I am so fortunate to be working with them again,” said Alex Balkanski, a partner at Benchmark who is investing individually, in a statement. “Investing in a company linked to education is incredibly important to me on a personal level, and Engageli has the potential to enable a truly transformative learning experience.”

Updated to clarify that Balkanski is investing privately, not through Benchmark.


Read Full Article

Twitter is now allowing users to share that controversial New York Post story


Twitter has taken another step back from its initial decision to block users from sharing links to or images of a New York Post story reporting on emails and other data supposedly originating on a laptop belonging to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s son Hunter.

The story, which alleged that Hunter Biden had set up meeting between a Ukrainian energy firm and his father back when Biden was vice president, looked shaky from the start, and more holes have emerged over time. Both Facebook and Twitter took action to slow its spread — but Twitter seemed to take the more aggressive stance, not just including warning labels whenever someone shared the story, but actually blocking links.

These moves have drawn a range of criticism. There have been predictable cries of censorship from Republican politicians and pundits, but there have also been suggestions that Facebook and Twitter inadvertently drew more attention to the story. And even Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey suggested that it was “unacceptable” to block links in DMs without an explanation.

Casey Newton, on the other hand, argued that the platforms had successfully slowed the story’s spread: “The truth had time to put its shoes on before Rudy Giuliani’s shaggy-dog story about a laptop of dubious origin made it all the way around the world.”

Twitter initially justified its approach by citing its hacked materials policy, then later said it was blocking the Post article for including “personal and private information — like email addresses and phone numbers — which violate our rules.”

The controversy did prompt Twitter to revise its hacked materials policy, so that content and links obtained through dubious means will now come with a label, rather than being removed entirely, unless it’s being shared directly by hackers or those “acting in concert with them.”

And now, as first reported by The New York Times, Twitter is also allowing users to share links to the Post story itself (something I’ve confirmed through my own Twitter account).

Why the reversal? Again, the official justification for blocking the link was to prevent the spread of private information, so the company said that the story has now spread so widely, online and in the press, that the information can no longer be considered private.


Read Full Article