Techmeme
August 27, 2015, 12:25 AM

Top News

Jessi Hempel / Wired:
Facebook testing M, an AI-based, human supervised virtual assistant inside Messenger that can complete tasks such as purchasing on your behalf  —  Facebook Launches M, Its Bold Answer to Siri and Cortana  —  Today, a few hundred Bay Area Facebook users will open their Messenger apps to discover M, a new virtual assistant.
Cade Metz / Wired:
How Facebook's M virtual assistant's artificial intelligence works  —  Facebook's Human-Powered Assistant May Just Supercharge AI  —  Face it: Siri sucks.  So often, she has no clue what you're saying.  And when she does, there's a pretty good chance she'll respond with nothing more than a page filled with Internet links.
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Amazon lays off dozens of Fire engineers, scales back and reorganizes its hardware-development center Lab126  —  Amazon Curtails Development of Consumer Devices  —  Amazon is scaling back its efforts to develop consumer devices, laying off dozens of engineers …
Annalee Newitz / Gizmodo:
Ashley Madison had approximately 31M male members, 5.5M female members, but likely only 12K women actively used the site  —  Almost None of the Women in the Ashley Madison Database Ever Used the Site  —  When hacker group Impact Team released the Ashley Madison data, they asserted that “thousands” of the women's profiles were fake.
Romain Dillet / TechCrunch:
Rovio To Cut 260 Jobs As The Angry Birds Franchise Becomes Irrelevant  —  It looks like Angry Birds maker Rovio is having some troubles to pay the bills.  The Finnish company is about to cut 260 jobs after reducing its workforce by 110 employees in October 2014.  At the end of 2013, the company had 800 employees in total.
Leena Rao / Fortune:
Qasar Younis, former Y Combinator graduate and creator of Talkbin which was acquired by Google in 2011, named Y Combinator COO  —  Meet Y Combinator's New COO  —  To appreciate the rapid growth at Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator, consider this: In 2009, it shepherded 42 startups through its boot camp.
Romain Dillet / TechCrunch:
YouTube Gaming launches on the web, Android, and iOS  —  Meet YouTube Gaming, Twitch's Archenemy  —  YouTube just launched YouTube Gaming on the web, Android and iOS.  As expected, YouTube Gaming goes head-to-head against Twitch, mirroring many popular features of the existing gaming streaming giant.
Ina Fried / Re/code:
AT&T Says Injecting Ads Into Airport Wi-Fi Was a Test That Is Now Over  —  AT&T said on Wednesday it has ended an experiment that had the company serving ads to those using its free Wi-Fi at two Washington, D.C.-area airports.  —  “We trialed an advertising program for a limited time in two airports …

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More News

Jessica Toonkel / Reuters:
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Earlier Picks

Mary Jo Foley / ZDNet: