This is a special episode we recorded on Monday, Feb 15th with guests Whitney Hoffman and Alexandra Samuel. 

We will be at Podcamp Toronto, so register (it’s free) and upvote our panel please!

Steamlabs is running a hackathon we can (and will) get behind — to create your own Rey doll ala Star Wars: The Force Awakens. What a great way to take a negative (Hasbro excluding Rey from their action figure set for the movie) and whip up a positive!

We’re interested in Twitter’s crackdown on accounts that support or talk about terrorism, and the 125k accounts they have suspended since last year.

Do you know how to attract and retain women in your tech company? This infographic from Entrepeneur.com has some great data that we love. And VentureBeat has six great tips for hiring and retaining the best female talent as well.

How do you feel about Kik and Snapchat and other social networks that the ‘kids’ are on? We’ve got some thoughts we’d like to share…

Toronto’s own Freshbooks has an innovative new way to build teams — they’re setting up blind dates between their employees.
And speaking of dating, we have thoughts about Katerina Lyadova’s approach — to hire someone as her dating profile manager — for $12 an hour. Who knew that the price of love was so low?
Your Instagram might finally have an update worth sticking around for called Mashfeed.
Sting is scheduled to play at the NBA All-Star’s halftime show and the folks on twitter do NOT approve.

And if you haven’t heard of Heartmob, it’s time to get up to speed. The recently Kickstart-ed project promises to fight online harassment by offering real-time support, a place to upload and store evidence of the harassment and much more.

Strap yourself in because this is an episode full of ups and downs. The Girls Who Code scholarship is all up, with a plan to give away US $1 million to high school students who want to learn to code this summer. The non-profit’s inspiring plan is to offer the workshop to more than 1,600 XX’s and add to the 10,000 ladies who have already been trained through the program.

In the list of downers this week, Gillian Anderson was offered half the salary of her fictitious FBI partner to star in the 6-part X-Files series. Now THAT’s something that I’d like to see burned with fire.

We get a little more info about why Rey was excluded from the action figure toy packs for The Force Awakens and it’s all Dark Side if you know what I mean.

And Vimeo’s new ‘Share the Screen’ initiative should have lifted us to new heights, and would have, if not for Gregory Alan Elliott’s not guilty win in his Twitter harassment case. To be clear, he was harassing, and now that he’s ‘not guilty’ he has no intention of changing his ways. Awesome. Listen in.

Here come the #WhiteOscars again, bereft of a person of color, except for the guy who is hosting (poor Chris Rock). But is it a problem with the awards show or a larger problem with the industry? According to PBS (and the two of us) it’s the latter. 

If you’re on Peach, we’d love to hear from you… Hell, we’d love to hear what you think of it, cause we’re still figuring it out.

Have you seen the Battleship game all fancied up with the periodic table? OH you NEED TO. 

And our special guest this week is Pin & Tucker co-founder Tracie Wagman.

The Golden Globes made a statement this year, supporting Amy Poehler's #SmartGirlsAsk campaign, encouraging people to ask the kinds of questions of actresses that are worthy of them. We think that's fabulous. We also think Carrie Fisher is three kinds of fab for her response to the body-shamers who attacked her on social media after her stellar appearance in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

The Code-a-pillar from Fisher Price is one of the cool items that popped up around CES 2016, and we also love the Prism - we'll tell you why.

And we're NOT SORRY to tell you about the new 'Just Not Sorry' Chrome extension that will help all of us limit our 'dampening phrases.'

Oh Steve Harvey, it could have happened to anyone, but not everyone would be able to recover from naming the wrong Miss Universe, with a photo and a tweet.

Was 2015 the year of Open Source? According to Wired Magazine it was. And on the other side of the spectrum, you’ve got FastCo predicting the End of the Infographic.

Think you’re gluten-intolerant? Yeah, you and everyone else. Now, if you’re really gluten-intolerant, you might be interested in the Nima food detector.

And our tooltip for this week comes from the AppSumo newsletter and it's called the PushBullet.

Our latest BLAB was full of our predictions for changes in the digital industry for 2016. We were joined by Tara Hunt and Tamera Kremer, two stellar ladies in their fields PLUS everyone on BLAB who joined us live - listen in!

IBM has once again proved how disconnected it is from the general population by offending more than half of it with their #hackyourhairdryer campaign aimed at women in STEM professions.

Fortunately, both France and the Donald threw out the idea of banning public wi fi (because terrorists are easily dissuaded from their targets by using a data plan to communicate) so maybe IBM won't be able to stick their entire foot in their mouth digitally.

But just in time to restore our faith in the world, a Girl Scout group in Orange County, Florida just earned their STEM badges.

All this AND a talk about Trudeau gracing the pages of Vogue magazine means this is a podcast you MUST listen to.

It has been 26 years since the Montreal Massacre at École Polytechnique and we don’t believe enough has changed in our North American culture when it comes to incidences of violence against women. What do you think?

Highschool is tough on everyone, and it’s hard to retain your dignity when confronted with the bullying and judgemental behaviour that seem to plague that age group. One Newfoundland teen has done just that — risen above a straw poll posted by her schoolmates and answered their rude activities with a well thought out answer on Facebook. We couldn’t be more impressed with young Lynelle Cantwell.

We tell you all about Uber and why we love it and Wayne MacPhail extols the virtues of Hype in a Flash-unfriendly world.